Release Ascii Sector


Christian Knudsen

Still Fresh
Joined
May 7, 2011
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6
Greetings Pandorians!


Urged by a Pandora owner, I've managed to compile a version of my freeware game Ascii Sector for ARM Linux. I only have a virtual ARM machine that runs very slow myself, so I'm not able to test it adequately. Anybody interested in giving it a spin? I'll just send you a tar.gz of the game directory. No installation necessary, just unzip the game and run the binary "./asciisec". You'll need sdl and sdl_mixer installed, though, but I imagine that's pretty much standard on a handheld Linux gaming device! :)
 
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Cool! I've sent you a PM.


I was under the impression that the Beta Testing subforum was for stuff intended to be added to the Pandora repository?
 
Beta testing is beta testing. Though why wouldn't you add this to the repo?
 
The game isn't finished. It's been in development for quite a few years now with frequent updates, so I imagine it would be somewhat of a hassle to constantly have to update the package in the repository. It's also stepping on some IPs belonging to EA (Wing Commander and Privateer), so I'm not sure if having it in the repository could present some legal issues. I was offered to have it added to the official Ubuntu repositories, but we agreed on waiting with that until its no longer infringing on another IP. I'm currently working on moving the game away from the Wing Commander/Privateer universe to make it its own thing, but that's something that will take a bit of time.


EDIT: Oh, and could a mod please move this to Beta Testing, if that's where it belongs? :)
 
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Actually, from what I hear it's not a hassle. Just repack the .pnd then upload it. And don't worry about infringing on copyrights; there are plenty of gray areas on the site. There are quite a few programs whose legalities are questionable, too. (Zing!)
 
Wow, this game would be *ace* with some decent graphics. Can you replace the ascii with tiles at all? That would certainly be a step in the right direction!


D.
 
Actually, from what I hear it's not a hassle. Just repack the .pnd then upload it. And don't worry about infringing on copyrights; there are plenty of gray areas on the site. There are quite a few programs whose legalities are questionable, too. (Zing!)
I'll certainly consider it if we can get it to run! ;)

Wow, this game would be *ace* with some decent graphics. Can you replace the ascii with tiles at all? That would certainly be a step in the right direction!
Well, this specific game will remain ascii, but I'm also working on an isometric game engine that will eventually be used for a commercial version of the game (if it ever gets done).
 
It seems that compiling with Free Pascal for ARMEL isn't as easy as I thought it would be, since the Free Pascal compiler only supports ARM. :(
 
Are you sure?


ARM supports both, little and big endian, and at least nowadays little endian is the default being used, so people usually refer to little endian ARM when just talking about ARM.
 
That's what I've been able to Google, at least. But is also seems to be an issue of ABI vs EABI and FreePascal not being able to compile for FPU. Also, FreePascal can only compile for ARMv3, v4 and v5. I've read through some discussions of people trying to make a FPC compiler that can compile for ARMEL, but nobody seems to have had any real success with it (though I did come upon a thread from March where they said that there will be a "2.4.4 [FreePascal] release for ARM/linux (barring any last-minute showstoppers) ARMv5/EABI/softfloat").


I've only been fiddling around with ARM for a couple of days, though, so I may be wrong about it all...
 
Excellent! I hope this gets working, because it was really cool when I played it a long time ago. I thought it would be perfect for a handheld, and now...
 
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