Porting LÖVE to PSP (again) and what is missing

[tpimh]

LÖVE aka Love2D is a nice little game engine allowing you to implement your game almost entirely in Lua. It's easy to learn, fun to use, and the documentation is pretty okay. I have created a couple of small games with it, and I enjoyed the process. I believe, there were several attempts to port it to PSP, but all these ports are now abandoned. I would like to start a new port (possibly targeting not only the PSP, but also Vita, PS2, PS3, etc.) similar to LovePotion for Nintendo consoles.

What are we missing?

Official Love2D dependencies are:

• SDL2
• OpenGL 2.1+ / OpenGL ES 2+ (we have pspgl, but it's only targeting OpenGL 1.5 and OpenGL ES 1.1)
• OpenAL (we have openal-soft, also an unfinished port of MojoAL, and ALdc port is looking promising)
• Lua / LuaJIT / LLVM-lua (we have Lua 5.1, Lua 5.2, and an unfinished port of LuaJIT)
• FreeType (and also Harfbuzz)
• ModPlug
• Vorbisfile
• Theora

What will not compile?

Additionally to dependencies, Love2D also bundles a lot of libraries that may not compile that easily:

• Wuff
• box2d (we have a port)
• ddsparse
• dr
• enet (we have a port)
• glad
• glslang
• lodepng
• lua53 (not needed if Lua is used as an external dependency, I guess)
• luahttps
• luasocket (we have an untested port)
• lz4
• noise1234
• physfs (we have an untested port)
• spirv_cross
• stb
• tinyexr
• utf8
• vma
• volk
• vulkanheaders
• xxHash

It's still to be investigated how much of the above "just works" and how much requires some patching.

Anyway, let me know what you think!

[sharkwouter]

This is cool! I've tried my hand at this before, but didn't get so far because back then we far fewer libraries.I think most of those should build just fine now today, though.

I don't think all libraries you listed are actually required. Most likely you can build without vulkanheaders and opengl. I think the main challenge will be physfs for sure. We don't have an actual port for that. We had a physfs port for a bit, but we removed it because it wasn't working iirc. The MR for that can be found here: pspdev/psp-packages#32

[tpimh]

Yeah, there's no Vulkan on PSP, but including the bundled headers won't hurt. Let's see if pspgl is sufficient for all the graphics. Love2D has some shader support, but I think it can be disabled in the initial port. Not sure what LovePotion developers do on their hardware and how does it stand against PSP.

[sharkwouter]

It's hard to say now if porting LovePotion would be easier. It has a lot of Nintendo specific code.

[tpimh]

I'd like to keep LoveStation (or whatever it will be called) separate from LovePotion, but I can check how this or that part was ported to Nintendo platforms. Thankfully, the code is under MIT.

[xyzshantaram]

I'm actually working on getting general-purpose TLS sockets working on the PSP with the tlse library. I have no idea if that'll be helpful but if it will I would love to pitch it in.