I love programming for a closed system… or maybe I just hate programming for Windows? I recently started getting into PSP programming and so far i’m really enjoying it. I’ve dabbled into handheld programming before with the Gameboy Advance and it was just as enjoyable. There’s just something so liberating about having a closed system to work with. No worry about hundreds of lines of initialization code or any crap like that, you just get down to work creating content.

A little background first. I started coding when I was 16, using nothing more than Sams Teach Yourself C in 21 Days. I got into it, enjoyed it, and decided that programming was what I wanted to do as a career, with game development being my ultimate goal. So I majored in computer programming in college - while continuing to study things not covered in my coarse on the side - and graduated in June of ‘05. So far I haven’t had any luck finding a job in the field, which is pretty depressing. Anyways, back to the topic at hand.

First, I took at stab at LuaPlayer as that seemed to be the unanimous choice when it comes to getting results quickly and easily, but i’m honestly not going to give it another look until there’s some major improvements made to it. As a test, I ported this title screen concept I made for Windows to the PSP using Lua. It’s nothing more than a PNG image that fades in, some text on the lower-right corner, and a .wav file playing in the background. Only took me half a day to set up, as apposed to the week it took me to do the same thing on Windows (had some major problems getting certain libraries to work well together). Unfortunately it didn’t work very well. The background music came out all garbled and full of static. Browsing around some forums, it seems that fading in an image while playing a .wav is too much for LuaPlayer to handle, performance just isn’t good right now. So, with that, i’m not touching LuaPlayer again until it gets some major performance improvements. It’s off to C/C++ land, which i’m more comfortable with anyways.

I’ve had some weird experiences with Cygwin in the past, but setting up the C/C++ development environment for the PSP was a breeze following some simple guides and I was up and compiling code in no time. I haven’t done anything major with it yet, but as a first step I intent to port that same title screen concept later in the week and see how well it works out, I don’t think there’ll be any performance problems this time. If all goes well i’ll start developing my game concept on the PSP exclusively, should be fun.