Difference between revisions of "Windows CE"

== Appendix A: Jubanka's "A Brief History of PocketScumm" ==

;<font size=10 face=Georgia color=gray><b>,,</b></font>

:I remember that Vasyl did the first port, which was just working with no sound and no specific CE features (i.e. straight port from the CVS). Then Andys from [http://www.pocketmatrix.com PocketMatrix] forums started working on the sound, and had some success with that, but without getting officially involved in the ScummVM project.

:If I remember well I got involved after sending some patches for Loom CD, and doing the "first refactoring" of the port which was basically C only at that time, I fixed some Pocket PC specific bugs, and started working on a specific UI for Pocket PC, the virtual keyboard and icons. Then a guy called Bjorn Eike Schwarz (Shapeshifter on PocketMatrix) improved the UI, virtual keyboard and icons. He passed away unfortunately :( So he deserves extra credits in the Wiki I think - see http://www.pocketmatrix.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=20410

:So that was early 2002 - during the next months I improved the compatibility on the different ports on Windows CE and my holy grail at that time was to have a single binary working with all screen resolutions, as well as a very easy code base to port on multiple other Pocket PC architectures (at that time MIPS and SH3 were still on the market), and a clean framework to port SDL based games on Windows Mobile.

:The Pocketmatrix forum community was quite useful at that time, with a lot of people always available to test the new releases (replaying full games on each release), and SirDave's excellent documentation project.

:I'd say my big achievement came with the 0.5.1 release in 2003 and the special scalers to work on the first Windows Mobile Smartphone (SPV E100). It was one of the early homebrew to work on the SPV as well (since I spent some time freeing the platform for developers also), and most probably the first single Windows CE executable to work on a Pocket PC and on a Smartphone :)

:After that and other funny compatibility updates (due to the ever changing Microsoft platform and mostly "updates" to the graphics drivers), I decided to refactor everything since ScummVM was turning more and more into a C++ project and I felt a little bit left behind with my messy C hacks :)

:This happened in 2004 but I don't remember for which release it went public. The refactoring itself was fun but of course it broke many things and the result was significantly slower and less compatible than 0.5.1, which was a little bit disappointing.

:So I spent the next months trying to improve that, but eventually got super busy on other things and rather bored of that never ending bug fixing and attemtps to understand the next creative way Microsoft found to break the display drivers in the next devices (the giant mess that was Windows 2003 SE and its virtual VGA resolution along with the never kept promise of a standard DirectDraw layer coming to the mobile platform pretty much convinced me to stop developing games for this platform).

:And that's where you came to save the day, I guess :)

:To conclude I'd say that all these years were pretty much fun, I spent a lot of time on these games as a child and feel happy to have contributed  to such a great project than ScummVM is today.

:I think this project makes a lost gaming genre still appealing for many people, and really preserves the history of computer gaming. Bringing my small contribution to this task and helping people carry their new favorite games with them was a great experience ... I think the best part of it were the posts or e-mails of people telling me that they won't get bored anymore on the train or on meetings :)<font size=10 face=Georgia color=gray><b>,,</b></font>