Converting Games?

pmollohan

Hello!
I was wondering if there was a program that could convert old MS-DOS games into games for the Hydra?· Is there such a program?
Thanks in advanced!

Oldbitcollector (Jeff)

Afraid there is more to it than that..

The Hydra is based on the Parallax Propeller which works in Spin, Assembly, and
now there is the release of a C compiler {just getting going}. You probably will
find yourself writing from scratch. However, many have found ways of importing
sprites, graphics, and audio from some of the older games.

OBC

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JT Cook

You have to write everything from the ground up for the Hydra.

tpw_man

It MIGHT be just possible to write a SCUMM emulator for the HYDRA, so you just use the data files from the game.

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AndreL

pmollohan,

What you have to understand is what you are asking -- first you would have to clearly define "programs" -- do you mean DOS .EXE, .COM files in pure binary, what graphics support? CGA, EGA, VGA? so on and so forth. Then what do you mean by "convert"? A program that takes a source file, the binary and then transcodes it to target language of interpretive code? In the simplest form, what you really are asking is "is there a PC emulator for the hydra?" This is really the only meaningful type of "conversion" we could hope to achieve [noparse]:)[/noparse] The answer is of course no. The propeller chip is a microcontroller with limited memory, etc. and although, its "possible" to write an 80xxx emulator with the propeller, you would need external ram, huge rom, etc. to make this whole thing fly.

So the moral of the story is if you have a simple DOS game that you would like to port to the hydra, then depending on the game, you can port it in ASM or BASIC/ASM with some work and time. People have successfully ported games like pacman, tetris, defender, donky kong and others to the hydra. And I use the word "port" loosely, since they did NOT port source code, but simply eyeballed the game and then cloned it bit by bit.

That said, some people have successfully written baby or limited versions of emulators for much simpler systems like the Timex sinclair, C64, and Atari computers. But, emulating a modern PC not really feasible or practical.

Andre'