I've noticed some people wondering if games like Half Life, StarCraft, and Diablo will ever be ported to DS.  Looking at DS games like Metroid, Pirates, and DS Quake it would seem plausible.  Hopefully Valve and Blizzard will decide to do some ports for DS.

What about homebrew game ports? Could something like a homebrew version of Half Life be ported to DS? Most likely not. Half Life is based on a highly modified version of the Quake engine, with many enhancements. It is possible the Quake source code could be used as a base reference to reverse engineer Half Life levels, but this would be very challenging.

Understand Quake is being ported to DS because the original source code is available to the public.  The same is true for Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Heretic, and Hexen, all source code has been released to the public by ID/Raven Software (John Carmack).  Unfortunately Valve (Half Life) and Blizzard (StarCraft) haven't released game source code.

The ScummVM project is a special case and is based on partial source code and extensive reverse engineering. ScummVM is more like an emulator than a game port.

If we want to be realistic about potential homebrew game ports for DS we should probably consider games with public source code available . . .

Games already ported or being ported to DS:

Doom
Heretic
Hexen
Quake
Wolfenstein 3D

Games that could be ported to DS:

Descent
Descent  II
Doom II
Duke Nukem 3D
Hexen II (based on Quake engine)
Rise of the Triad
Shadow Warrior (based of Duke3D engine)

i want starcraft!!!!!!!

Abuse-SDL - http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~trandor/abuse/:



Troy Davis implementation of SDL library.

Stylus is a must for this game.

Quote from: "MasterMan"Abuse-SDL - http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~trandor/abuse/:

Exactly what I wanted to see in this thread.  Excellent.

I'm not sure it's realistic but a game I'd like to see is Allegiance by Microsoft Games (the full source is on the M$ site somewhere).

(Link for screenies)
http://www.microsoft.com/games/allegiance/screenshots.htm

For those who don't know Allegiance is a mix between a space sim and a RTS, it was supposed to be a worldwide success for massive online gaming, allowing for battles of more than 100 players at the same time in the same game, but it suffered from a bad interface and bad marketing and bad support, so the game went downhill from the start.

I don't think it's possible to make a good port of the game without a lot of trimming, resizing, downsampling and plain sabotaging the clunky interface. There are too many buttons to be mapped and too many things to display, though we do have the second screen to display ship stats and the space map. Direction could be controlled ala MP:H, but we'd certainly need some sort of toggle to switch between game and menu, but I'm getting lost in pointless conjectures as this probably won't see the light of day, ever. That is, until I finish my studies in IT, then I'll probably try to do something out of the game.

Those are a few sites that are the remains of the official site and the source code to the game.
http://www.microsoft.com/games/allegiance/home.htm
http://research.microsoft.com/research/allegiance/

This is a good site of people who have recoded the security routines and have made their own anti-cheat softwares because there once was a lot of hackers in the allegiance world. FreeAllegiance is the last bastion of fan-love for the game. Try it, it's free and it's fun, but as the FreeAllegiance "First Steps" page tells you, Allegiance is a fun game at the price of a VERY steep learning curve. I consider myself a pretty good gamer, I don't do tutorials and I master the basics in only a few minutes of begining to play, but in this game, had it not been for the kind instructors in the newbie servers, I'd still be busy figuring my head from my back. It's by no way hard, it's simply that a lot of things are intertwined to make a whole, and not knowing those things can and will lead you to certain confusion, death and potentially being kicked out of servers.
http://www.freeallegiance.org

Descent 2 all the way.  It's already been ported to *highly* unusual platforms with great success - for instance, a guy's managed to get it running on a not-so-new PDA... I forget what kind exactly, but basically he had like 3 buttons and touchscreen to work with, but made it playable.  Try googling it.

When I saw that photoshopped pic of Descent on Darkfader's site, then learned it was fake, I had a serious chip on my shoulder for a week :cry:  Would've been so awesome...

Minimum system specs for Descent 1, based on my memory:
386-66 or something
4 megs of ram for a slideshow, 8 megs for silk (but with screen res decreased as much as it'd be for a DS screen, this probably wouldn't be the case)
Uh... monitor?

Descent 2 was basically the same.  Same engine, just tweaked, and with a lot of new enemies, levels, and weapons.  It was also made to be able to function in 640x480 and other resolutions...

