WonderSwan (Mono) development - Swan Driving BW
This is a back-port of the WonderSwan Color version of my homebrew Swan Driving so that is works on the original WonderSwan (Mono). It's largely the same, except it lacks the weather effects (rain).
The brunt of changes were around converting all bitmaps to use four-colour palettes, and replacing palette-loading code to initialize the palettes explicitly in the code.
The WonderSwan is a nifty little handheld, whose popularity in its native Japan far surpassed its adoption everywhere else. WonderSwan games are targetted at the Japanese market, with scant fragments of English language here and there. This is one of the chief reasons for its obscurity this side of the world.
Swan Driving BW is a WonderSwan homebrew where you control a car, trying to avoid incoming traffic. Your car has a low and a high gear, for driving slowly and fast, respectively. Use UP/DOWN to move your car, and LEFT/RIGHT to select low or high gear.
Swan Driving BW is meant more as a tech demo, to be useful for others trying to kick-start their WonderSwan development. It features a scrolling background layer and sprites for the cars. Fortunately for me, the WonderSwan CPU is x86-compatible, so writing the game in assembly language did not require a steep learning curve.
Swan Driving BW ROM - download this to run it in an emulator (I recommend Oswan)
Source code - Swan Driving BW source code package
Dev kit with ready-to-compile source code for Swan Driving BW - get this if you wish to compile the Swan Driving BW ROM yourself, or if you'd like to develop your own games using this as a starting point!
The brunt of changes were around converting all bitmaps to use four-colour palettes, and replacing palette-loading code to initialize the palettes explicitly in the code.
The WonderSwan is a nifty little handheld, whose popularity in its native Japan far surpassed its adoption everywhere else. WonderSwan games are targetted at the Japanese market, with scant fragments of English language here and there. This is one of the chief reasons for its obscurity this side of the world.
Swan Driving BW is a WonderSwan homebrew where you control a car, trying to avoid incoming traffic. Your car has a low and a high gear, for driving slowly and fast, respectively. Use UP/DOWN to move your car, and LEFT/RIGHT to select low or high gear.
Swan Driving BW is meant more as a tech demo, to be useful for others trying to kick-start their WonderSwan development. It features a scrolling background layer and sprites for the cars. Fortunately for me, the WonderSwan CPU is x86-compatible, so writing the game in assembly language did not require a steep learning curve.
Downloads
Swan Driving BW ROM - download this to run it in an emulator (I recommend Oswan)
Source code - Swan Driving BW source code package
Dev kit with ready-to-compile source code for Swan Driving BW - get this if you wish to compile the Swan Driving BW ROM yourself, or if you'd like to develop your own games using this as a starting point!