QuickJump QuickGuide #16: StrmnNrmn, storming the PSP scene with his Daedalus legacy
While most of the coders out there work within the same circles, one of them seems to be standing on the outside, causing his own storm of sorts. External from most of the drama, StrmnNrmn is happily living in his own world, giving us one of the greatest homebrew emulator projects for the PSP: the Nintendo 64 emulator, Deadalus PSP. As a tribute to Daedalus’ third year anniversary this month, here’s your QuickGuide for reminiscing (or catching up!) on the life and times of StrmnNrmn so far. Strap into your seats, we’re heading into the eye of the storm!
From Dark AleX to Fanjita to FreePlay, there are a handful of PSP homebrew coders out there whose names, whenever mentioned, send shivers down spines in awe and grandeur (or spite, in some unfortunate cases).
While most of the coders out there work within the same circles, one of them seems to be standing on the outside, causing his own storm of sorts.
External from most of the drama and controversy, StrmnNrmn is happily living in his own world, giving us one of the greatest homebrew emulator projects for the PSP: the Nintendo 64 emulator, Deadalus PSP.
As a tribute to Daedalus’ third year anniversary this month, here’s your QuickGuide for reminiscing (or catching up!) on the life and times of StrmnNrmn so far. Strap into your seats, we’re heading into the eye of the storm!
Who needs vowels in their name anyway? StrmnNrmn breaking free from the norm
StrmnNrmn – are you sure you’re pronouncing it right? While I can’t confirm the first five letters (I’m just assuming it’s short for Stormin’ cuz it sounds cooler that way), what I do know for a fact is that the last four are an abbreviation of his real name, which is Norman. He is based in the UK. If you want to stalk him, last we heard, he found a flat in Guildford, Surrey, but that was almost two years ago now.
He’s also a Mac user – eventually got a MacBook Pro back in mid-2007 – just in case you were wondering. As he explained before, Daedalus PSP compiles much faster on Mac OS X compared to when he was still using Windows to work on the emulator.
Probably a shining epitome of professionalism in the homebrew scene, StrmnNrmn has always had an aura of being one of the most brilliant developers to look up to.
Despite receiving countless blows from naysayers who always thought that Daedalus would never go far, StrmnNrmn has remained dedicated to the cause.
And my, what a noble cause that is. He’s made public the source codes for all of his releases since Day 1, and to him, it’s all about love for development and progress. And that’s also why we love him too, being such a sport and all.
World 1 – 1: Daedalus in its early days
StrmnNrmn’s very first release of Daedalus PSP was back in May 2006. This would have been right at the forefront of PSP hacking scene when Team Noobz, Dark AleX, and even HarleyG were busy working on the golden 1.50. At those early stages of brew development, having an N64 on the PSP was surely a big deal.
Daedalus PSP is actually a port of an existing Nintendo 64 emulator – and the fact that it was “just a port” didn’t seem to sit well with other people at first. And so, StrmnNrmn received the first round of bashing from the critics (yeah, there’s always a tough crowd – some things just never change around here).
There was even some issue about StrmnNrmn supposedly competing with PSMonkey, who was actually the very first person to release an N64 emulator for the PSP. StrmnNrmn? Compete? Of course not!
Now, as you’ll find out in the next section, the early stages of Daedalus were very frenetic – with the first two versions being released on the very same day! If you checked out the release dates, you’d notice certain some lulls, but despite that, it’s still been one heck of a golden era for emulation.
The golden age: from GoldenEye to Zelda
Like with all coders, StrmnNrmn had his glory days which flourished with release upon release, lots of feedback from users, and of course considerable support from the homebrew community.
Daedalus PSP grew from the very first version all the way up until R13. Along the way, games were continually tweaked and optimized, speed increases, audio improvements, incorporation of savestates, frameskipping, custom controller configurations… bit by bit, every brick and mortar laid on to the foundations gave rise to a formidable N64 emulator on the PSP.
Some of the games which have been continuously being worked on were The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, GoldenEye 007, Super Smash Bros., Mario Kart 64, Star Fox 64… The list goes on.
