8086 (ibm Pc) Static Recompiler For Gp2x

[icurafu]

Cosmo

Are you referring to Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure?

'Cause if so, that's one of the most awesome DOS games ever.

Yeah, that's the one. It's my third faviout dos platformer behind Dangerous Dave 2 and a weird RPG platformer starting with x.

OOO, I KNOW THE GAME!!!!!!


Sorry, just got a little over-excited.

It's by Epic, I'm pretty sure, and it's called Xargon.

Sorry, this one has a fantasy genre. One of those games that goes on forever. Like wonderboy in monster land, but quite a bit more hardcore.

 

[zodttd]

I think Advanced Dungeons & Dragons would be good, since I have it on 5.25 floppys.
I remember the game having a weird key mapping.

Wizardry would be VERY cool!

I'm thinking of mapping the 4 GP2X buttons (X,Y,A,B) to become shortcuts to positions in the selected key list. So pressing X is a shortcut to 0, Y is a shortcut to Y (helpful for settings!), A is a shortcut to A, and B is a shortcut to either lower case 'a' or N (helpful for settings as well).

This is at least a temporary solution to the lack of a keyboard and touchscreen. I could put a scrolling (via L and R) list of characters on the bottom of the screen, with the selected key highlighted. I suppose that's the best idea I have so far.

I'm going to redo the conversion process and see if that fixes the problem I was having with the program exiting. Thanks for the tip Hilary.

Performance of my Build 1 of Romance is as fast as the Zaurus video. Maybe even a bit faster?! The only slow points is when it does a full screen draw and it seems to draw in line by line quickly down the screen. It might very well be intended by the game as a "video effect". I'll improve my blitting code just in case.

Time to make a Build 2. This is fun!

 

[jmetal88]

Cosmo

Are you referring to Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure?

'Cause if so, that's one of the most awesome DOS games ever.

Yeah, that's the one. It's my third faviout dos platformer behind Dangerous Dave 2 and a weird RPG platformer starting with x.

OOO, I KNOW THE GAME!!!!!!


Sorry, just got a little over-excited.

It's by Epic, I'm pretty sure, and it's called Xargon.

Sorry, this one has a fantasy genre. One of those games that goes on forever. Like wonderboy in monster land, but quite a bit more hardcore.

It's not Xargon? Huh. Xargon is a role-playing platformer, though.

Here's a screenshot:

It has a storyline and a map stage. The guy (I think it was a professor) falls asleep and wakes up in another dimension. That's really all I remember, I'd have to find my disks and play it again.

 

[slaanesh]

I think Advanced Dungeons & Dragons would be good, since I have it on 5.25 floppys.
I remember the game having a weird key mapping.

Just wondering, which AD&D game is it? I thought there were several made. One of the Eye of the Beholder series? Or is it Dark Sun? Love to play that one again.

Any and all of the AD&D games would be great! I have most of them and would love to see them running again on a handheld!

 

[hilarycheng]

I think Advanced Dungeons & Dragons would be good, since I have it on 5.25 floppys.
I remember the game having a weird key mapping.

Just wondering, which AD&D game is it? I thought there were several made. One of the Eye of the Beholder series? Or is it Dark Sun? Love to play that one again.

Any and all of the AD&D games would be great! I have most of them and would love to see them running again on a handheld!

It will be Pool of Radiance or Curse of Azus Bond or etc. I think both Dark Sun or EOB is not good choice, since it needs mouse and quick response. It is not easy to be done on Gp2X.

 

[icurafu]

I think Advanced Dungeons & Dragons would be good, since I have it on 5.25 floppys.
I remember the game having a weird key mapping.

Just wondering, which AD&D game is it? I thought there were several made. One of the Eye of the Beholder series? Or is it Dark Sun? Love to play that one again.

Any and all of the AD&D games would be great! I have most of them and would love to see them running again on a handheld!

Probably the oringal engine.

Like Pool or Radiance, Pools of Darkness, secret of the silver blade and all those.

But Darksun and EotB would be great as well.

edit:

Hilary, do you have a GP2X?

 

[hilarycheng]

zodttd, please remember, current RTK1 engine is not yet fully recompile, in previous build, I can play the game for viewing state, etc. War Feature is not yet done compiled. I think ending, saving, loading game is not yet compiled. So, just have a look on performance tuning. Expecially the Loading Word From Meomry, it is horrible slow (becoz it will clear the Cache of ARM when branching). But Every WORD Reading is branching. Endian of ARM and Endian of x86 is little bit different. Maybe a inline assembly can help.

I will improve my code to divide the each of C source code into a smaller parts for GCC to optimize. GCC cannot handle such a large files.

I think Advanced Dungeons & Dragons would be good, since I have it on 5.25 floppys.
I remember the game having a weird key mapping.

Wizardry would be VERY cool!

I'm thinking of mapping the 4 GP2X buttons (X,Y,A,B) to become shortcuts to positions in the selected key list. So pressing X is a shortcut to 0, Y is a shortcut to Y (helpful for settings!), A is a shortcut to A, and B is a shortcut to either lower case 'a' or N (helpful for settings as well).

