Quarantine Gaming !! - Dev/Port Help

[Martin Iturbide]

Hi

I'm on my third week of quarantine here in Ecuador (I'm in Quito, not Guayaquil).  These days I'm taking some time to update the OS2World Gaming Site. I'm checking dead link and some layout improvements.

For the moment I'm checking one by one the native games and I had completed the Sports, Strategy, Other, Packs categories.

Let me know any suggestions, dead link or improvements.

If it can be possible I need the help of a developer to help me updating/compiling some of the already available games to update the libraries dependencies.
- For example "Alizarin Tetris" uses LIBC06R1.DLL which is not communally distributed on RPM, so it can be great if it can be recompiled with the latest LIBC.

Regards

[Andreas Schnellbacher]

I'm here in Hamburg, Germany since 2020-03-20, 1.5 weeks ago, but it's also my third week.

I just say 'Hello', because I don't like gaming. I'm coding instead.

[Martin Iturbide]

Hi Andreas thanks for the reply.

Do you think you can try to recompile Alzarin Tetris - https://www.wkiri.com/projects/atris/
It uses SDL and LIBC.

Let me know if it is possible and I will test the game and package it for the site.

Regards

[Andreas Schnellbacher]

Do you think you can try to recompile Alzarin Tetris - https://www.wkiri.com/projects/atris/
It uses SDL and LIBC.

No, I don't even have a GCC environment running.

[Andi B.]

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No, I don't even have a GCC environment running.yum install gcc*   :-)

[Dave Yeo]

Code: [Select]

No, I don't even have a GCC environment running.yum install gcc*   :-)

The tricky part is setting up the various SDL libs, at least the ones built with OpenWatcom which seem a better choice then the ones installed by YUM/RPM

[Martin Iturbide]

Hi

I think I never tried Light Cycles and not even have a picture of it.
https://www.os2world.com/games/index.php/native-games/puzzle/275-light-cycles

It required something called ACSSVC (APPC.DLL and ACSSVC.DLL), does someone has those DLLs?

Will it work, or does it requires some strange network protocol (not TCP/IP) to run?

Regards

[Pete]

Hi All

Had my own corona virus scare recently: Had double hernia repair surgery on 10 March, discharged on 11 March at noon but about 12 hours later I was having trouble breathing and was coughing up blood - some of it bright red. My wife phoned an advice line who told her to wait for a call from an out of hours doctor service. They rang rang almost immediately, listened to wifes description of my problems and sent an ambulance. Turns out that the hospital where I had the surgery had had its first death from this virus the day before I had surgery and my symptoms were similar enough to cause a mild panic. However, after a checkup at hospital turns out I was suffering from a lung infection probably the result of having had a breathing tube inserted/removed during surgery. The wife and I were told to "self isolate" for a minimum of 14 days simply because we had been at 2 hospitals within 2 days...

Not being able to do much of anything due to the surgery the "self isolate" bit was not a great hardship - of course, now the whole UK is going through the same "self isolate" bit and will be for the forseeable future...

Looking for something to do I investigated the sample applications supplied with WDSibyl. I am not a games coder myself but compiled the chess game sample and added some code to save and read an ini file which saves the screen position and Difficulty setting - the default setting is 3 which is way above my Novice level of play  ;-)

I have attached WDSchess.zip in case anyone wants to give it a try - something to do while stuck at home  :-)
If it gets positive reactions I will upload it to hobbes.


In the meantime: Stay Healthy, everyone.


Regards

Pete

[David Graser]

Hi Pete,

It is a simple chess game, but works great. 

[Pete]

Hi David

Yes, simple but seems capable. I am not much of a chess player myself and struggle to win games on any difficulty setting higher than 2 - and lose more than I win even when set to Novice (1)...

If I can work out the coding I will try to add Save/Load Game capability - sadly the source code is lacking any comments. Moan, moan - even back in the late 1980s it was obvious that comments would be useful when revisiting code at a future date and college coding assignments were marked down if there were not enough informative comments.


Regards

Pete

[Jochen Schäfer]

The tricky part is setting up the various SDL libs, at least the ones built with OpenWatcom which seem a better choice then the ones installed by YUM/RPM

Why is that?

[Dave Yeo]

The OW SDL libs are more complete, as in they've all been ported and seem more stable.
To adapt them for GCC, need the includes, need to create the import libs, sdl-bin and the pkg-config files and set the environment up to find sdl-bin or the pkg-config files.
Not that hard but not as simple as yum install.

[Martin Iturbide]

Hi

I guess that the OW SDL are SDL-1.2.15-20160303.zip and SDL2-2.0.4-20160225.zip available at hobbes. I use those ones (the DLL runtimes) because not all SDL DLLs are available on the RPM.

I still do not know why there are different files on the zip files and on the RPM. Are the ones on the RPM compiled by a different person than the OW SDL ? I also don't know why the ones on the RPM SDL has some extra files like SDL120.dll and SDL_t200.dll that are not on OW SDL.

I attach the picture when you can see the difference. (The OW SDL are on SYS/DLL)

Regards

[Pete]

Hi Martin

It does look like sdl is a bit of a mess. I don't really use sdl apps so have not noticed just how bad...

You may not have noticed the duplicate cdtbl.dll on your system. I wonder which location is best suited for that - os2\dll or mmos2\dll ?


Regards

Pete

[Dave Yeo]

SDL was originally ported by Doodle using OpenWatcom and he got his makefiles etc into SDL, so supported.
The RPM one is likely compiled with GCC doing the configure make routine using libtool for linking and the extra DLL names are likely an artifact of using libtool to create the DLL's. IIRC, the bauxite people did the original GCC port.
At some point we should be moving to SDL2 as SDL is dead, but once again everything would need recompiling at least, if not some minor porting.