Faking it, Part 2

Last week I had some pretty good luck with a quick and easy build of the wetspot2 game that I discovered on the gcw zero recent news page.  So I thought maybe I'd go for a twofer and cherry pick another easy target off that list.  I measured things up and decided the last-mission game also looked ripe for the picking.  Naturally, things weren't nearly so simple.

Remember last month when I confessed to pushing a fake build of libmikmod in order to fascilitate a quickie build of SDL_mixer, which I needed to get sdlbasic running?  Well, it turns out libmikmod wasn't the only joker in the pack.  Apparently I also skimped on the SDL_mixer build itself.  I vaguely remember that was somewhat of a challenge to compile because I wanted it to use libmpg123 instead of libsmpeg.  But that involved a bunch of finicky hand patching.  When I finally got that going I failed to check out the other build options.  Turns out the default ogg support is the floating point version, not the fixed point libtremor code that works on the zipit.  Oops.

Which brings us back around to the last-mission story.  I was getting nowhere.  It would load a blank black screen, and then appeared to hang.  So I added some debug printfs and discovered it was actually running behind the black screen, loading a bunch of ogg sound files at something shy of a snails pace.  If I waited long enough, just short of an eternity, it would actually bring up the splash screen and allow me to attempt a game.  Sorta, kinda.  Press a button, then wait a minute for the the floating point ogg code to process the associated squeek or beep sound.   Repeat.  Not much fun at all, really.

I checked the SDL_mixer readme file and sure enough there was an option for libtremor that I hadn't selected.  That might work better than the fake floating point support on the zipit.  So I did a rebuild on the library and now the game loads and plays at reasonable speed on the zipit.  As an added bonus, the new SDL_Mixer lib also fixed up playmus to work on ogg files.  I wonder what else I might have missed.  Say, doesn't supertux use ogg?  Perhaps I should take another look at that.

Meanwhile I've got a new SDL_mixer and last-mission package to put up here...

libSDL_mixer-iz2s-tremor.zip
last-mission-iz2s.zip

Update:

So, I fetched supertux and applied the 4 patches from the openwrt-zipit project before compiling.  The resulting executable took a while to load, but it ran and the music played ok.  However the controls were sluggish and the frame refresh rate was pretty darn awful.  Digging into the code revealed floating point math all over the place.  Oh well.  But wait, I don't give up that easy.  I ran some internet searches and found a fixed-point patch for a slightly older version of supertux that was done for the zaurus.  I also found some tantalizing hints that someone might have updated them to the newer code, but could't locate the goods.  The outdated patch was pretty large, but I gave it a shot and then attempted to manually merge the rejected parts.

As far as I can tell so far it seems to work.  The controls are smooth and the game is much more playable.

So now I just gotta pack it up and make an updated version of the patch...

supertux-iz2s.zip
supertux-0.1.3-fp.patch