Serious? I know an OS X port came out... but OpenGL is sooo much prettier...
JonoF at
ZildjianKX said
Serious?
Absolutely. I don't have the resources to buy a Mac myself, so the only way it's going to happen is if I get my hands on one some other way. The biggest part of a Mac port will be making sure endianness issues are identified and corrected. The vast majority of them are in the classic renderer, most of which gets disabled when OpenGL mode is active anyway. I have here a Sun UltraSparc 10 workstation on loan which I'm going to be playing with, hopefully porting the game to it too, and if that eventuates a Mac port will be an evolution of that work.
Jonathon
Anonymous at
JonoF said
ZildjianKX said
Serious?
Absolutely. I don't have the resources to buy a Mac myself, so the only way it's going to happen is if I get my hands on one some other way. The biggest part of a Mac port will be making sure endianness issues are identified and corrected. The vast majority of them are in the classic renderer, most of which gets disabled when OpenGL mode is active anyway. I have here a Sun UltraSparc 10 workstation on loan which I'm going to be playing with, hopefully porting the game to it too, and if that eventuates a Mac port will be an evolution of that work.
Jonathon
I don't have the funds to actually donate a G5, put perhaps I can get some of the mac gaming sites to donate some of their funding via paypal for perhaps an iBook (new or used)? :) With your permission, would it be okay if I asked around and linked to this forum post?
On a side note, as a fellow programmer, I really appreciate what you've done with this project.
JonoF at
I guess the most important question for Mac gamers to consider is how much Duke3D is worth to them to want to subsidise the purchase of a Mac for me to port to. For starters, I don't know much about Macs, so I have a fairly steep learning curve before I get productive with the things.
I had a quick poke around ebay Australia and there's quite a few iBooks and Powerbooks for sale, but I don't have the first clue what makes for a good Mac lappy on the cheap. If someone who knows more about these things wanted to email me a few good examples, that would give me some reference points to work from. $1700AU for a brand new baseline 12" iBook and no other extras (according to Apple Australia's site) is a lot of money for something which probably won't get used a great deal apart from the port as I already own a P4 laptop. I'd be extremely impressed if there were 68 folks ready to pony up $25AU a piece to help buy the thing.
If the Mac Colour Classic I have in my wardrobe was useful for more than a quaint doorstop, I'd be set, but sadly it's not.
Jonathon
ZildjianKX at
I always forget how expensive macs are outside of the US, sad really. I can run it by some mac forums just for curiousity's sake to see what the response is...
You are correct, this is a straight port and doesn't use OpenGL. One can dream...
P-J at
Will there ever be a MAC Port?
http://www.apple.com/macmini/
This sort of cash might be easier to raise?
JonoF at
That is the best idea I've seen for a long time. Screw an iBook, that's what I'll be getting. With an extra 256MB of memory, an 80GB harddisk, and a keyboard and mouse it's $1100 my money -- that's $500 less than the base iBook and all I have to do is use a spare monitor. Brilliant. Thanks for the heads-up P-J.
Cheers
Jonathon
ZildjianKX at
JonoF said
That is the best idea I've seen for a long time. Screw an iBook, that's what I'll be getting. With an extra 256MB of memory, an 80GB harddisk, and a keyboard and mouse it's $1100 my money -- that's $500 less than the base iBook and all I have to do is use a spare monitor. Brilliant. Thanks for the heads-up P-J.
Cheers
Jonathon
Anything every come out of the mac mini idea?
Cheers.
TX at
ZildjianKX said
JonoF said
That is the best idea I've seen for a long time. Screw an iBook, that's what I'll be getting. With an extra 256MB of memory, an 80GB harddisk, and a keyboard and mouse it's $1100 my money -- that's $500 less than the base iBook and all I have to do is use a spare monitor. Brilliant. Thanks for the heads-up P-J.
Cheers
Jonathon
Anything every come out of the mac mini idea?
Cheers.
He bought one, but I don't know if he's done any porting to it yet.
hawkeyefile at
I can help get sheepshaver and an os9 rom
or basilisk II and an os8.1 rom (have one ne1 need one ask me)
ill also donate about 75 usd (next week). hope it helps
hawkeyefile at
ChEeZeBaLL said
All you mac people could just make things easy and buy a real computer :D
linux/unix roxorz!
GothOtaku at
ChEeZeBaLL said
All you mac people could just make things easy and buy a real computer :D
We did, it's called a G5 Power Mac. It gives me no reason to go back to the Wintel world. Two 64-bit 2.7 GHz PowerPC processors with 8-gigs of RAM, an nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra, , a 20+" flat panel LCD screen, and a huge hard drive. Plus, I can run all my FreeBSD and NeXT applications (needs to be recompiled though) along with Mac OS X and Mac OS 9 applications, Java GUIs get rendered the same as everything else, and I've only had the OS hang twice. Name a better computer and OS than that.
hawkeyefile at
unix/linux/amiga DE
hawkeyefile at
GothOtaku said
ChEeZeBaLL said
All you mac people could just make things easy and buy a real computer :D
We did, it's called a G5 Power Mac. It gives me no reason to go back to the Wintel world. Two 64-bit 2.7 GHz PowerPC processors with 8-gigs of RAM, an nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra, , a 20+" flat panel LCD screen, and a huge hard drive. Plus, I can run all my FreeBSD and NeXT applications (needs to be recompiled though) along with Mac OS X and Mac OS 9 applications, Java GUIs get rendered the same as everything else, and I've only had the OS hang twice. Name a better computer and OS than that.
i thought pc's can only have ONE processor, no one makes 8 gig chips of ram, i have a 30 inch monitor (lcd's suck at nething moving). i have had my amiga for about 15 years only hanged once, and i STILL use it.
