Just To Quash Any Furhter Dreams Of Tes

[Azalin]

According to Bethesda softworks, they will not be releasing the code to any of thier games. Ever. So we can pretty much kiss goodbye to ever seeing a port of arena or daggerfall to the 2x or its successors. I would dig up the source for this, but it's buried deep in the official forums and i just don't have the time nor inclination at the moment.

You would have much better luck porting BG1

 

[dagrooved1]

You mean no:

I guess not unless DosBox becomes super fast .

 

[icurafu]

I did a thread about this back in ??November??

I got an official responce saying that they have a policy to not release source code.

Maybe it's because they plan to make money of retro engines in Mobile phones or watches, or maybe their source is commented full of racial slurs.

We may never know.

 

[Azalin]

Methinks its just because they don't like people playing thier old games instead of their new ones. I mean, seriously, the top 10 threads in the official forums are always "Daggerfall?" "Daggerfall re-release?" "WILL WE GET A DAGGERFALL REMAKE?!?!" But bethesda seems to have the ability to completely ignore said comments and instead release crap like oblivion :angry:

Maybe they don't even have the arena source anymore... :unsure:

 

[zodttd]

Sorry to jump into this thread without quite knowing much about whats going on but...
...I've been researching emulating the X86 platform using static recompilation. HilaryCheng wrote a static recompiler for the Intel 8086 (IBM PC) and we're working on getting specific games working one at a time. Now the 8086 isn't as complex as the 286/386/486, but I heard DOSBox being mentioned here.

What processor were these games designed for?
Also, does DOSBox already have a dynamic recompiler? If not, is one in the works and do they need help with it? The thought of writing a dynamic recompiler for DOSBox is something I'm considering for a project. It depends on how fast the 8086 static recompiler progresses and if DOSBox already has the dynarec.

Sometimes you don't need the source to port a game. :x

 

[Azalin]

My head just exploded. Both with the complete depth of that post, and with the implied possibilities...

Although, aren't re-compilers so completely illegal that its not even funny? Or are they different from reverse-engineering a game?

 

[dagrooved1]

What processor were these games designed for?

Well, Arena:

Minimum system requirements:
386/25 MHZ, DOS 5.0, 4MB RAM, 25MB HD Space, VGA graphics card, Mouse, Soundcard (Ensoniq, Aria, Roland, SoundBlaster, Ultrasound).

Where as Daggerfall:

486DX2 66MHz; 8MB RAM; 50MB hard drive space; CD-ROM drive.

Although I have heard it wasn't until the pentium that all of Daggerfall was at a nice playable speed.

 

[icurafu]

What processor were these games designed for?

Well, Arena:

Minimum system requirements:
386/25 MHZ, DOS 5.0, 4MB RAM, 25MB HD Space, VGA graphics card, Mouse, Soundcard (Ensoniq, Aria, Roland, SoundBlaster, Ultrasound).

Where as Daggerfall:

486DX2 66MHz; 8MB RAM; 50MB hard drive space; CD-ROM drive.

Although I have heard it wasn't until the pentium that all of Daggerfall was at a nice playable speed.

Daggerfall had an issue, that they sky animations took up so much space that it would pause and load from the cd rom every minute or so. Because a lot of early CD-ROMs had spin-up times of a few seconds, this was really irritating. I played Daggerfall on an AMD 386 33MHz and it ran ok, but a bit framy. If it was recompiled for the 386, or even 286 architecture, it would still run.

 

[zodttd]

Recompilers are common in emulators that demand performance.
Generally static recompilers take an executable, and runs through the bytecode, in this case X86 code, and translates it to code that can be compiled for the target platform, in the GP2X's case, ARM. No knowledge of the internals of the executables source is needed. You just need to know how to handle the processors instruction sets, which is public knowledge.
Dynamic recompilers are slower than static recompiler, since they translate the code during runtime (while playing the game), and they rely on having a caching system to store blocks of translated code for reuse. Other than that it's conditions are the same as a static recompiler.

It's good to know that the largest requirement for those two games is a 486. Even though it probably needs a Pentium for speed, it uses the 486 instruction set. From what I remember, DX equates to the FPU that can be used, which complicates things.

There seems to be a large demand for these games. Having them on the GP2X would be very cool.
But yeah, without the source to the game, the best bet for these to get working on handhelds is to get:
- DOSBox, which from what I'm aware of is currently too slow for most handhelds. Dynamic recompilation might help this project, but I don't know if one is already worked on for it.
- If the 8086 static recompiler matures into an X86 (2xx,3xx,4xx) static recompiler than games could be recompiled on at least a per-game basis. But 8086 static recompiling is hard enough, 486 with an FPU is even harder. So we're talking about the future here.



Oh wow, Daggerfall can run on a 286? So the 486 DX/33Mhz was for performance, and not the instruction set. Even better!

 

[sparr]

Distributing recompiled versions of the game is most likely illegal. But if you distributed the recompiler, or even used a dynamic recompiler ("dynarec") in the emulator directly, then everything would be kosher.

 

[Muncher666]

Distributing recompiled versions of the game is most likely illegal. But if you distributed the recompiler, or even used a dynamic recompiler ("dynarec") in the emulator directly, then everything would be kosher.

Arena has been released by Bethseda for free, hasn't it? I understand that recompiling and offering the recompiled files is still probably a violation of the terms of use, but I'd like to think they'd let it slide seeing as they have released it for free.

I have never played Arena or Daggerfall - but I always wanted to. The idea of playing it on the Gp2x sounds like a good starting point. Good luck in your recompiling efforts, guys!

Allan.

 

[Shikaku]

I can't see how daggerfall would be playable control wise....

Well, I can't see how the sword swings would work (never played any of their games otherwise however). Hmm... maybe it could work, but it could be like Nethack menus... Meaning lots of work maybe =/

 

[dagrooved1]

Why not have it set to mouse look, the joystick moves the mouse, but when you press a button, it acts like holding the mouse button down and thus moving the stick causes your guy to swing. One button turns on\off the cursor for clicking the buttons and menus, 2 buttons for moving back and fourth, and a button for ducking. That's what? 5 buttons?

 

[Azalin]

Let's put it this way:
There's less keyboard shortcuts in arena then there is in Duke3d.

 

[___]

But how can this be achieved anyways? Is there a possibility to assign the gp2x buttons to the keys? And also, wouldn`t be close to impossible to do that "mouse-look"/mouse trick without having access to the source code?

 

[dagrooved1]

But how can this be achieved anyways? Is there a possibility to assign the gp2x buttons to the keys? And also, wouldn`t be close to impossible to do that "mouse-look"/mouse trick without having access to the source code?

I'm not sure about the first part, but I know that while in mouse-look mode (a mode selected from the options in the menu) you can press a button and have your cursor appear for clicking on doors and loot, so all we really need is a way to map the controls to the buttons. Assuming we ever get it running of course.

 

[Lancer-X]

Dosbox uses dynamic translation for x86, since both the source and target platforms work with x86, which is very handy. Likely the only possible chance of running DOS games like the first two Elder Scrolls games at a reasonable speed is to add support for ARM dynarec to Dosbox. For various reasons, doing any sort of fast dynarec from x86 is not easy, so uh.. have fun adding that.

 

[ravuya]

Yeah, it's just me, but writing a dynamic recompiler for DosBox ARM might be just a teensy bit harder than figuring out how to make the controls work.

 

[dagrooved1]

Has anyone tried contacting the DosBox community, or maybe one of the CVS build authors to see if they're interested in doing something with the GP2X?