Tracking down the entire development history of Daedalus is a long and arduous journey. And since this is a QuickGuide, the most we can spam you with would be the release list of each and every Daedalus version. Of course, lots of progress reports happened in between but as far as milestones go…
Here I’ve listed all the release articles, marking down some of the milestones with each version (If you guys want a full detailed version history of Daedalus PSP, just download the most recent version – R13 – and check out the changes.txt file included in the archive.):
- Daedalus R1+R2 (May 1, 2006) – initial release
- Daedalus R3 (May 2, 2006) – support for large ROMs
- Daedalus R4 (May 5, 2006) – compatibility fixes
- Daedalus R5 (June 15, 2006) – dynarec engine
- Daedalus R6 (July 19, 2006) – C-button support
- Daedalus R7 (Aug 13, 2006) – custom controller config
- Daedalus R8 (Aug 25, 2006) – various optimizations
- Daedalus R9 (Feb 22, 2007) – new UI
- Daedalus R10 (April 2, 2007) – frameskip option
- Daedalus R11 (May 6, 2007) – texture rendering improvements
- Daedalus R12 (June 26, 2007) – dynarec fixes for GoldenEye, Smash
- Daedalus R13 (Nov 4, 2007) – savestates, +20% speed up
Reaching out (and expanding) into the future: rebirth into the DeadalusX64 project
As you can see, the very last full version of Deadalus that was publicly released by StrmnNrmn was R13. Unofficial beta versions for R14 came out care of Wally and Captain Morgan, but eventually, progress reports from StrmnNrmn himself went down to a trickle until it became apparent that he had fallen under a release hiatus.
After almost a year since R13, things jump-started eventually when a team of long-time Daedalus enthusiasts, testers, and/or contributors decided to take the mantle and pick up where StrmnNrmn left off, starting from those R14 beta versions. Thus, the DeadalusX64 project was born.
Just like when Daedalus first appeared on the scene, so did DX64 receive some backlash. More people called foul saying the project wouldn’t go anywhere still, and yet some even accused the team of disrespecting StrmnNrmn’s legacy. Ah yes, the naysayers once more. See, I told you some things never change around here…
Well, for the most part, all that’s been smoothened out. StrmnNrmn came back out of hiding, revealing off the bat that “No, [he] didn’t choke on a mince pie.“
Apologizing for the sudden extended leave of absence from the community, he did reveal one cool thing though – another clear sign of this coder’s professionalism. The best part came in when he reaffirmed that his commitment to the Daedalus cause still very much applied.
See, not only did StrmnNrmn give the DX64 project a green light, but also said that he would be contributing to it every now and then. He definitely approves of what the DX64 team is doing, because ever since Day 1 – source codes all the way, baby! – that’s exactly what he wanted. In his own words from the “mince pie” post:
The whole reason for making Daedalus open source was to give people the opportunity to learn from the source code and update it as needed, so it’s great for this to be happening.
Such a sport, this guy is. Such a sport!
And who are StrmnNrmn’s protégés, so to speak? As it stands, the following are involved in contributing to the code of DaedalusX64: Howard0su, Wally, Chilly Willy, Salvy, Kreationz, Hlide, and ShinyDude100. Of course, other members of the team also include the testers and those who’ve given feedback to the beta releases.
Here’s a teaser trailer from one of Team DaedalusX64’s beta builds:
Not quite daed – but loving it!
Now StrmnNrmn may not be all that active as much as he was back in the day. But rest assured, he’s still around – maybe just not in in the front-end making releases and going public. Last we heard, he’s busy with real life.
According to the last post in his blog, other than contributing to the DeadalusX64 project, there are two major pursuits he’s got his hands on:
- One thing he hints at is that he’s working on a high profile game. No word on what game exactly, or for which studio. (I did some digging – one of the biggest dev studios in Guildford is Criterion Games. Hmm.)
- He’s also hinting at another port of the Daedalus project, but this time, it’s going to be for a different platform.
Admittedly, he mentions that he does have phases in life where he loses momentum due to other projects – periods of “radio silence,” as he put it. And yes, he’s apologizing in advance if it so happens that his next blog post would come in another year.
So you never know though, if and when StrmnNrmn will come back to PSP development with a force to be reckoned with. Maybe what we’re having right now is just a calm before another huge storm, eh?
With that, our very own radio silence sets in. We now conclude our QuickGuide on StrmnNrmn and Daedalus development. And unfortunately, the Who’s Who series will also be getting a bit of a radio silence for the next couple of weeks to pave way for other investigative feature articles, this time centering on E3 2009. (Ooh, excited?)
So now, I bid farewell: it’s been a pleasure and I thank you all for joining me on this journey. Gino D., signing out! It’s been one heck of a blast, people! Keep ’em brewing!
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