Exult for Openzaurus

[amdonati]

Artaxerxes,
Do you think it would be possible to compile Exult using OpenEmbedded, in order to have it natively working in OpenZaurus?

I imagine that the enhanced FPU support in OZ would speed the game up noticeably.
Ciao,
Adalberto

[artaxerxes]

amdonati wrote:
>
> Artaxerxes,
> Do you think it would be possible to compile Exult using
> OpenEmbedded, in order to have it natively working in
> OpenZaurus?

Oh certainly. Anything is possible. You might just need some elbow grease.

> I imagine that the enhanced FPU support in OZ would speed the
> game up noticeably.

Interesting. I didn't know the OZ had better FPU support. I wonder if Exult could be made without using floats anywhere.

Artaxerxes

[amdonati]

>Interesting. I didn't know the OZ had better FPU support. I wonder if Exult could be made without using floats anywhere.

Here is what Myckeyl (one of the OZ programmers), wrote on the ZUG forum:
"It's like that: hard-float means you just compile floating point instructions into the binary, no matter whether your CPU has a FPU or not. Stumbling over such an instruction, the CPU then raises an exception, the kernel gets active and calculates the expression for you (in place of a "real" FPU) and hands it back to the application layer. This is slow.
soft-float more or less means that the glibc and the gcc work together in substituting floating point instructions on the fly w/ the appropriate emulation. This is faster because no exception and >>kernel is involved."

OZ uses soft-float.

Not having floats would probably also speed things up un embedded devices!

Compliling exult for the Z was straightforward or did you need to do some intervention?

Thanks,

Adalberto

[artaxerxes]

Compiling was easy but running was something else. it was mostly trial-and-error. I'd compile the source, try to run it and get a seg fault or a lock. I would then run gdb to see what was going on (with the help of wjp).

Then when the issues where located, a couple #ifdef and we try again.

Artaxerxes

[amdonati]

I am not really good in programming, but I wad told that creating an OE script is quite easy.
Do you think you could share the "Zaurus ready" source to be added to OZ?
Adalberto