Zaurus SL-5600

[ced]

Hi,

I have a Zaurus SL-5600 and I got few issues with the latest version of Exult. Here is my config:
- Exult v1.1Beta2 (ipk binary)
- Zaurus SL-5600 (Xscale 400Mhz processor)
- sound disabled
- resolution 320x240
- scaler set to 1x
- Serpent Isle - The Silver Seed (English version)

The game look great but I can only play around 15min due to frequent crash:
- sometime Exult kill it self and the system come back to the qtopia desktop
- mainly the game control stop (background animations are still working), I can see the qtopia desktop appearing when I clicked somewhere on the screen, I need to do a hard reset of the Zaurus or connect remotely and kill Exult (kill -9) to be able to re-use the system...

Another issue occurred during the movement, the game freeze for few seconds and it come back to control.

Do you think there are a known issues or it's due to the limitation of the Zaurus? (small amount of memory, no floating point unit, etc.)

Do I need to compile the source to be optimised for the Xscale processor?


Regards,
Ced.

[artaxerxes]

Hi,

start a game from a console this way:
# cd /opt/QtPalmtop/bin
# ./exult 1>/mnt/cf/exult.out 2>/mnt/cf/exult.err

play until it crash and then post the last 20 lines of both files here (exult.out and exult.err).

Be careful, the logs will get big (that's why you should store them in /mnt/cf)

For information, I've played for about 3/4 of an hour straight without a single lockup or crash the other day. And just to make sure, go get the SDL packages from www.gnurou.org. They are the most stable I've found and work like a charm with exult.

Artaxerxes

[ced]

Hi,

I get "Gamed paused" in the stdout. I just killed exult (kill -9) and I get an out of memory popup window... here is my problem!

How much free memory do you have? do you use a swap file?

Ced.

[artaxerxes]

I do not use a swap file, but it could be a good idea to setup one.
If you do however, know it will wear out your cf card faster. You might want to use the Zaurus's Flash ROM to create your swap file.

As for the memory, I have nothing else but exult running on the qpe. I've not had a problem of memory in a loooong time. Just for fun, try to kill most running process as you can. Stuff like addressbook etc which are running in the background for fast wake-ups.

As for the blocking you get, it makes total sense. When exult looses focus, it goes into pause mode and produce the output you saw. The popup about lack of memory makes exult loose focus, but since the screen and the keyboard are grabbed, you can return to exult. What would be good is a way for telling exult it should always try to return to the foreground if it was put in pause mode. I believe it might not be that hard to do. The hardest part would be to find out how to tell qpe to focus back on exult. I don't know if signals could do it or not.
Anyone has a suggestion?

Artaxerxes

[ced]

On the SL5600, the root partition is jsff2 therefore you can't create a swap partition from it. On the SL5600, the memory size is only 32Mg, any suggestion about increasing the memory??

I have recompiled my kernel to remove the caching issue fix from the Xscale processor and I have applyied a preemptif kernel patch (http://www.tech9.net/rml/linux/). It look like it's a bit more stable, I need to do more test...

[ced]

first line you should read ".... jsff2 therefore you can't create..."

[edit by wjp: and now it does ]