Reflections on Week One

Some hard truths I learned during this, my first week of working on an open-source project:

• Everything will take more time than you predict it will :-)
• This Summer will be a learning experience. I think things will go a lot smoother now that I've been humbled a bit and am more comfortable with taking some time to read documentation/ask for advice from other devs when I hit a bottleneck.
• Panera Bread has free wifi and tasty food :-)

Some things I did during this, my first week of working on an open-source project:

• Got MUCH more comfortable with linux (specifically Ubuntu).
• Got the PS2 port of ScummVM to compile and updated the wiki page concerning the process.
• Learned a bit about how GNU linker scripts work.
• Got comfortable merging trunk changes into my branch and communicating with the ScummVM porters (nice people!)
• Modified the PSP loader to work for PS2 and made special PS2 linker scripts (as of now, these are untested).

Day 2

Spent today trying to get ScummVM builds compiled on my machine for all the platforms I'll be working with this summer.

Having a fair bit of trouble with the ps2 build :-)

Turns out tweaks made to the ps2toolchain over the past year make it incompatible with ScummVM's ps2 code, but even when checking out a previous revision of the toolchain, the script that builds the toolchain updates everything to the current revision :P

So I manually tweaked the scripts to check out an earlier revision, which would have worked out fine if ps2dev.org wasn't down ALL day. Luckily my mentor had a link to another site hosting the same code and I was able to make some more tweaks to get the correct revision.

Now I just need some libraries (tremor specifically) and it should be built before bedtime.

Made some progress on getting the others built as well :)

Stumbling Out of the Gate

Attempted to start my GSoC project yesterday, but had a far less productive day than I had hoped. I spent pretty much all of the day just trying to get the PS2 port of ScummVM to build (with no real changes to the code) but the ps2toolchain I set up didn't work correctly. Then I got esoteric svn errors when trying to revert to an earlier version of the toolchain to fix these problems. Frustrated that the ball isn't rolling quite yet, but excited to get there soon :D

Tony

Grrr...

Drove around Sacramento the last couple of days looking for a gameshark or action replay for the PS2 (things that give you means of exploiting and running indie homebrew software on the PS2). No luck... I ordered swap magic discs (another means of exploit) and it seems they only just shipped today (even though I ordered them over a month ago). So looks like I'm headed to Stockton to pick up an exploited PS2 memory card today. Hope all goes well!


UPDATE:

The trip to Stockton was a success! Got a memory card with Free McBoot and successfully ran "Freddi Fish" on my PS2 via ScummVM!

The Wiz

I refer not to Michael Jackson's retelling of Dorothy's journey on the yellow-brick road, but to the fact that I have obtained a nifty little Korean handheld known as the GP2x Wiz and am currently enjoying Full Throttle on it :-)

Brewed at Home

Got ScummVM up and running on the DS. Sam and Max never looked so good :-)

Now to tackle getting homebrew to run on the PS2...