So a few weeks back my friend klops: the lead dev of PortMaster, introduced me to a developer called bmdhacks (who was once, long ago, a dev on a couple PS2 games!). bmdhacks had a crazy plan (well by the time I got to chat to him, that plan was very close to complete!) of bringing Dead Cells to the inexpensive R36S retro handheld. Which maybe you’ll know, if you’re a retro handheld fan, is a device that was never designed to run games of that scale.
What started as a impossible request in the PortMaster world (they had it rated as “Low” in feasibility) turned into a stupidly difficult technical project involving a custom ARM JIT compiler for HashLink, an LLVM-based ahead-of-time compilation backend, and an entirely new decompiler pipeline capable of reconstructing structured code from bytecode.
And did I understand everything he told me when telling me what he did, how he did it, and what was next? No. Not at all.
My article I got to write on it (from all bmdhacks told me) covers the whole process, so if you’re into the technical side of porting games? Then you’re in for a treat!
Here’s my link:
https://gardinerbryant.com/the-anatomy-of-an-impossible-port/
Little edit: bmdhacks is in the comments below, if anyone has any specific question to ask, or comment to share! Yay!
We emphatically disallow AI-written articles on our site.
Here: https://gardinerbryant.com/the-bryant-review-style-guide/
Here: https://heavyelement.com/ethics/
I have personally witnessed dash’s writing process through various drafts and through my editing passes in my role as Editor in Chief. Dash makes typos and other mistakes where LLMs don’t.
…for once my embarrassing unending typos save me -____-
there’s nothing in this article that makes me think it’s LLM generated, no idea what that guy was on about. It’s very well written and readable, which I don’t think LLM can really achieve, not that I’ve ever seen anyway. And it wasn’t easy but I did manage to find a minor typo - “All my thanks to bmdhacks for keeping me informed through
and ofevery step he took” 😁God. Damn. It.
Hahahahahah, its basically tradition that Gardiner finds a bunch, and then someone here on Lemmy points something out.
That one’s on me, I’ll fix it when I get back in from walking me cat (harness time!) around my yard. Thanks for pointing it out, and for all your kind words!!!