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I'm lazy, and I honestly hate battling my computer just to get stuff done. So I went the easy way here. I'm using VS Code with the PSX.Dev extension by Grumpycoders. It comes with most of the necessary tools (compilers, a debugging-capable emulator, linker, etc.) to generate a PlayStation program, plus the tools from the Sony PsyQ SDK. The alternative would be using an old computer running Windows 95/98 or emulating it in some kind of virtual machine setup, which comes with all kinds of limitations on file sharing, internet access (for Git), and so on. Also, the original solution uses an older compiler, which isn’t as good as the one used by PSX.Dev. Sure, it would make it easier to work with Sony tools made for Windows 95, but most of them still work on Windows 10, and for the few that don’t, I use DOSBox. My setup is a desktop running Ubuntu (again, lazy...) and a notebook with Windows 10. I don’t use Copilot, not because I think I can do better (I’m a pretty bad programmer), but because, like with my comics, I like to use my own brain. It’s all I have, all I am... I don’t want it to waste away. I’ll probably have to use Copilot (or something like it) at my job soon just to keep up, but for my hobbies, I prefer doing things myself. Back to the dev setup... most of the tool usage happens on the notebook, for no real reason other than I haven’t configured Wine to run everything on the Linux machine. On the PSX hardware front, I have four. A real collector would probably laugh at me, but it’s enough to raise eyebrows from regular folks :D Each one has a different bypass to allow it to run homemade ISOs. Here is my happy drawer:

Apart from the PsyQ tools, I use mkpsxiso to create disk ISOs, GIMP for graphics, VirtualDub for video, and Audacity for audio. For documentation, I rely heavily on the official PsyQ docs and the NOCASH hardware/programming specs. And... that’s it. Thanks, I promise to try to bring real programming to my posts soon.

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Here it comes, a new comic! Sort of. I've been cooking this one in my mind for quite some time. Despite not looking like it, I do have the whole Adrift saga in my head. I just didn't have time to write it all down. Actually, the biggest problem is not time. It's money! I chose to tell it through a medium I'm not good at making by myself, which is comics (I'm not good at writing either, but I can do it, unlike drawing good comic book art). I don't have money to pay all the artists needed to draw those comics, so I only write stories when I'm close to being able to start the process of taking the raw material and turning it into drawing drafts, thinking about camera angles and all that. Well, that being said, this is the raw brain-dump of this little adventure about Ghaks. It's short, for adults, and advances the plot of the saga a little. Feel free to take a look. I would love to receive feedback on it, btw. It's written in a mix of Brazilian Portuguese and "Brazilian English" :D Because it's easier to communicate with local artists this way. Download

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I know, this blog is supposed to be about gamedev but, since Dridax makes its debut in Orbi's comics, I think it's only fair to announce here that we finally finished it! It took quite a long time. It began in 2020 and extended all the way to today. Not a laziness problem, I assure you! It's a big comic, with over 450 pages, and was made while other comics were being produced. And maybe, just maybe, I had the tendency to redo a page many times over until I deemed it finished :D Ah! A pandemic happened too... Anyway, it's finished! And you can read it for free at: READ IT! PLS :) Go on and take a look! While you might not like the writing, as I'm just a bad programmer telling stories, you can be sure that the art is spectacular!

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It's been a while since I last tried to have some sort of blog of my own. I'm not very much into the medium, and personally I don't think I have anything worthwhile to share. Despite all that, I'm creating a PlayStation 1 game and decided to document its creation. It's true that retro game development is not that popular, but it's also true that this is probably why I like it so much. It's this lack of a spotlight and the profound admiration I have for the old timers that created amazing games with so little, comparatively, in terms of hardware and software. So... this is my journey on creating Dridax's Escape, a game that belongs to the Adrift space opera, a comics project I've been writing since 2019, with the help of many artists to transform my words into pictures. I must warn you that I'm not an expert on PlayStation development. Any of my ideas and implementations are most definitely far away from the gold standard, but I hope that this might serve as some sort of encouragement. If I can do it, so can you!