Dzzee 1.6.0 for NDS, GCN, Wii, PS1 and PS2 released

Sun, 11 Jun 2023 12:00:00 +0000

Finishing up the porting frenzy, Dzzee gets ported to a few more home console homebrew platforms, and the NDS port is updated for improved performance.

Four new ports (PS1, PS2, GCN, Wii) and an updated NDS port of Dzzee are now available on Itch.io.

Release announcement

Completing the list of ports of Dzzee to homebrew consoles, this release brings support for 4 home console systems (PS1, PS2, GameCube and Wii) as well as an update for the NDS port.

The game itself uses floating point quite heavily, and the PS1 doesn't have floating point hardware, so floating point is emulated in software -- this resulted in bad frame rates, but instead of rewriting everything in fixed point (something that might have boosted the PS1 frame rate even more), the floating point code and loops were optimized so that the PS1 port runs acceptably well.

As a side effect of the PS1 optimization work, the previously good-but-not-perfect NDS port is now quite playable with good frame rates, so the NDS gets a new release with this version (originally, Dzzee 1.4.0 supported the NDS already).

For those not keeping count, here's the statistics of the Dzzee ports today:

A bunch of Retro PC builds (DOS, Win9x+) with various rasterizers

4 published (PSP, NDS, PS Vita, 3DS) handheld console homebrew ports

4 published (PS1, PS2, GameCube, Wii) home console homebrew ports

Modern Windows (SDL2/OpenGL)

HTML5 / WebGL port (playable on Dzzee's webpage)

Compared to my other game with many ports (Loonies 8192), Dzzee is missing (and probably won't get) a port to the GBA (lacking accelerated triangle drawing), 16-bit DOS (but 32-bit DOS is available in multiple incarnations) and some other mobile ports.

However, Dzzee has audio support (sampled sound effects) for all the platforms it supports, including PS2, Wii and GameCube (something that Loonies 8192 lacks due to laziness on my part). Also, Dzzee uses hardware accelerated rendering on all platforms it supports, with the exception of the DOS ports, for which either Mesa-based software rendering or a custom VGA/EGA rasterizer has been implemented (but if you have a 3Dfx Voodoo card, even the DOS port has support for hardware acceleration via GLIDE2X.OVL, i.e. the DOS Glide API).

Anyway, have fun with these new ports -- especially on the PS2 and Wii, which can be easily softmodded these days.

See Also

Release announcement on itch.io

Announcement on Mastodon

Project webpage