GothOtaku at
hawkeyefile said
i thought pc's can only have ONE processor, no one makes 8 gig chips of ram, i have a 30 inch monitor (lcd's suck at nething moving). i have had my amiga for about 15 years only hanged once, and i STILL use it.
The term "PC" is very vague but, theoretically, you can have any number of processors. Most only have 1 or 2 though since anything more than that is useless in most cases unless their dedicated to a certain task (like OpenBSD's crypographic SMP option). Microsoft Windows only recently really supported multiple processors (and in XP it's limited to 2 I think) but *nix users have had multiple, 64-bit CPUs for years. Yes, no one makes a 8-gig RAM stick but Power Macs have 8 RAM slots so the people who actually get the 8-gigs of RAM get a 1-gig stick in each slot.
ZildjianKX at
So no word if a mac port will ever happen?
hawkeyefile at
OR yo ucan compile the code on the osx since it uses bsd you should encounter very little problems.
ZildjianKX at
hawkeyefile said
OR yo ucan compile the code on the osx since it uses bsd you should encounter very little problems.
I've tried... I thought the specific compiler the game used was x86 only, or it used some assembly that was x86 processor specific.
JonoF at
So no word if a mac port will ever happen?
I've said I will be doing it. I even bought a Mac for the purpose.
OR yo ucan compile the code on the osx since it uses bsd you should encounter very little problems.
There's still the little-endian Intel and big-endian PowerPC problems to seek out and convert.
Jonathon
ZildjianKX at
JonoF said
So no word if a mac port will ever happen?
I've said I will be doing it. I even bought a Mac for the purpose.
OR yo ucan compile the code on the osx since it uses bsd you should encounter very little problems.
There's still the little-endian Intel and big-endian PowerPC problems to seek out and convert.
Jonathon
Sorry, I didn't mean to pester you, I just read in the forums that you were considering the mac mini. How do you like it by the way?
Awesome job on the PC and Linux Shadow Warrior ports. If you'd like a mac beta tester, let me know, I'd be more than happy to.
Cheers.
JonoF at
I'm quite impressed by what Apple have made of OS X. The user experience is quite well crafted. The machine seems rather quick but the 2.5" harddisk Apple uses in it shows its speed bottleneck rather quickly. I haven't done a lot of programming on it yet but I expect to start that very soon. Overall, I'm very happy with the purchase. Looking forward to porting stuff to it.
Jonathon
Mephisto at
ChEeZeBaLL said
All you mac people could just make things easy and buy a real computer :D
i hope you dont mean a windows-based computer with that, cause windows is just a bad joke and an insult to decades of computer innovations.
but judging by your avatar, i guess you're using linux (like me), and i'd like to point out that linux does not just run on intel machines. if jonof fixes endianness problems, that will help the linux port too, by probably making it possible to run the port on other platforms (powerpc, sparc, etc..., maybe even amd64?).
ZildjianKX at
Mephisto said
ChEeZeBaLL said
All you mac people could just make things easy and buy a real computer :D
i hope you dont mean a windows-based computer with that, cause windows is just a bad joke and an insult to decades of computer innovations.
but judging by your avatar, i guess you're using linux (like me), and i'd like to point out that linux does not just run on intel machines. if jonof fixes endianness problems, that will help the linux port too, by probably making it possible to run the port on other platforms (powerpc, sparc, etc..., maybe even amd64?).[/quote
Doesn't amd64 use the x86 endian-ness?
I agree with the rest of your post though :)]
Mephisto at
ZildjianKX said
Doesn't amd64 use the x86 endian-ness?
macs are 64 bit :)
GothOtaku at
ZildjianKX said
Doesn't amd64 use the x86 endian-ness?
Yep, since it's just an x86 but with larger registers and some new instructions for 64-bit data.
ZildjianKX at
Mephisto said
ZildjianKX said
Doesn't amd64 use the x86 endian-ness?
macs are 64 bit :)
The amount of bits doesn't really have anything to do with which endian it has... if not, I just wasted 4 years on my computer engineering degree :shock:
Mephisto at
ZildjianKX said
Mephisto said
ZildjianKX said
Doesn't amd64 use the x86 endian-ness?
macs are 64 bit :)
The amount of bits doesn't really have anything to do with which endian it has... if not, I just wasted 4 years on my computer engineering degree :shock:
apparently you didnt understand what i was trying to say (or i didnt point it out very clear). macs are 64 bit, so by getting it to run on a mac, which is 64 bit, it might run as 64 bit on amd64 as well. i didnt mean anything about endianness here. unfortunately, i dont have a 64bit computer, else i wouldve compiled jfduke/jfsw there to see if the current code can run in 64 bit mode at all.
