Aquafish's Interview
Aquafish's website can be found here!
Hooka: When did you get your gp32?
Aquafish: I've had my gp32 for about 1,5 year.
Hooka: What convinced you to get it?
Aquafish: At the beginning, I'd been attracted by all the emu’s, the divx players, the nice gp32's SDK and especially the nice French user community. (Now I don't play a lot with my gp32 and the French community is become a big shite..)
Hooka: What dev environment do you use?
Aquafish: I use arm sdt (under win xp) since I had problems with minigp32.
Hooka: The first time I saw your site all it had was French translations and shitegba, what led to making all the multifirmwares?
Aquafish: I've start to make multi firmware’s after seeing some news on gp32x saying that mr.spiv stopped making his own (it certainly was a fake news but it convinced me to make my own multifirmware): I was waiting for a multifw with the European fw in it, so I've made it myself...
Hooka: Are there any games or demo's that shitegba actually run?
Aquafish: Only 3 demos: rotozoom, plasma and chaos89 and they run at 4 fps, so, there is no interest to use it; when I've coded it I planned to make a full gba emulator (I was also working on a Snes emu and on an Amstrad CPC emu at this period) but after the first version of shitegba32 I have preferred to stop my (little) work on emulation.. (I leave emulation for gods like rlyeh :D)
Hooka: What are the GpEpromutils for?
Aquafish: GpEpromUtils let you dump the gp32's EEPROM, the boot parameters of some firmware’s (Slubman's, Pacrom or multifw) are stored in gp32's EEPROM, and I've need a tool for watch where for be sure that my multifw don't interfere with the others firmware’s.
Hooka: What made you think to do an Advance Wars clone for gp32?
Aquafish: There are only 2 games I love on the gba and which are impossible to play on gp32 with emulators: Advance War (the NES version is in Japanese...) and Tony Hawk Pro Skater. After seeing that make myself a gba emu was impossible, I decided to make a remake of my favorite of these 2 games: Advance War.
Hooka: How was getting second in the Tomak competition?
Aquafish: I didn't expect it! It really motivated me for my gp32 projects!
Hooka: What is the hardest part about making a clone of a gba game?
Aquafish: Nothing special, in fact I find it's easier than making a totally new game because I don't have to care about make the gfx or find ideas...
Hooka: What exactly is yogourt for I know you said something about filtering images for your game entropy, but why do they have to be filtered?
Aquafish: I used it for define which part of the picture stop you or let you go to another picture in the game.
Hooka: What other projects do you have planned for the future?
Aquafish: Moving to the Zodiac... (No, don't beat me it's a joke... :D )
Aquafish: I've a lot of projects: an HTML viewer (maybe include in United Gp Viewer), maybe a skate game (like GBA's Tony Hawk Pro Skater), a plugin system for the gp32 (I'm working on it with Slubman), Gp Firmware Maker 2, Zed 3 (no Zed 2 because Zed 2 killed my Gp32...), maybe a commercial version of Gp32War, and some secrets projects...
Hooka: Is GP32War’s AI based on the GBA AI (did you reverse engineer the GBA versions AI?) or is it just a new AI that suits the game?
Aquafish: It is a new AI (based on the explanation of a French AI guru...), I don't like how the GBA AI "think"...
Hooka: Is two-player support planned for somewhere down the line?
Aquafish: I planned it for the v2.0 but I've lost the sources of Gp32War so I can’t do anything directly in the game.. (Maybe if I ever found time to rewrite the game I'll include this feature..)
Hooka: How did you adjust to the higher resolution, use the original pixel size and just have a larger viewable area or did you resize some sprites?
Aquafish: I've done a bit of the both: I've enlarged sprites (20*20 pixels instead of 15*15 in the gba version) and I've also use a larger viewable area (16*12 tiles instead of 15*10 in the gba version).
Hooka: Will there be the ability to change the graphics or add new (I don't know what to call it) troop types?
Aquafish: Yes!! If you want, you can use gfx from another strategy game if you rip them, the editors are very adaptable!!
Hooka: What languages do you plan on making Advanced Wars for GP32?
I've made 3 translations: English, German and French.
Hooka: Do you need someone to help with the translation into some of the languages?
Aquafish: If I ever rewrite the game, I'll need a Spanish translator, but not yet...
Hooka: Did you make the manual for GP32War yourself? If someone was willing to would you help them translate it to new languages?
Aquafish: Yes I made the manual myself and if someone want to translate it to another language I'll send him the files to translate and convert it into PDF after...
