X-com: Ufo Defense V1.0.1

[M-HT]

Hi,

version 1.0.1 of X-COM: UFO Defense for the GP2X is finished.

List of changes:
+ Battlescape "Select next soldier" and "Deselect current soldier" macros
+ Geoscape "Set time to 5 secs" and "Set time to 1 day" macros
* added a fix for the "Difficulty bug"
* when the display is in original mode (not stretched), it's vertically centered on screen
* minor bug fixes

X-COM: UFO Defense v1.0.1 on the gp2x archive

 

[Megagun]

Yay, select next soldier!
Now kicking alien ass is that much easier and faster! Thanks!

M-HT isn't Guru yet?

 

[sepulep]

Great, thanx!!

 

[Tag5]

Need to update my current version of XCOM with this new release! Fantastic job on this project M-HT and Senor Quack. I praise for all your hard work in making this port happen! :lol:

 

[ledro]

I actually abandoned. My gp2x for a while, found a cheap gameboy micro with rebelstar (a kind of ufo game from the actual makers from ufo).
Then I saw the postings of UFO on gp2x. I postponed trying it out on my gp2x expecting being the whole night busy getting it all to work with sound and tweaking for speed and everything.

So now I finally decided to try it. followed the instructions and within 10 minutes everything was working flawlessly sound and speed are perfect. And I was amazed that even my old save games were still there.

For me, this is still the best game ever. And now... I don't think I will ever need another handheld anymore (well maybe an f200 for the touchscreen).

Man, I'm staring at the screen right now. And I'm almost crying.

Great work! You made my dream come true!

 

[Pickle]

(well maybe an f200 for the touchscreen

or a wiz?

 

[Unfathomable Depths]

Thank you for this M-HT

Incredible stuff

 

[slaanesh]

I would imagine that this version of XCOM is somewhat faster than running it through DosBox on the GP2X?

Do you have any plans to do Civilization?

(Yes, I know it's available on other formats but the PC version was the best.

 

[M-HT]

I would imagine that this version of XCOM is somewhat faster than running it through DosBox on the GP2X?

Yes, it is.
In fact , when you turn off sound and music, it's a bit faster than comfortable (at 200 MHz).

Do you have any plans to do Civilization?

(Yes, I know it's available on other formats but the PC version was the best.

Civilization is not compatible with my static recompiler.
DosBox is your only help here.

 

[slaanesh]

Civilization is not compatible with my static recompiler.
DosBox is your only help here.

Okay - just wondering what other older DOS games would be compatible?

 

[M-HT]

Civilization is not compatible with my static recompiler.
DosBox is your only help here.

Okay - just wondering what other older DOS games would be compatible?

The ones using dos extender - usually indicated by the presence of the file dos4gw.exe.

But in addition to some possible technical difficulties, there are other aspects to consider. For example:
- Controls - if the game can't be controled by the gp2x controls, there's no point in doing static recompilation
- Display - if the game uses higher resolution than gp2x then resizing can make the game unplayable (e.g. the text becomes unreadable, etc.)
- Sound - working sound isn't always guaranteed, so if you need it for the game to be playable, then you're out of luck
- Speed - if the speed requirements of the game are too high, then even static recompilation won't make it playable on gp2x

 

[slaanesh]

The ones using dos extender - usually indicated by the presence of the file dos4gw.exe.

Master of Magic and Master of Orion were both excellent games - especially MoM.

What about Colonization? I can't remember if that was a dos4gw.exe game or not.

Darklands was not - but that was a classic game! Played it for ages. No real "finish" to that game.

 

[Pickle]

The ones using dos extender - usually indicated by the presence of the file dos4gw.exe.

Master of Magic and Master of Orion were both excellent games - especially MoM.

What about Colonization? I can't remember if that was a dos4gw.exe game or not.

Darklands was not - but that was a classic game! Played it for ages. No real "finish" to that game.

Dark Forces is a dos4gw.exe

 

[M-HT]

The ones using dos extender - usually indicated by the presence of the file dos4gw.exe.

Master of Magic and Master of Orion were both excellent games - especially MoM.

What about Colonization? I can't remember if that was a dos4gw.exe game or not.

Darklands was not - but that was a classic game! Played it for ages. No real "finish" to that game.

Neither of these games uses dos extender. (Master of Orion 2 does.)

