BoR/Palm and BoR/ce - Beats of Rage for Palm OS and Pocket PC
Beats of Rage is a "beat'em'up" game in the grain of Double
Dragon and Streets of Rage and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,
as well as being a fully modable engine for such games.
Beats of Rage is freeware!
Thanks to the Senile team for making BoR engine, and to Squidge
for making my life a lot easier porting it :)
Please enjoy!
For help, contact support@codejedi.com
Requirements:
Should work on most 'heavyweight' Palm OS devices and most
Pocket PC devices.
Palm OS:
Works on most halfway decent devices. Feedback first day tells
us that its
known to work on at least PalmOne T|T3, Tapwave Zodiac, Sony Clie NX80,
Sony Clie UX50, PalmOne T|E, PalmOne Zire 71; should
work on many others as well! You'll need an expansion card
to hold your BOR PAK files.
Remember that if you're running a lower end device, stick to
the smaller PAK files; if you're running a high end device, running
the giant 50MB PAK "Beats of Rage" file will be fine!
Older OS4 and earlier devices are not supported. OS5 and up.
Pocket PC:
For Pocket PC it should work on most devices, be they QVGA or VGA
models, using WM2003 or WM2003SE. I'm using a Dell Axim X50v
but hopefully we can get people to test on piles of devices. You'll want
a lot of memory ideally, but its been well tuned to lower end devides
so should work on most Pocket PC's no problem. You'll need an
expansion card to hold your BOR PAK files, for sure.
For the Axim X50v, ensure you're using Picard/Emulamer's
GAPI-tweak, since the Dell supplied "GAPI" system is very slow.
With the replacement GAPI this runs smooth as silk and just
looks gorgeous!
If you've got the memory, you can keep the PAK files and
such in device RAM or "Built in Storage" as you see fit.
All:
BoR is a very large application; for Palm OS it requires
expansion media (and likely for Pocket PC as well, since actual
RAM is tight usually!)
to hold your "pak" files (games), though the application itself
can reside in RAM, etc. The expansion card (SD, CF, MemStick,
whatever) will need a lot of space.. common PAK files are anywhere
from 5MB to 60MB (not kidding!) and you can have as many
as you like -- I like to keep a half dozen mods around!
The included pak file has lower requirements; it is known to
run on lower end units such as the T|E and Zire 71!
The gory details:
It depends on the PAK file used; the Megaman mod I've been testing
with will run the first level with a minimum of 6MB of heap runtime
RAM. Note that the Palm T|T1 (original) had only 700k of RAM for
instance, despite having 15+MB for storage. The T|T3 on the
other hand has 8MB of heap runtime RAM, so no problem.
Installation:
For now its a bit basic, but the app is yet young. You'll need
to have an expansion card (SD card, memory stick, compact flash, etc)
to use the emu.
Palm OS
- Install BoR.prc to your device (wherever you want it to be)
- You could use hotsync tricks to move the PAK files around,
but since most are very large, its just going to be unpleasant.
Use an inexpensive USB card write to move files, or Card Export
software, or MSExport on Sony's, etc..
- But the BoR.pak file in /PALM/Programs/BoR on your expansion
card and you're good to go!
Pocket PC
Use a card writer or active sync; a card writer is faster because these
are big files.
- 1) Copy BORce*.exe to anywhere you like for now (though likely SD or CF
is best)
- 2) Copy one or more BOR MOD PAK files to the same place you put the
main borce.exe file in step 1; if you put it in
/SD Card/Programs/BORce/ like I did, then you'll want to see two or more
files there:
BORceBeta4.exe (or whatever its called today)
bor_cast.pak
** Files must be unzipped.
- 3) You're good to go! This version is pretty smart -- if you have no PAK file
in the same place as the program, it'll warn you and exit; if you have one
PAK file it'll just fire it up. If you have more than one, a simple menu
is presented to let you select which one to play.
- 4) You can use any BOR mod you like, such as 50MB one or the one I've
included.. the 3MB "Castlevania BOR MOD". There are many dozen available!
Some come as RAR files .. so unpack them with an unRAR utility. Some come
as ISO disk images (for Dreamcast etc), so you need to pop the BOR.PAK file
out of that. But look around -- a few sites carry full normal PAK files.
This should be pretty easy to install really -- just copy the zip file
contents to an SD or CF card and run it from your Pocket PC :)
Usage:
See the README in the zip file for details.
Note that the quick exit is only available while playing the
game; if you're in the game menus, look for the "Reboot" option
to exit.
On the Zodiac, shoulder buttons and Function-button (gray) act
as Special; for other devices, tap the lower half of the screen
with your finger to fire off the Special.
For Pocket PC, the hardware buttons will act as Start, Attack,
Jump and move, but you'll find it best to hold the device landscape
with controls on the left. Use your right hand thumb to fire
by tapping in the bottom right corner of the display -- jump is
top right, and 'Special' is left-half of the screen. Using your
left thumb to move and Special, and right thumb to attack is
quite formidable!
Message Board and BoR Links:
BoR Mods (alternate game packs for BoR):
Beats of Rage is an easily modded engine, and as such numerous
mods can be found around the Internet. Due to the constricted
environment of a PDA, not all mods can work on all devices.
Donations:
By request I've turned up a donation box in the webstore; I
build all of my free software to help support the communities I'm
a proud member of, but feel free to help pay the bills of a self
employed coder :)
Screenshots of BoR/Palm:
Screenshots of BoR/CE:
BOR/ce Downloads for Pocket PC:
- BOR/ce Beta 5! Should run very well; on-screen button display, PAK picker etc; no soun dyet, but thats next on my list. (And fixed the directory scanning for beta 005)
- BOR/ce Alpha 3! Should run *great*, though not yet added audio.
BoR/Palm Downloads:
BoR/Palm is directly descended from the Windows and GP32 ports.
You may wish to experiment with them too! (for Windows, DOS, Mac,
DreamCast, GP32, you name it)
Release notes:
004
---
CHG: Some aesthetics are changed (removed audio checkbox until audio is
implemented and other little things)
NEW: Full screen (with anti-aliasing) for Zodiac owners!
beta 003
--------
NEW: Scaling is now nearly fullscreen on 480 wide devices
FIX: Stage complete text is fixed
FIX: File handling issue sorted out; it was preventing numerous mods from
loading correctly; interesting approach they had in there.. subtle fix!
This gets us Sonic-X, Nintendo Vs Sega and some others
FIX: Found a bug in the engine itself; some mods seemed to trick the engine
for player models, so built in code to make broken mods work.
This gets us Vale of Rage and TMNT and Ghosts N Goblins Return
beta 002
--------
NEW: Zodiac Function button performs the Special move; thanks RZR for the tip!
o also the shoulder buttons, in case you need analog while specialing
NEW: Hitting Home will fast exit :) (after fadeout)
FIX: Textual fixes
o Player name and score should be shown now
o Lives count should be correct
o Credits count should be correct
o And all over the place :)
CHG: When you start a game, it now hides the go button and the list box, so
you don't accidentally press them again and do weird stuff to the engine :)
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