The Ur-Quan Masters Discussion Forum

The Ur-Quan Masters Re-Release => General UQM Discussion => Topic started by: J on May 17, 2004, 11:09:19 am



Title: UQM on PocketPC
Post by: J on May 17, 2004, 11:09:19 am
Hey,
I am just wondering if anyone has throught of, or has managed to port a copy of UQM to WindowsCE on an ARM processor.

It sure would be great to play SC2 on my iPaq :D


Title: Re: UQM on PocketPC
Post by: Antoine on May 17, 2004, 12:37:58 pm
I imagine it would be a pain in the ass.  But hey, who wouldn't want portable UQM?  ;D

My PDA has Palm OS, with a 320x320 screen.  Basically, it can fit the full resolution of UQM, and then some.  The programmer would have to do a lot of work to get the graphics to fit on 160x160 screens.

If the source were in C++, it would be easier to modify in order to cater to the Palm and PocketPC SDKs.  However, it is in the structured C language, one that some computer science students don't even bother to learn anymore.

Then there are the controls.  If you're lucky enough to have a five-way navigation or mini keyboard, go you.  Otherwise, you're restricted to only four buttons for a game that requires five (or in the case of the campaign, seven or eight).

Despite these technical issues, the port should still be doable.  The more I think about what sort of programs could run on a PDA, the more I want to learn how to program for them.


Title: Re: UQM on PocketPC
Post by: J on May 17, 2004, 12:49:28 pm
Screw Palm, just stick with the PDA's with proper OS's and Resolutions.
Mine runs Windows with a 320x240 screen.
The only problem I see is the ARM CPU,
Although now that I think about it, linux does run on iPaq's - so maybe the linux port can help me.


Title: Re: UQM on PocketPC
Post by: Culture20 on May 19, 2004, 12:12:29 am
See this thread:
http://uqm.stack.nl/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.pl?board=Techissues;action=display;num=1063303287

Summary:
UQM on an iPaq running linux; works great (but slow) over a forwarded X connection through ssh (when running on another box), but when running natively, it has some problems (I think with the memory alignment idiosyncracies that the iPaq has when UQM does its memcpy's).  Not knowing how to proceed at the time, I quickly dropped work on it in favor of things I knew more about.  If there is anyone in the handhelds.org dev team that is a big fan of StarControl, they might be convinced to spend time debugging the mem-alignment stuff, but they're usually busy constantly porting linux to the ever increasing number of iPaqs that HP makes.

MS's VS .Net 2003 can compile C/C++ for Pocket PC OS too, although it'd probably need more modifications to work within its weird framework (and SDL isn't completely supported for WinCE yet).


Title: Re: UQM on PocketPC
Post by: meep-eep on May 19, 2004, 12:55:54 am
Memory alignment stuff will be fixed before 1.0, to make UQM work on machines like Sparcs and IA64. It shouldn't be much work, but still, the most offensive code will be replaced anyhow, so I"m not going to do double work.



Title: Re: UQM on PocketPC
Post by: Culture20 on May 19, 2004, 01:52:19 am
neato  ;D