Calling for gaming experiences

[Borley]

I'll get around to adding links to the Talospace "Tonight's game on OpenPOWER" at some point, but here they are if someone else is bored:

https://www.talospace.com/search/label/Games

I just built Bugdom, though it looks like you've already listed that. I loved it on my Power Mac 7300.

I just included the Tonight's Game on OpenPower titles and hopefully everything is accurate. Those Pangea games were a pleasant find. I grew up in a Windows household so never heard of those until now, but they are charming - especially Otto Matic .

New to the list as well is Sonic Robo Blast 2. If somebody told me that one day there would be both Sonic and Mario games running natively on nearly fully libre systems, I wouldn't have believed it. Granted, they're reverse engineered or fan projects. The build resources for Sonic Robo Blast 2 assume that the user is building with GUI tools on a Windows environment. Seems like a project largely built by Windows folks for Windows folks. Anyway I got things going, and maybe will post the simplified terminal build somewhere more visible:

Code: [Select]

git clone https://git.do.srb2.org/STJr/SRB2
wget https://github.com/STJr/SRB2/releases/download/SRB2_release_2.2.10/SRB2-v2210-Full.zip
mkdir ~/SRB2/assets/installer
(Extract music.dta player.dta zones.pk3 srb2.pk3 from ~-Full.zip into ~/SRB2/assets/installer/).
cd SRB2
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make

Run the game:
./bin/lsdlsrb2
And I had tried getting the PSP emulator, PPSSPP, up and running. It builds most of the way but fails at their included ffmpeg library. PPSSPP has PPC support and PPC JIT (as far back as 2013) but for some reason their ffmpeg does not account for the possibility of POWER architecture. Somebody was supposedly able to build it for Wii U (POWER platform), I would love to ask them how they did it.

[tle]

Have we a wiki page for all games that are compatible with POWER9?

[MPC7500]

Only this site you know already
https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Games_Compatibility

[Borley]

Have we a wiki page for all games that are compatible with POWER9?

And it's growing. Vega Strike just merged a PR that fixes builds on ppc64(le) so I have to get around to fixing those notes.

[power9mm]

has anyone tried a quake 3 port online? hoping there isn't an issue with connecting to an x86 server

also wondering how ezQuake runs as well (will need to be compiled from source)

Also, can anyone try compiling openxray to run STALKER call of pripyat?

https://github.com/OpenXRay/xray-16

[ClassicHasClass]

I wouldn't imagine any significant problems with connecting to an x86 server from a ppc64le machine, and I'm pretty sure it worked fine back in the day even with big-endian.

Enjoyed Stalker the movie, so I might have to try that when I get a free second.

[power9mm]

I wouldn't imagine any significant problems with connecting to an x86 server from a ppc64le machine, and I'm pretty sure it worked fine back in the day even with big-endian.

Enjoyed Stalker the movie, so I might have to try that when I get a free second.

Ive heard some ports have issues with it, but I didn't think so either.

if you've not played STALKER youre in for something. Looking to get a raptor POWER9 for my next desktop, so wondering how these games will compile and run.

[power9mm]

Also, what kind of performance could one expect to get vs x86? would it be sufficient / "good enuff"

[Hasturtium]

Also, what kind of performance could one expect to get vs x86? would it be sufficient / "good enuff"

A lot would depend on what you're running. I'd have concerns about a lack of VMX/VSX SIMD optimizations within Stalker's physics engine dragging down performance in a worst-case scenario, but for older titles I wouldn't expect Power9 to be at a noticeable disadvantage versus, say, Zen+. We need more data points, and I'm happy to provide mine as time allows. (edit: Looks like someone's already taken the time to incorporate sse2neon for arm64 builds, so we should probably introduce the project to x86intrin.h and other translators, and compare results versus compiling and running on an x86 machine.

Compiled vkQuake with little hassle on Void Linux last night, and other than needing to sanitize my Quake folder's contents to lowercase, it has purred right along with no incident. During compilation DXX-Rebirth seems to have trouble seeing my SDL headers despite having SDL and SDL2 dev libraries installed, so I'm backburnering that for now and turning my attention to GZDoom. After that, I may kick the tires on Void's build of DOSbox before I try to suss out the non-trunk state of x264 on Power... I'd expected progress on VMX/VSX optimizations on that codec to be further along in the official repo than they are by now. Never a dull moment!

[power9mm]

I've never used vkquake. Just the ezQuake  quakeworld source port. I usually get a few thousand FPS in it.

as for stalker, i'm not sure what openxray has changed, im not a developer or a coder. So i'm not sure how much work it would take to compile it for ppc64le, as well as optimizing it for the architecture as well. Seems like UT4 ran okay. so I suppose it comes down optimization. another engine i'd like to try is quake3e and cnq3 when I acquire the system. ezQuake is also single threaded. openxray is somewhat multithreaded, but still favors single threaded performance.

Also, just for fun but couldnt one possibly get the 2017 CS GO source code leak to compile and run?

[Hasturtium]

Quake III should run beautifully with a 3D card of nearly any stripe. Even a Radeon 5450 would manage. And Stalker would scoot along happily on an Athlon64 with a fifteen year old Radeon, so Power9 should be WAY beyond that. I’d forgotten how old it is - it really may be possible to just brute force it acceptably. I guess I’ll add it to my list, maybe start by installing it to the little Ryzen mini PC I keep for my Windows-limited stuff to get a baseline of expectation.

I can’t speak to the state of CS: GO’s source leak, but a friend of mine worked at Valve for years and was very familiar with the Source engine. Your biggest impediment would be the low-level optimizations, which as far as I know were hooked into x86 SIMD optimizations and not messed with a lot. There probably isn’t much AVX code there, if any, so xmmintrin.h could come to the rescue if you were brazen enough to port an illegally leaked pile of source code. Have fun and let me know how that goes if you do.

[MPC7500]

Doom 3 should also work on POWER9
https://forum.hyperion-entertainment.com/viewtopic.php?f=58&t=4645

[MPC7500]

I can’t speak to the state of CS: GO’s source leak, but a friend of mine worked at Valve for years and was very familiar with the Source engine.

You'll find some CSGO repos on GitHub like Kisak-Strike

[power9mm]

You'll find some CSGO repos on GitHub like Kisak-Strike

this is cool, definitely going to try to have this going as a demo

[MPC7500]

Another one is FreeCS
https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeCS-Open-Counter-Strike
https://github.com/eukara/FreeCS

There is also AssaultCube Reloaded
https://acr.victorz.ca/

And Urban Terror
https://www.urbanterror.info/home/

Dunno if it's comparable to CSGO