Future
As both the games Speedy Blupi (Desktop) and Speedy Blupi (Phone) are closed-source and with proprietary dependencies, the goal for the future should be to completely port these games to their open-source alternatives and at the best also to decompile these original games.
- Free and open source technologies should be used to keep these games running on the future operating systems.
Old versions of Visual Studio, DirectX 3, Direct Play, Windows Phone emulators and others may not be supported on the future versions of the Windows operating systems.
Free replacements are: SDL
Speedy Blupi (Desktop)
The support of future versions of Windows (maybe Windows 12, 13, 14, ...) to run Speedy Blupi I/II is uncertain.
It should be the key goal for us to constantly ensure, that:
- The latest version of Wine project will still support the run of Speedy Blupi I/II - at least until the moment, the complete specification of Speedy Blupi I/II will be completed. This complete specification is necessary to develop Open Eggbert - the free and open source recreation of Speedy Blupi I/II. There should be recorded as much as possible or gameplay videos for various situations in the game. It would be also good to record on the screen some visualization of the pressed keys.
Wine is developed in the C programming language.
Fortunately, there is ongoing work on the decompilation of Speedy Eggbert II. This can later be used as the engine for all the desktop versions of the game. GitHub repository: https://github.com/jummy0/sb2-decomp
Risk: X86S was the new x86-64 architecture, where the 16-bit and 32-bit support was removed. X86S was cancelled by Intel in December 2024.
Speedy Blupi (Phone)
Regarding Speedy Blupi (Windows Phone), it is now not possible to run Windows Phone XAP executable files on Linux.
- It seems, that no such support will exist in the future, as the Windows Phone is a discontinued platform.
It should be the goal for us to document new features and differences (to desktop version) of Speedy Blupi (Windows Phone), but also record videos of playing Speedy Blupi (Windows Phone) via "Project My Screen App for Windows Phone" https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=42536
What programming languages and libraries to use for the next decades
Good candidates: Java, C#, C++
Bad candidates: Node.js.
The goal should be to make both Speedy Blupi for Windows and Windows Phone sustainable and easy to run (even in the future)
We should focus on technologies that have a large community and are open, with well-documented tools. Both options, C++ with SDL2 and Java with LibGDX, have their advantages, but here are a few factors that can help us decide.
As few dependencies on specific libraries as possible should be used.
Dependencies, that could become obsolete over time, should be minimized.