Exult Forum

I'm curious about the OS X port. I notice there was a beta release. Is someone still working on this and is a 1.0 release expected sometime soon?

Thanks,

-Rodney

"OK. FYI, there will definitly *not* be a Mac OS X release. Exult
compiles just fine (well it did a week ago, and if there are any
problems now I am sure I could fix them). The problem is that it
doesn't run, due to a nasty bug in the iostream lib over here.
Basically, the iostream lib has troubles reading the last byte of any
given fail. Therefore, the BG & setup menus crash immediatly, while
Si will launch, though I assume it'll crash hard at some point, too."

-- Max Horn from the exult-general mailing list.

It seems the answer is pretty much 'no', until Apple fixes the bug.

How can this be possible? The last pre-1.0 release runs just fine with OS 10.2.2? What can possibly have changed so much in the Exult code that it will no longer operate?

The compiler! The gcc3.2 that comes with 10.2.2 is screwed and would require a massive recompiling of the very compiler to work correctly. Fingolfin reported the bug to the powers that be but it seems they are quite slowwwwww (but that is probably like saying we were slow in coding Exult).
That the RC2 release works is because it was compiled with an earlier version of OSX.
And we can't really force Fingolfin to go back to an earlier version, can we?

That said, we are really sorry but the blame is with Apple

Ummm... IIRC, you can use the command:

sudo gcc_select 2

under OSX to switch to an older version of gcc (2.96 or 2.95 I think.) Would compiling with that version fix this problem? You can then switch back to gcc 3 with:

sudo gcc_select 3

Not sure if this would work, but maybe? It would be a pity if there was no OSX version.

I mostly run exult on other platforms, but I have a Mac with OSX 10.2.1 around (haven't bumped it up to 10.2.2 yet) can I compile it? Would it be useful if I did so and sent it to someone?

Forgive my lack of programming knowledge. It would be wonderful, though, if someone could compile it with an earlier version of OS X.

Maybe when I get back home, I can try and see if it is possible to compile exult on 10.1 and have it running well on 10.2, however, that would require me to install a 10.1 system first, then install all the latest tools & libs (e.g. SDL 1.2.5 which is a must). So I am not likely to do that. And esp. not while I am not home, since the iBook that I have here couldn't support another OS X version on its limited HD space.

Yes one can switch to gcc 2.95 even on 10.2; in fact, I should be able to get it to use the g++2 compiler w/o switching my whole system (switching my whole system even temporary is *not* an option for various reasons).

So this might indeed be an option (although not a really nice one as the code quality/size are inferior, but better than nothing I guess). I'll give it a try.

Another possible option might be to try and get STLPort working on OS X, but last time I tried it was a major headache of its own.

Thanks for your efforts, Fingolfin.

Using GCC2 doesn't work (it dies with an internal compiler error). That leaves STLPort to try.

Thanks for the update. It's dissapointing that it doesnt work, but hopefully Apple will get things fixed sometime in the future. In the meantime, at least I should be able to play on my PC. Hmm... maybe I'll try under Virtual PC sometime to see if it will work.

-Rodney