Nowadays, everyone knows what an iDevice is (hell, in Spain we even have iDiapers, it’s just crazy). People all around the world line up for hours in order to get one of those the first day they come to the stores, and other people make millions on the App Store dollar over dollar. And users are happy.
The cool thing is that most games that succeed in the App Store for the iOS are the kind of games that are particularly easy to create in BennuGD: the old school 2D games that are FUN to play, combined with a simple but elegant look.
That’s why I’m particularly excited to show you what I got running yesterday:
Sorry for the low quality of the video, I’ll try to upload a better one later
(More after the break).
As you can see, this thing is very early yet, set_mode() is not working yet (that’s why you can’t see the logo in the lower half of the screen) neither does audio or keyboard input, but many things are working just fine.
The thing is based on the monolithic version of BennuGD I created for the unofficial Wii port. I have not used the regular BennuGD code for two reasons:
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You cannot get programs that use external dynamic libraries into the App Store. Apple provided libraries are the sole exception to this rule.*
In order to get BennuGD running on the iOS, you must compile it against SDL 1.3. It seems to be working pretty well, but is yet unfinished and therefore upstream Bennu has not yet adopted it.
But fear not, updates in BennuGD code are rapidly synced and it’s -of course- also free both as in speech and as in beer for you to use and change to your willing.
There are many things that can be said about this new development, but for the moment I’ll just add a couple of more things:
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I really believe this is a HUGE thing for BennuGD. If we do things right, Bennu might become an important development tool for the iOS.
I believe that this time the timing is correct.
Once the base Bennu is implemented, we could think of adding very interesting modules on top of it.
There’s not any date set yet for a final release :(.
[Update] Forum user Pixel has uploaded a video of Bennu running natively on his iPad. Right now, you need to have your iDevice jailbroken and running iOS 3.2 or over.