Merry Christmas -- Warcraft 2 Dos On Pandora!

[gruso]

And a Merry Christmas to you too Skeezix :wub:

 

[ignatz]

Civ 1? wooooooooohoooooooooooo!

 

[Yod4z]

Good news how does it run at 500MHz (default)?

 

[audovoice]

Betrayal at Krondor
and
Syndicate Plus
here I come...

great job!

Also I just got to ask, what about MMO2 Master's of Orion 2. Being that it is turn based and all...

 

[Mutilator]

great, system shock on pandora

 

[second exodous]

Wow, I loved WC2, it's my favorite Warcraft. I fired it up a while ago on my 20 inch monitor and noticed that it was wayyyy to large and thought it would look much better on a smaller handheld screen. Looks like I was correct, I can't wait to play this on my Pandora.

 

[gruso]

Nice, well that kind of renders Wargus useless.
There's still other fun to be had with the Stratagus engine though, no? Stargus would still be cool, even though it was halted in the early stages.

Or you could ditch Stratagus all together and look at BosWars. B)

 

[Brockway]

Wait, if this will run, does that mean the Fallouts and other same era rpg's might be possible too?! Thought the most recent we'd see were 386 era games. Awesome news!

Fallout is pushing it. A lot. Warcraft and Command and Conquer was a 486-era, early Pentium-era game, really. I wouldn't expect games that required a faster Pentium to run well at all, and those that did, are Windows-based.

Besides, Fallout was a pig on the minimum system requirements, which was a Pentium-90.

Warcraft II requires a fast 486 or a Pentium-60.


Guess Fallout was hoping for a bit much. That whole 486-P era sorta blurs together for me. Still amazing to me though that it can play 486 games.

 

[fusion_power]

Good news how does it run at 500MHz (default)?

Good Question. Skeezix said, he played it at 800MHz, so it is actualy "cheating" in some way. I think WC2 would even run onto a C64 or a pocket calculator if this machine was set to 800MHz. -joke-

Well, I'm sure with a optimized port like "Wargus" we can clock the Pandora at 300MHz or so, it runs OK at the GP2X with 266MHz (even if this port is still buggy).
Cool would be a native resolution of 800x480px by the way.

 

[conso]

Nice, well that kind of renders Wargus useless.
There's still other fun to be had with the Stratagus engine though, no? Stargus would still be cool, even though it was halted in the early stages.

Or you could ditch Stratagus all together and look at BosWars. B)

I took a look at BosWars yesterday. While 2.5 is a pretty good release, not much has happend since then (~10 svn commits in 9 months), it seems to be halted. In the last releases they implemented a totally new economic system and there is still some polishing to be done. Maybe the open handheld scene will blow some fresh wind into it, but I seriously doubt that.

Warzone 2100 and glest are probably the best bet, though they are targeted a little less "retro".

 

[mali]

Great news, thanks skeezix

If Pickle reads this:
I did a little research on Cortex A8 and it seems that the main "bottleneck" is the out-of-the-box bad FP performance because the VFP unit is not pipelined any more(if you use standard FP code, it won't perform on par with ARM11) and the difficult to use NEON code(you have to handcraft some ASM to use it, because the compiler is dumb). Maybe the best way to optimize DosBox is to do some NEON optimizations. I'm no coder and I don't know how much performance critical FP code is used in DosBox, though. I've quoted some things from Beagle Board IRC in the last post of the performance numbers thread.

 

[Uprising]

Very nice!

Thanks skeezix and pickle

Can you tell us what the cycle settings were?

 

[Khan]

Holy fu***** goodness in chocolate syrup-coated joy!!!! (*feeling of relief now that Sierra old school adventures at fullspeed are assured *)

This is the only emulator I have wet dreams with! Now a nice video will give me a boner

 

[skeezix]

Civ 1? wooooooooohoooooooooooo!

on my phone now..

Civ1 is playable on ST emu for years now btw

I imagine there was some frameskip for wc2 but I didnt have a tonne of time to fiddle. Still, super awesome .. We'll have to try more and see how far we can push it!

For heavy emu like DB i would expect to overclock for big games, but it did really well at 500 for older titles like civ1 etc.. (civ1 is turn based so a bit of a cheat)

I wonder if dosbox does netplay .. I play orcs!

Jeff

oh man.. Should try dune 2.. I forget now if that was pure DOS and how old..

 

[benjiro]

Starcraft anyone?

 

[Pickle]

mali: good idea with the neon for fp emulation, might be something to look into. I also think we could benefit from a hw accelerated SDL.

skeezix (jeff): cant thank you enough for this, made my day (as you know the last few havnt been so great) Thanks for the nice things you said in the blog, thanks goes to M_HT too for the dynarec and the other guys that have helped test and get things working on the gp2x version.

We should be able to do network play as long as SDL_net gets ported, (wheres that wireless driver?).
Im humans

 

[conso]

battle isle!

 

[RajTakhar]

Dune 2 was definately a pure dos title

That would make my day on the Pandora - it was the best version out - and a real pain in the ass to get working under windows

Under Dos it ran fast - the console versions were not on a par with it

Someone please try that and command and conquer

Great work Pickle, Skeezix, and co

 

[A_Llama]

oh man.. Should try dune 2.. I forget now if that was pure DOS and how old..

Far older than warcraft 2! It should work perfectly

I wonder how well Z would work Would be amazing if I could play that full speed on the pandora!

 

[Calmatory]

I think the main concern here is not necessarily the CPU speed, rather optimizing DosBox for Pandora. If the games were written for Pandora, I am sure that they would run flawlessly. However, now all the (Dos/Windows) software which is being ran has to be emulated in order to run properly(or at all). This then requires some computational power which is directly off from the CPU and thus the performance is low.

For example, how on earth are people running Quake 3 on Pandora, let alone GP2X or iPod Touch, if Pandora's 600 MHz CPU is not sufficient for running games which require less than Pentium 133 MHz class CPU and Q3 needs at lest 350 MHz AMD K6-2(barely slower than Intel counterparts, Pentium 2 and Celeron with Mendocino core)? Answer: It runs natively. If Q3 was emulated, I am sure it would not run at playable frame rates at all.

My point: We will see more games with better frame rates after the software is being optimized a bit more and after people start to tweak their Pandoras. Are we going to get Fallout 1 & 2, C&C or C&C RA at playable frame rates? I am sure we are. (Thpugh, DOS versions only)