Some Popular Lnx Ports


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vaustein

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Feb 19, 2006
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Hi all,

I ordered a GP2X from gp2x.co.uk today. Also bought 8 Energizer 2500 mAh rechargeable AAs. I've filled a 2GB SD with emulators, freeware ports, and AVIs in anticipation. But I still have 90MB unused. Here are some ports that ought to run well on GP2X, although simulating a mouse on the GP2X controller can be tricky.

- Wargus (formerly Freecraft), http://wargus.sourceforge.net/. Runs Warcraft 2 data files on an open-source engine.

- Vulture's Eye (formerly Falcon's eye), http://www.darkarts.co.za/projects/vultures/. Isometric interface
to Nethack that includes MIDI music and point-and-click interface with context menus.

- Flight Gear, preferably a dumbed-down version with only the most necessary flight controls and a limited
map/terrain set.

Any other urgent port requests?
 
vaustein posted on May 12 2006 at 06:08 PM said:
Hi all,

I ordered a GP2X from gp2x.co.uk today. Also bought 8 Energizer 2500 mAh rechargeable AAs. I've filled a 2GB SD with emulators, freeware ports, and AVIs in anticipation. But I still have 90MB unused. Here are some ports that ought to run well on GP2X, although simulating a mouse on the GP2X controller can be tricky.

- Wargus (formerly Freecraft), http://wargus.sourceforge.net/. Runs Warcraft 2 data files on an open-source engine.

- Vulture's Eye (formerly Falcon's eye), http://www.darkarts.co.za/projects/vultures/. Isometric interface
to Nethack that includes MIDI music and point-and-click interface with context menus.

- Flight Gear, preferably a dumbed-down version with only the most necessary flight controls and a limited
map/terrain set.

Any other urgent port requests?
Click to expand...

I'm a little confused - are you offering to port things or asking them to be ported? I thought the former till your last comment.

Wargus has been discussed a few times, usually as Stratagus though.

Vulture's Eye has also been discussed, but it'll be a nightmare to get the blitter doing the job that the graphics card does for scaling purposes - I remember asking a team member about it and he said something along the lines of it taking an Athlon XP 2200+ to render VE without a graphics card doing the work for it. Apparently it is possible, but it'll take some time and effort to get it running. Aside from that, I wouldn't understand why you would want it - we have a very nice Nethack port going on from dzz, and VE is really quite clunky at the best of times I found, like the way it won't let you play it like a normal Nethack game using pure keyboard - instead opting out on using mouse driven menus. A pity, because other than that it was *fairly* playable. VE2 will feature animations for the monsters and such, I'm looking forward to that. If only we could make a keyboard driven port, I'd be wrapped.

Allan.
 
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vaustein posted on May 12 2006 at 05:34 PM said:
- Freeciv
Click to expand...

I fully intend to do a port of FreeCiv to the GP2X (there is an SDL version already). I got most of the way through "porting" it to the YOPY3700 (technically, since the YOPY supported X/GTK, it was a simple re-compile - although of course, FreeCiv was designed for at least 640x480 screens, so I had to re-size a lot of graphics), so am not unfamiliar with the code-base and the challenges of cramming it into a smaller screen than it was designed for.

For the GP2X, I'll probably do a re-design of all of the major forms/ dialogues so that they fit comfortably on screen. Scrolling/ tabs will have to be used fairly extensively. Moving units will be accomplished by moving the cursor with the joystick (with a few tweaks and enhancements to aid fluency, of course), but menus will be completely different - I'll be using a "radial context-menu"-type approach, so that pressing such-and-such a button will superimpose the main menu, with "Build", "Unit", "Whatever" menu options arranged at the ordinal points for easy and fast selection. Likewise, all dialogues will allow you to jump straight to a specific field by pressing the such-and-such button and choose the field you want by pointing in its direction.

There will be a separate button for a Unit's context-menu, and another button for quick Unit movement (think pressing the "Goto" button). The shoulder buttons will likely move between successive active units or cities, dependent on the state of the fourth button. The fourth button will also act as either an accelerator for the cursor, or switch the joystick so that it scrolls the screen instead of moving the cursor. All control design decisions are subject to change and, of course, feedback from you guys ;)

Be warned, though - it will be (at the very least) six weeks until I can even begin to work on it (and I don't even have my GP2X yet :)). If anyone's interested, bump this thread & PM me in six weeks' time so i don't forget!
 
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Great news, I requested FreeCiv when I first got my GP2X 6 months ago. I'd also like to see a simcity type game if there's an open source one out there.
 
cbox posted on May 12 2006 at 05:06 PM said:
Great news, I requested FreeCiv when I first got my GP2X 6 months ago. I'd also like to see a simcity type game if there's an open source one out there.
Click to expand...

There's LinCity and it's updated counterpart LinCity-NG.
 
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It's not a problem. I have been playing the port of Transport Tyccon Deluxe and thinking about it there could be the same problem where the screen is too small. Luckily freeciv is turn based so scrolling the screen wouldnt be too hard but having large info windows would make it hard.
 
semyaza posted on Jul 5 2006 at 03:15 PM said:
It's not a problem. I have been playing the port of Transport Tyccon Deluxe and thinking about it there could be the same problem where the screen is too small. Luckily freeciv is turn based so scrolling the screen wouldnt be too hard but having large info windows would make it hard.
Click to expand...

Indeed - it's going to be tricky, and large parts of the UI will probably have to be re-designed and re-written. My GP2X apparently arrived today, so there's a slim chance that I'll get impatient and start working on it sooner than anticipated, but don't get your hopes up ;)
 
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It is tricky, I compiled it for the X server and the UI is much too big. Another problem was that it complains about running as root, for security (I set up another user, but you could just remove the checks). I then decided I couldn't be arsed and gave up :)

The other problem I have with Freeciv is that it keeps getting updated and the client and server have to have the same version.
 
I was thinking this would be a bit tricky. I know nothing about game development anymore but I personally I am beginning to think it would be better to create native original versions specifically for gp2x. Maybe the logic and the tiles can be 'borrowed' as it is gpl'd? How about the client and server seperation? How would that work?
 
Found another of my old favourites ,Populous. This isnt quite popular and the author has pretty much declared it DOA but there is this
http://freepop.sourceforge.net/

I kept my eye on it for a while until the announcement of it not being developed due to lack of time.

I really wouldnt know where to start at the moment if I wanted to try and put it on gp2x....or any other game for that matter. Last time I did any game programming was in Z80 in 1990. And I know nothing about isometric...expecially raising and lowering terrain :(
 
I'm wondering has anyone played Wargus or Stratagus before? Good reverse engineering usually takes years, so I think this may still be a wip. How does it look compared to the original games?
 
Jaguarandine posted on Jul 6 2006 at 02:26 PM said:
I'm wondering has anyone played Wargus or Stratagus before? Good reverse engineering usually takes years, so I think this may still be a wip. How does it look compared to the original games?
Click to expand...

as far as I know Stratagus is an open source RTS engine and Wargus is simply a mod that allows Stratagus to use the game content from Warcraft II.. but its not really a port of WC2 or even an interpreter AFAIK but I have the battlenet Edition of WC2 so I can't try it out... still, it would be cool if somebody ported Stratagus because there are 6-7 RTS games that run on it..
 
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Ok, I haven't finished the work I was intending to finish yet (naughty Zod :)), but I've just this minute started to look at FreeCiv.

I'll add regular progress updates here.
 
sweet... civ on the gp2x would rock. I am looking forward to this!
 
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