forums.ps2dev.org

protomank · Posted: Sun Feb 28, 2010 2:53 pm Post subject: Calling for help from experts

Hello. As most of you know, I am programming a game in SDL for PS2. But the fact is that SDL in PS2 is low-quality in several places.
I am willing to try to fix it, but the problem is that I am not a PS2 developer, nor know the PS2SDK very well, nor have time to learn it. So I need your help.

What needs to be implemented or fixed:
- fix SDL_Mixer threads, so sound is not choppy
- fix SDL_Timer (I've already partially fixed it, no big deal)
- fix mp3 support in SDL_Mixer (I tryied, but seems to have problems in smpeg)
- add MIDI support in SDL_Mixer

This is actually not a lot of things, and if done, would help a LOT of people to port their software to PS2 very easily. So, how can you help?
First of all, I want to know the people that implemented SDL, anyone here know if they are alive (in the sense of us being able to contact them)? Their knowledge can help a lot.
Second, please just walk in and start working, you guys surely are better than me to fix simple things in PS2 development.

Thanks in advance to all interested at least in reading this rant :)

protomank · Posted: Mon Jul 12, 2010 2:27 am Post subject:

Ok, I'm trying again, I hope someone can help. Here is an updated info:

Hello.
PS2SDK have a almost working mixer library for SDL. It runs, works and plays sound, but it does not play it well, just segmented and stopped.

I am willing to fix it, but I do not have much knowledge about the PS2SDK itself (as I use it throught the SDL lib). So if anyone can help me, or just review the code and point me the right direction, I'll be most thankful.

Looking at the sdlmixer code itself, I found no aparent error, everything seems to be ok. My currenct guess is that the problem lies in sdl_sound (in the SDL lib itself), probally due to wrong or absent thread code.

As I've said before, any help is welcome, and I believe a working sdlmixer will help to port LOTS of games to PS2.

ragnarok2040 · Joined: 09 Aug 2006 Posts: 230

Edit:

My suggestions here didn't help, :D. Turns out it was a thread priority problem worked around by changing the main thread priority to 64, same as ps2link's launched user threads.

protomank · Posted: Tue Jul 20, 2010 5:08 am Post subject:

Also, the default priority in SDL_Sound (inside the sdl mixer itself) was changed to 42.
wave and mod works very well, when I have some free time, I'll test other formats or implement them, such as mp3/ogg. It should not be very hard if I just copy it's implementation from the SDL/Linux.