NGCNews:2007-08-09 - Quake GameCube
From Dev-Scene
2007-08-09 - Quake GameCube
Quake GameCube
Peter Mackay took a break from Cave Story this week to work on a port of id software's classic Quake for the GameCube.
There had been a couple of long-standing bugs which halted progress on Quake. Firstly, the SD card library seemed to be reading garbage data occasionally, which would generally manifest itself as corruption when loading the second demo in Quake’s attract mode.
After that bug was gone, fixing the other was much easier. The other bug seemed to cause some variables to get corrupted, but only when starting a new game. Previously I couldn’t tell what the cause was, because the two bugs fed into each other and I couldn’t be sure where the corruption came from.
Quake now runs without crashing and with (almost) full optimisation. And boy, does it run. At 320×264 (PAL), demo 1 runs at comfortably over 70 frames per second. At 640×528, it runs at just under 30.
I implemented input and audio too, so the game is quite playable. Unfortunately, Quake uses the standard C library’s file functions for save game access, so there’s no support for loading and saving games yet.
The port can be run on either the Gamecube or Wii, and ultimately requires something like the SD media launcher or another way of running applications from the SD card to function.