General

Guide: Porting to your chosen system

This is a general guide for getting your Bennu game onto your chosen system.

If you have missed the front page of this Wiki please see Bennu_Wiki or click on the BennuWiki logo on the top left of this page.

At the time of writing this stable ports and porting processes exist for these OS or platforms:

Windows

Linux

Caanoo (a later GP2X type handheld)

GP2X Wiz

Dingux (Dingoo OS for handheld)

The rest are generally unsupported by BennuGD community but still quite possible:

Playstation 2

HTML5/Chrome Native Client

Dreamcast

Haiku OS

FreeBSD

MacOS X (Intel 32 bits)

BennuGD PPA for Ubuntu 32 bits

Nintendo Wii

PSP

Pandora

Xbox

Motorola linux phone (RU)

Another exciting development is - BennuGD is being ported to:

Android

Expect this to be added to the "unsupported" section list very soon.

Essential: Check out Downloads page for BennuGD.

You can read about current developments on any ports at bennugd.org main page in the frontpage News feed.

Starting Out

If you have some experience with BennuGD you will have used bgdc (the compiler) and bgdi (the interpreter).

Once you have downloaded the Bennu port for your chosen target platform you will find it includes bgdc.xxx and bgdi.xxx. The compiler is the part that talks to the the machine, making your bennu code into a .dcb that is usable when executed with the interpreter. Also depending on which port, you will also find the set of standard libraries for the specific machine, or not. With bennu-monolithic ports you may find the libraries are not present as seperate files.

bennugd-monolithic - Many of recent ports are part of the bennugd-monolithic project, which enables certain machines to run Bennu successfully, including Wii, PSP iOS and Android. See josebita's bennugd-monotlithic Google Code pages for information about this.

So if you haven't done so, see the Downloads page of bennugd.org and retrieve the relevant port for your system - (checking that you are downloading the latest version!)

Notes on Setting Up

Porting is quite a task sometimes. You may find you need to edit your source code, depending on requirements of the target system and the current state of the port you are using. This can be related to sound or display requirements for example. Sometimes you can find your game may not run fast enough and needs optimisation - the target system can be slower than the computer you originally wrote the game for. However this should be only attempted after testing your game! So read on!

Also some preparation work is desired in your game source for the peripherals (controls) of the console or platform, so a good idea is to ascertain what controls you will be using early on. There is a section on this next in the guide!

The other part of porting is getting the machine you want to run your Bennu game on to actually compile the game itself. This can be an easy process or rather tough. But you will find certain tools written by developers who have paved the way before you will make this infinitely easier.

Most of all DON'T GIVE UP. You may find once your game compiles successfully with bgdc and you have a .dcb ready, there may be runtime errors when running and playing your game (with bgdi).

Once you have filesystem specifics set up for your chosen platform, the thing to remember is the standard commandline process which must be performed on the machine you intend to run your game on:

bgdc.xxx [params] bennugame.prg

Which naturaly takes your code and builds a dcb of your program.

bgdi.xxx bennugame.dcb

This will run your program.

Note: Most testing scenarios will not require you to use parameters in the compilation of your game/program.

However, one common parameter used is -a which automatically packages your commonly used resources - for example FPGs, WAVs into the dcb. This is optional for you of course, but can be very beneficial. When distributing your game or homebrew, people will not see your resource files and can help protect them from further use.

For further information on compile parameters you can ask bgdc itself:

bgdc.xxx -help

Which prints a list of parameters and a description of their uses. Disclaimer: Be careful with these! They can sometimes crash your console or any equipment used!

For any platform specific questions I will direct you to the bennugd.org community boards for each supported platform. Here you can post questions or search for answers. (This is for more advanced or searching questions about each particular console/machine).