I think that the 3D games we've seen so far on the DS have at least as much detail, probably much more, than anything you might see at one time in Descent.  My only concern is in some of the unusually large environments... for instance, the final boss fight.  It's a pretty wide-open space with a fair bit of polygonal detail.  On the other hand, I was a level designer back in the day, and I can remember that there was a limit of 900 cubes at any one time.  A cube is the most basic level unit, it's just like when you're modelling something in 3D for modern games - except you can't extrude, you can just add more cubes or alter the geometry of existing ones.  Descent used portal rendering long before Metroid Prime ^^

Descent 2 wifi would make me buy another DS Lite, supercard, and anything else, just so I could play such a great game with other people anywhere I went.

I can't emphasize enough how phoenomenal Descent 2 multiplayer was.  Games limited to 2 dimensions make you feel naked or something.  After Descent, you NEED to be able to strafe up and down!

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Edit: for the record, you should probably just have "Descent 2" in there.  The D2 engine runs D1 content as well...  They're basically the same engine, D2's just got a few tweaks to allow for things like bouncing weapons, etc.

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edit: oh yeah, here's a helpful link: http://www.descent2.de/d2x.html  it's the homepage of D2X-XL, currently the biggest and most successful effort underway to improve the D2 source code.  And wow, have they improved it...  It's fully openGL now, and can run on windows, dos, unix, linux, mac, etc

Quote from: "Chlikaflok"I'm not sure it's realistic but a game I'd like to see is Allegiance by Microsoft Games (the full source is on the M$ site somewhere).
(Link for screenies)
http://www.microsoft.com/games/allegiance/screenshots.htm
Those are a few sites that are the remains of the official site and the source code to the game.
http://www.microsoft.com/games/allegiance/home.htm
http://research.microsoft.com/research/allegiance/
http://www.freeallegiance.org

Good stuff.  Might be too much for DS?

Quote from: "Altor"Edit: for the record, you should probably just have "Descent 2" in there.  The D2 engine runs D1 content as well...  They're basically the same engine, D2's just got a few tweaks to allow for things like bouncing weapons, etc.

Nice report.  I remember playing D1 on my 386DX 33.  I didn't know the D2 engine could run D1 contents. D2 had 3D ships and wepons and D1 only had 2D animated ships and wepons.  Descent multiplayer was very fun to play.  The first time I played D1 I remember thinking "Doom killer".  I think Descent would be very playable on the DS.

Nope, D1/D2 had the exact same stuff in 2D and 3D.  Ships and enemies were 3D in both games, that was a big selling point in fact.  Some weapons were sprites, but many were polygonal.  Low detail though, just basically enough so stuff looked vaguely proper from any direction.

D2 by itself doesn't run D1 stuff if I remember right.  But the D2X-XL project allows it to.

Indeed, it was a Doom-killer.  Only problem is that Doom, no offense intended, didn't require people to be terribly bright in order to be adept at it.  Descent 1/2 required a LOT more thinking.  The third dimension literally "adds a whole new dimension" to the gameplay, as you are constantly hearing nowadays with every new FPS that introduces slightly improved lighting or whatever.  This, combined with the problem of severe motion sickness that some people experienced their first times playing the game (in some cases it didn't go away and they just couldn't play it for very long at a stretch) made it impossible to appeal to as broad a user base.  FPS games after Descent 2 bored me to tears until I got Jedi Outcast, which brought me back into the mainstream FPS genre.

Quote from: "Altor"Nope, D1/D2 had the exact same stuff in 2D and 3D.  Ships and enemies were 3D in both games, that was a big selling point in fact.  Some weapons were sprites, but many were polygonal.  Low detail though, just basically enough so stuff looked vaguely proper from any direction.

Yes, I just fired up Desent 1/2 and you are correct about the ships, but there seems to be more 2D sprite animation happening in D1.  Maybe it's mostly the difference between D1 and D2 resolutions?

How about Star Control 2...
Or rather known in the open source area to be The Ur-quan Masters?
http://sc2.sourceforge.net/

Abe's Odyssey , nothing could rival is, but no source code ~

Radio buttons kill this poll for me, checkboxes would be better.
All of those games except Doom need to be on DS.
And though perhaps the games are too high res for the system, I think it would be nice to see the Kenta Cho/ABA Games freeware PC shoot em' ups on the DS. http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/

Descent 1/2 has more votes than everything else combined.  Well, er, almost.  I wonder if anyone would be interested in trying to port it?  Where would I post to make a suggestion like that?

how about beats of rage ds?

full speed SNES...

but I'd settle for Chrono Trigger on DS , or a non-GBA Link to the Past