 

[ledow]

The ones using dos extender - usually indicated by the presence of the file dos4gw.exe.

Can I just ask how this works... I assume your emulation simulates a DOS extender in order to do certain memory translations etc. Does it work with every DOS extender, or the most common ones (CWSDPMI, DOS32A) or only DOS4GW?

A quick google highlights System Shock, Warcraft, Warcraft II and Worms among those games that use a DOS extender. What other (approximate) requirements are there? System Shock, for examples, states that it needs a 486 - is that too high for this sort of work? Worms needs 25MHz+, etc.

Personally, I've always wanted a native port of XQuest2 but it doesn't seem to use a DOS extender, and neither does Slicks 'n' Slides (of which I was a registered user and my mates and I would spend DAYS in school building new tracks on the editor and playing them four-player on one machine).

Oh and Assault Trooper, by the same author, was good fun - sort of like a real-time UFO. I didn't have the registered version of that but I got to play it through... (hint: rename any save file... *REG* will be very happy if you do that!)

 

[M-HT]

The ones using dos extender - usually indicated by the presence of the file dos4gw.exe.

Can I just ask how this works... I assume your emulation simulates a DOS extender in order to do certain memory translations etc. Does it work with every DOS extender, or the most common ones (CWSDPMI, DOS32A) or only DOS4GW?

The actual requirement is a 32 bit code with flat memory model, which is achieved by using dos extender.
I emulate some parts of the dos extender, but the goal is to run as much code 'as is', so no memory translations etc. It should work with other dos extenders, but all games I recompiled used DOS4GW.

A quick google highlights System Shock, Warcraft, Warcraft II and Worms among those games that use a DOS extender. What other (approximate) requirements are there? System Shock, for examples, states that it needs a 486 - is that too high for this sort of work? Worms needs 25MHz+, etc.

The best answer is comparison to existing recompilations.
Albion requires a 486 and it runs at playable speed on gp2x, although not fullspeed.
So if the requirements of a game are lower or similar to Albion, there is a good chance it could achieve playable speed when recompiled.
But this might not be true if the game uses a lot of floating point instructions. These are really slow instructions to recompile. Albion uses very little of them.

An obvious requirement is memory. Up to 16 MB is possible. Up to 32 MB is possible only when the requested blocks of memory are smaller than 16 MB.

 

[sepulep]

The best answer is comparison to existing recompilations.
Albion requires a 486 and it runs at playable speed on gp2x, although not fullspeed.
So if the requirements of a game are lower or similar to Albion, there is a good chance it could achieve playable speed when recompiled.
But this might not be true if the game uses a lot of floating point instructions. These are really slow instructions to recompile. Albion uses very little of them.

An obvious requirement is memory. Up to 16 MB is possible. Up to 32 MB is possible only when the requested blocks of memory are smaller than 16 MB.

Just a technical question: is this recompiling portable? (ie does this mean we can look forward to other versions, or is it very specific for GP2X)? It would be cool to have eg native PC linux versions!

 

[M-HT]

Just a technical question: is this recompiling portable? (ie does this mean we can look forward to other versions, or is it very specific for GP2X)? It would be cool to have eg native PC linux versions!

It's not portable to other processor architectures.
X86 linux version exists as part of the development, but there's no point in releasing it, because on PC X-COM is perfectly playable in DOSBox (or DOSEMU in linux).
The only reason for statically recompiling it for GP2X is, that it's not playable otherwise (too slow in dosbox).

Edit:
To elaborate, I'm recompiling directly from X86 instruction set to ARM instruction set. So it is possible to rewrite the recompiler to recompile the X86 instructions into another instruction set, but I wouldn't call it portable.

 

[Gadget]

Very impressive, it runs perfectly for me.

I cannot get music working though?

I downloaded timidity, and copied it to the root of SD card, eg. \timidity.

Then copied timidity.cfg into \ufo, added a line in like so:-

dir /mnt/sd/timidity/


But still not music? Anyone got this working?

 

[hlidegp2x]

Edit:
To elaborate, I'm recompiling directly from X86 instruction set to ARM instruction set. So it is possible to rewrite the recompiler to recompile the X86 instructions into another instruction set, but I wouldn't call it portable.

to be precise, what kind of recompiler ? a true static recompiler ?