This is at least a temporary solution to the lack of a keyboard and touchscreen. I could put a scrolling (via L and R) list of characters on the bottom of the screen, with the selected key highlighted. I suppose that's the best idea I have so far.

I'm going to redo the conversion process and see if that fixes the problem I was having with the program exiting. Thanks for the tip Hilary.

Performance of my Build 1 of Romance is as fast as the Zaurus video. Maybe even a bit faster?! The only slow points is when it does a full screen draw and it seems to draw in line by line quickly down the screen. It might very well be intended by the game as a "video effect". I'll improve my blitting code just in case.

Time to make a Build 2. This is fun!

 

[LineOf7s]

Hrmmm... 8086 suggestions... ?

The Ancient Art of War

[edit] Actually, just tried to play it - it may have too many keyboard-centric controls to be suitable, depending on exactly how you create your 'templates'. [/edit]
[edit2] Plays great on DOSbox (PC) - perhaps I should try it on the GP2X equivalent... [/edit2]

 

[sehs33]

Hilary, welcome to the community, great work you and Z
I would like to suggest Supaplex, one of the greatest games of all times, is it possible to recompile it?

 

[hilarycheng]

Hilary, welcome to the community, great work you and Z
I would like to suggest Supaplex, one of the greatest games of all times, is it possible to recompile it?

I donno yet. I don't have the source.

 

[Jarska333]

I think Supaplex would be a bit too demanding... VGA 386 or so.

 

[WhiteFalcon]

This sounds very promising!

What about X-Com : Ufo Defense? The requirements are a bit higher, but I remember it worked fine on a monochromatic 286.
Or Dangerous Dave..or Prince of Persia..or..or....too many

 

[greenmikey]

Some ideas

battle chess
hugo's house of horrors
romance of the three kingdoms *ignore this im a blind moron*
aldo's adventures i dont know why I played this game so much
Some sort of oregon trail..it would surely not hurt.

http://www.mobygames.com/attribute/sheet/attributeId,64/p,2/

There seem to be a few games I remeber quite well at the site above but I didn't want to fill the page.

 

[PokeParadox]

This sounds very promising!

What about X-Com : Ufo Defense? The requirements are a bit higher, but I remember it worked fine on a monochromatic 286.
Or Dangerous Dave..or Prince of Persia..or..or....too many

Oh... yeah that would be awesome... love that game
(I'm used to it being called "UFO:Enemy Unknown" though but yeah awesome game.)

 

[sehs33]

Hilary, welcome to the community, great work you and Z
I would like to suggest Supaplex, one of the greatest games of all times, is it possible to recompile it?

I donno yet. I don't have the source.

Does recompiling require the source? I thought You reassemble the 8086 assembly to ARM assembly, if it requires the source code, how does it differ from porting? :huh:

 

[kevcal]

Hilary, welcome to the community, great work you and Z
I would like to suggest Supaplex, one of the greatest games of all times, is it possible to recompile it?

I donno yet. I don't have the source.

Does recompiling require the source? I thought You reassemble the 8086 assembly to ARM assembly, if it requires the source code, how does it differ from porting? :huh:

Meant 'source binary' ?

 

[icurafu]

pretty sure source is binary. It's obvious to deduct it based on the previous conversation.

Thanks so much Hilary! This is looking very awesome.

 

[hilarycheng]

Hilary, welcome to the community, great work you and Z
I would like to suggest Supaplex, one of the greatest games of all times, is it possible to recompile it?

I donno yet. I don't have the source.

Does recompiling require the source? I thought You reassemble the 8086 assembly to ARM assembly, if it requires the source code, how does it differ from porting? :huh:

No. Just Convert it from EXE.... but using Dissassembly tools will help for debugging.

 

[YakumoFuji]

I doubt the gold box games will convert. They are pascal and use dynamic overlays and such, its not a simple .exe...

sounds a bit like a nightmare. lots of games are compressed + packed like Rose Hackstop, protect! 6, etc..

i would rather see some of tis static recomp embedded into dosbox and make it more general...

then you have stuff hitting the hardware registers..

now if you could show me "copper" by Surprise!Productions, then i'd be REALLY impressed

 

[zodttd]

You brought up some good points YakumoFuji.
Just to clarify, it won't matter what they're coded in, since we're dealing with the compiled code.
What is tough, is this dynamic overlay stuff. Hilary understands it may more than I do. Could someone point me at a good resource or help describe dynamic overlays to me? In the meantime maybe Wiki will suffice.
The compression of games makes it extremely difficult to do something general, but since we're going by a game-by-game template process, it might be possible to decompress them first.

As for using DOSBox and giving it a static recompiler. Since the static recompiler processes the 8086 executable and outputs C code which is compiled, you pretty much lose the need for DOSBox. Having the 8086 executable run as a native ARM binary pretty much eliminates the need for "emulation". Though I'm not quite sure how DOSBox handles things. If I'm wrong on this, please let me know.

What I'd like to know is, how much harder is it to make a 286/386/486 static recompiler over 8086? By the sound of things from YakumoFuji, we might have a harder time with 8086 games over the later processor arch's? I'm still new to the interworking of Intel processors, and going back to pre-486, things get fuzzy.

Time to deal with self modifying code...