Hooka: Have you done any work on GP32War lately? If so what new features have you added?
Aquafish: Since the Tomak compo's version, I've corrected all bugs I knew, add the battles animation’s support, random maps generator and add loads of maps (about 150!)..
Hooka: Could you explain some of the differences between your different multifirmwares?
Aquafish: It's only evolution’s: v1 was buggy and slow to boot, v2 had majority of bugs corrected and possibility to use a background and to add apps from the smc on the boot selector, v3 was faster to boot, v4 was faster, has a better look and 'all' bugs corrected (v4.8 is again faster...); I'm now working on the v5 which will include some multimedia features (like displaying pictures)...
Hooka: What other plans do you have for AquaMultiFW v5? Will it be able to possibly multitask? (Listen to mp3’s while looking at pics or reading text files?)
Aquafish: Listening to MP3 uses too much of the processor for reading pics at the same time, but I think that a .wav player should be possible...
I also think that I'll include a launcher like the one on the Zodiac (I've see it with the emulator, I found it very handy!).
Hooka: Could you elaborate on why using the new beta firmware in a multifirmware messes some stuff up?
Aquafish: There is two parts to a Gp32 firmware: the bios and the menu/firmware. The bios is the thing that address the hardware of the Gp32 directly, it's very hard to modify (and close to impossible to make a new one!) so I used to take the same bios as the official 1.5.7 Eng. firmware, it works really well with all homebrew apps, but the European firmware use a different bios, and the menu of this firmware has been made to be compatible with this new bios, so there are some incompatibilities with the Euro Fw in my multifw because I use the old bios (for example, it's pc-link doesn't work..) but for example, if you flash your Gp32 with the Euro-Fw only, Dark Fader's pclink wont work anymore... (I hope that mr.Spiv will find a way to patch a bios and make it compatible with everything...)
Hooka: If someone wanted to translate the old Korean bios into a new language (like you did to make it French) would you be willing to help them?
Aquafish: Yes of course!
Hooka: What’s the difference between Gp Firmware Maker 1.5 and Zed?
Aquafish: It's easy: Gp Firmware Maker let you make a firmware that include only one program (or a multi firmware you've made yourself), and Zed let you make a multi-firmware that include 2 programs and a menu to choose on the which to boot.
Hooka: Now Aquafish’s Multifirmware has made it to v4.8, what’s next to add and what was the biggest changes for the last release?
Aquafish: The biggest change was that it boot a lot faster than the old versions... (I had to rewrite most part of it for that...)
Hooka: Who all helped you out with GP32War?
Aquafish: I received the help of a lot of people to make the game! : DarkWolfNine ripped the origninal Advance War gfxs for me; MaDsk8Tard, Falken80 (,and you!) made some original gfx; Dobermann made some awesome campaigns; Topcat made the title music and one music for the game, and a friend of mine also made some musics for the game because I lost contact with Topcat..
Hooka: Didn’t my planes look ugly?
Aquafish: No they look good.. (In fact it's the soldiers that I like the less ;p )
Hooka: Yeah, I can understand that! A friend told me the soldiers were pretty bad, but I couldn’t figure out how to draw them any better ;P but I though my planes looked weird also because of how I drew them diagonally.
Hooka: Have you checked out to see if the new BLU BIOS has the same problems as the beta on gameparks site?
Aquafish: Yes, I've take a look on the new BLU's firmware and it seem that there are the same bios and the same pclink as the beta's version, so I cannot correct the problem...
Hooka: What new features have you added to united gp viewer?
Aquafish: Wait for the release for the Gp-Mag compo... It will be a good surprise! It now supports 16 formats (!) and is able to play wav’s while you watch pictures.
Hooka: Could it be possible to add more option on how to display the images? (Maybe rotated 90 degrees or fit width with scroll or just scroll over the complete image ;P)
Aquafish: Yes I plan to do that for the v2.0...
Hooka: What is your favorite gp32 game/app/homebrew?
Aquafish: My favorite gp32 game is Bichos, I really love this game!! (It’s one of the last games I still play...)
Hooka: What do you see for the future of the gp32? What would you like to see?
Aquafish: I think that Gamepark will certainly close soon, I just hope that the Gp32 community won't totally disappear after that...
Hooka: Hopefully the community will never die! I know I’ll always play my gp32 (just like I’ll always play SNES or PSX), so I believe that it’ll always be there...either that or I’ll be a really bad loner ;P
Thank you Aquafish for doing this interview, you have a good day now! Same with everyone who reads my interviews, thanks for reading and have a good day!