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Shortly after my post about porting OpenTyrian, developer deniska announced in the comments that he’s almost finished with the PSP port, and posted a video on YouTube:

This is a release I’m definitely looking forward to. For those who don’t remember, Tyrian was a beautiful and engaging PC shooter, at a time when PC shooters (as well as most PC games) were subpar to most console titles. The music and graphics in the game are easily on par with many Amiga and MSX titles.

Nice job, deniska!

UPDATE Release is expected Monday

When I was just starting to program for the PSP, I envisioned first doing a port of fMSX, then a port of an emulator specifically for emulating arcade versions of Mortal Kombat games 1-3. Since I don’t think any emulators other than MAME support the games (and MAME’s source is a tangled mess), I doubt that phase will ever come to fruition.

Most recently I’ve also considered porting older games, however, and if someone else doesn’t do them first (I hope they do), I just might do a port myself. Two obvious choices right now are OpenTyrian, a rewrite of Tyrian, and Wargus, the Warcraft II-compatible RTS engine based on Stratagus. I prefer not to port these projects myself, as they’re both based on SDL, and I happen to have an inherent dislike for hardware abstraction frameworks.

If you’re looking for an interesting port project, both of these games should be a welcome distraction from the many flavors of DooM already ported to the PSP.