GothOtaku at
Mephisto said
apparently you didnt understand what i was trying to say (or i didnt point it out very clear). macs are 64 bit, so by getting it to run on a mac, which is 64 bit, it might run as 64 bit on amd64 as well. i didnt mean anything about endianness here. unfortunately, i dont have a 64bit computer, else i wouldve compiled jfduke/jfsw there to see if the current code can run in 64 bit mode at all.
I was confused about what you meant too. However, your assumption is false. Macs use the Gn family of computers which use the PowerPC instruction set. PowerPC chips are RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) processor whereas IA-32/AMD64/EM64T are CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computing) processors. Even though they're 64-bit it still wouldn't work because the instructions would be different. Also, even if you have a 64-bit computer almost all programs are still 32-bit and to change them to 64-bit would require more work then it'd most likely be worth.
Mephisto at
GothOtaku said
Also, even if you have a 64-bit computer almost all programs are still 32-bit and to change them to 64-bit would require more work then it'd most likely be worth.
ah yes, sorry about that, i read somewhere before that the mac kernel is 64 bit, but everything GUI-based is 32bit. i shouldve remembered that before talking crap :P
linux, on the other hand, can be fully 64 bit, afaik. distros like Fedora have their own 64 bit dvd iso's, and 64 bit rpm repositories. but your right, if it doesnt work yet, it's probably not worth the effort.
GothOtaku at
Mephisto said
ah yes, sorry about that, i read somewhere before that the mac kernel is 64 bit, but everything GUI-based is 32bit. i shouldve remembered that before talking crap :P
linux, on the other hand, can be fully 64 bit, afaik. distros like Fedora have their own 64 bit dvd iso's, and 64 bit rpm repositories. but your right, if it doesnt work yet, it's probably not worth the effort.
Well, what I was refering to was that to compile jDuke with true 64-bit data you'd have to rewrite most of the engine. Also, I think that for the most part most Linux apps are 32-bit only still (not entirely sure though since I haven't touched Linux in a while). However, Apple's software seems to be mostly 64-bit when necessary. The "when necessary" thing's important because why use 64-bit stuff when 32-bit works just as well? In fact, all standard UNIXes use 32-bit data by default despite being 64-bit.
JonoF at
To get Build to run in 64-bit mode on 64-bit systems, the code would need to be checked to make sure pointers aren't typecast to smaller types. On 32-bit machines, the integral datatypes are usually sized like so:
Build's code does a fair bit of typecasting pointers to longs and back again, which means on a 64-bit box, casting a pointer to long results in it losing its top four most significant bytes, and certain death. To fix this, we would have to review everything to check for these situations.
i doubt a long would be smaller than an int, that would defeat the purpose of a long :twisted:
JonoF at
I'm presently on my third attempt to find an AMD64 liveCD to run a test on my father's Athlon64 to see exactly what the type sizes are.
Attempt #1: Gentoo AMD64 minimal CD. 74MB. Missing /usr/bin/gcc-config, so unable to compile.
Attempt #2: LiveCD64. 275MB. Missing stddef.h and a bunch of other objects necessary to link a program.
Attempt #3: Ubuntu 5.04 AMD64 Live. 596MB. Hopefully this will work. If not, the swearing you will hear is me.
Jonathon
matbouch at
JonoF said
I'm presently on my third attempt to find an AMD64 liveCD to run a test on my father's Athlon64 to see exactly what the type sizes are.
Attempt #1: Gentoo AMD64 minimal CD. 74MB. Missing /usr/bin/gcc-config, so unable to compile.
Attempt #2: LiveCD64. 275MB. Missing stddef.h and a bunch of other objects necessary to link a program.
Attempt #3: Ubuntu 5.04 AMD64 Live. 596MB. Hopefully this will work. If not, the swearing you will hear is me.
Jonathon
If Ubuntu doesn't work, you could try knoppix, wich is based on debian, like ubuntu. If knoppix is not complete enough, you will have to install a complete system! :P
GothOtaku at
matbouch said
If Ubuntu doesn't work, you could try knoppix, wich is based on debian, like ubuntu. If knoppix is not complete enough, you will have to install a complete system! :P
He's looking for a AMD64/EM64T bootable live CD which Knoppix doesn't support yet.
matbouch at
GothOtaku said
matbouch said
If Ubuntu doesn't work, you could try knoppix, wich is based on debian, like ubuntu. If knoppix is not complete enough, you will have to install a complete system! :P
He's looking for a AMD64/EM64T bootable live CD which Knoppix doesn't support yet.
So, the pointer casting problem isn't a problem anymore, however we'd need to verify that code that's expecting to operate on 4-byte data is using an 'int' type. If we were to go to those lengths, it would make sense to define some of our own types to typedef to the appropriate integral type.