Blu-Play Developer Pages for PS4 Homebrew Devs by Misthalu

It's been 2 years already since Blu-Play was born. I can't believe how fast time flies. (Standard opening to all of my posts).

Following my 8-bit Memoirs eBook update, the whole idea with the Blu-Play label was to make more homebrew game developers interested in Blu-ray Disc Java (BD-J), so we'd see more BD-J homebrew.

I ported Ukko's Journey (Blu-Play.com Games Page) to BD-J to disprove a lot of false claims seen here and there online, and to show everyone that BD-J is perfectly capable as a homebrew gamedev platform.

And it had an effect. During the past 2 years, I saw a LOT of interest from developers, curiously asking lots of questions about the possibilities, first doubting that it was really true that you could target all 3 consoles simply by using Java. But once I got them convinced, they eagerly expressed a lot of interest.

To help out developers interested in BD-J homebrew games, I have now created some developer pages on Blu-Play.com.

On these pages you can find information on how to get started, various tips'n'tricks and other useful info. It's still a work in progress but I thought I'd let you know it's there now. (It's assumed you know basic Java - you won't find a Java tutorial there).

Developers are also much welcome at channel #blu-play on Freenode for a chat. The more the merrier, as they say. See ya there!

 

[PSXHAX]

It's awesome to see this project is still alive and kickin, keep up the GREAT work @misthalu and hopefully some new scene devs will join the Blu-Play movement!

 

[Chaos Kid]

There is so much this can do even without the need for any kind of mod and allowing you to hold so many roms within a disc and probably play from streaming directly

 

[misthalu]

Emulators are absolutely on the list of possible apps you can create with BD-J yes. There's already been two examples that I know off, a NES emulator and a Gameboy emulator. These exists already, and is only a matter of burning to a BD-R or BD-RE disc in order to run it on your PS3 or PS4.

They aren't 100% done though. At the moment they're missing the audio, as far as I remember.

Emulators aren't my focus though. My interest lies solely in amateur homebrew game development, and in general exploring BD-J to find more things you can do with it.

Instead of playing retrogames with an emulator (which I do also enjoy - except I prefer using the real hardware), for me BD-J is more about making my own modern version of a retrogame I used to enjoy - using BD-J to be able to play it on the consoles.

I realize this isn't interesting to the average gamer, since commercial titles will be much more interesting in 99.9% of the time. That is only logical. The idea with BD-J homebrew obviously isn't to compete with commercial AAA titles, but rather to have fun creating some "community homebrew titles" that we would all find fun for a period of time.

What could be a fun project at this time, would be to find and port some old Java Applets. As far as I can tell, the code for Applets and Xlets should be about 99% identical. I suspect it would be an easy task. Who'll look into that?

 

[Chaos Kid]

Most people don't have interest in that tho but last I checked audio was the issue and that was back in ps3 days. But not to say it's not something that shouldn't be done hw emu out does software emu any day that's where a lot fail to realize how powerful hw really is.

 

[misthalu]

Homebrew gamedev naturally isn't for everyone. Nothing is.

On the old 8-bit platforms there's a big interest in homebrew. I'm still amazed at how many homebrew titles keeps popping up for these old platforms. The Amstrad CPC, Amiga, C64, yes even the NES and PS1. They all have an extremely active homebrew community. And each game keeps impressing, showing things never seen before despite these computers having existed for over 3 decades.

The reason these old platforms have such a big homebrew community is probably partly because they grew up with those computers. It's nostalgic. And another reason is probably that commercial titles aren't produced anymore (apart from the homebrew titles that are offered for sale).

The PS3 / PS4 is obviously a bit different there. Not old enough for anyone to have any nostalgic feelings about them, and no where near the end of commercial titles releases.

I'm not exactly sure where my own interest spawns from..... I guess I'm just interested in homebrew in general, and BD-J gives me a way to target the consoles without needing to go through a lot of tedious processes like jailbreaking.
There must be more people with that view though; wanting to make homebrew games for the consoles.