Friday, September 5, 2008

Testing on hardware

Alas, I knew I shouldn't have waited as long as I did since I last tested on the real DS hardware. I guess I had more faith in No$Gba than I should have. Today I ran Anguna on hardware, which I haven't done in a good while, and had all sorts of bugs that didn't show up in either of the emulators I use.

The worst was that when you move from room to room, it occasionally takes a long time to load the next room. Like 30 seconds long time. Something is SERIOUSLY wrong in that case. It only happens some of the time. But in the world of programming, "some of the time" is worse than "all of the time" because it's a whole lot harder to find the problem and know if you've fixed it.

I've also got issues with rogue sprites appearing. Stuff appearing that never should have appeared, and not disappearing when it was supposed to.

The annoying things about fixing this:
1. There's no debugging tools available. My debugging tools were pretty worthless anyway, since the only emulator I have that has any debug facilities at all is horribly inaccurate. But this'll be worse.
2. The change/build/test cycle takes a whole lot longer, since you have to add the steps of insert the memory card in the PC, copy the file, transfer the memory card to the DS, boot the DS and start the right game, and THEN test.
3. I do all my development on linux. My card writers don't work on linux. Blah. (Edit: turns out one of them works on my laptop, but wouldn't work on my desktop. But I do the majority of the work on the laptop, so it won't be quite as bad as I thought)

Even if they end up being pretty trivial and easy bugs, this will take quite a bit of time.

1 comment:

Jake T said...

why not just stay in one room, then? I mean, I know that kind of defeats the purpose of having a portable system like the DS, but as long as you turn it off when you have to go somewhere else, it shouldn't be a big deal, right?

NES Anguna

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