Recent Posts

61

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: [NEWS] Fedora 41 is out!

« Last post by tle on March 12, 2025, 03:17:36 am »

Fedora 42 is still a bit rough, the whole GCC15's new C23 has introduced quite a number of breaking changes / regressions in many softwares. I am still in the progress of going through all softwares that I am actually using to see if I could get them properly working before the final release day. I greatly welcome extra hands from the community in beta testing

62

Applications and Porting / Nazi Zombies Portable

« Last post by Borley on March 11, 2025, 09:43:43 pm »

I decided to have another go at building Nazi Zombies Portable starting with QuakeC portion for the game logic.

They hardcode most of their tooling for specific target architectures. For example, the build script for Linux platforms at ~quakec/tools/qc-compiler-gnu.sh sets a variable explicitly to an x86 version of the FTEQCC executable included in the repository.

Code: [Select]

../bin/fteqcc-cli-lin: ELF 64-bit LSB pie executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2, for GNU/Linux 2.6.32, BuildID[sha1]=48ccbb62862f094e0f04da54935de367c88b7c63, stripped
Not a big problem, on Debian we can supplement fteqcc out of the the Debian archive. And then change the qc-compiler-gnu.sh script to use that instead:

Code: [Select]

FTEQCC=/usr/bin/fteqcc
And remove the relative paths for fteqcc calls as it no longer uses the project-supplied x86 binaries:

Code: [Select]

$FTEQCC -srcfile ../progs/csqc.src | grep -E -i "warning |error |defined |not |unknown |branches"
echo "Compiling FTE SSQC.."
$FTEQCC -O3 -DFTE -srcfile ../progs/ssqc.src | grep -E -i "warning |error |defined |not |unknown |branches"
echo "Compiling FTE MenuQC.."
$FTEQCC -O3 -DFTE -srcfile ../progs/menu.src | grep -E -i "warning |error |defined |not |unknown |branches"
echo "Compiling Standard/Id SSQC.."
$FTEQCC -O3 -srcfile ../progs/ssqc.src | grep -E -i "warning |error |defined |not |unknown |branches"

The build script calls for three python libraries; python3-colorama, python3-panda and python3-fastcrc.

python3-fastcrc isn't packaged in Debian, so I try substituting python3-crc instead. Changing the relevant bits in ~/quakec/bin/qc_hash_generator.py:

from fastcrc import crc16
to
from crc import Crc16

ctField('crc_strlen', ITY
to
ctField('Crc_strlen', ITY

etc...

It doesn't like that.

Code: [Select]

Generating Hash Table..
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/Borley/NaziZombies/quakec/bin/qc_hash_generator.py", line 177, in <module>
    main()
  File "/home/Borley/NaziZombies/quakec/bin/qc_hash_generator.py", line 173, in main
    csv_data = read_csv_data()
               ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/home/Borley/NaziZombies/quakec/bin/qc_hash_generator.py", line 143, in read_csv_data
    value[0] = int(Crc16.IBM_3740(str.encode(value[0])))
                   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
TypeError: 'Crc16' object is not callable
Compiling FTE CSQC..
../progs/csqc.src:1: warning: Unknown pragma 'noref'
../progs/csqc.src:2: warning: Unknown target 'fte_5768'. Ignored.
../progs/csqc.src:5: warning: Unknown pragma 'includedir'
../progs/csqc.src:6: warning: Unknown pragma 'includedir'
../progs/csqc.src:7: warning: Unknown pragma 'includedir'
************ ERROR ************
Error in ../progs/csqc.src on line 9
Compiling FTE SSQC..
../progs/ssqc.src:3: warning: Unknown target 'fte_5768'. Ignored.
../progs/ssqc.src:9: warning: warning id not recognised
../progs/ssqc.src:10: warning: Unknown pragma 'noref'
../progs/ssqc.src:12: warning: Unknown pragma 'includedir'
../progs/ssqc.src:13: warning: Unknown pragma 'includedir'
************ ERROR ************
Error in ../progs/ssqc.src on line 15
Compiling FTE MenuQC..
../progs/menu.src:1: warning: Unknown pragma 'noref'
../progs/menu.src:2: warning: Unknown target 'fte_5768'. Ignored.
../progs/menu.src:5: warning: Unknown pragma 'includedir'
************ ERROR ************
Error in ../progs/menu.src on line 7
Compiling Standard/Id SSQC..
../progs/ssqc.src:9: warning: warning id not recognised
../progs/ssqc.src:10: warning: Unknown pragma 'noref'
../progs/ssqc.src:12: warning: Unknown pragma 'includedir'
../progs/ssqc.src:13: warning: Unknown pragma 'includedir'
************ ERROR ************
Error in ../progs/ssqc.src on line 15
End of script.

  All of the errors fail at lines for #includelist

I suspect I'm going to need to begrudgingly install python3-fastcrc through python-pip. And probably also to compile an up to date ppc64 executable of FTEQCC directly from the project's repo. Usually stuff in C is a lot more straightforward than this.

63

Applications and Porting / Re: Porting the Dolphin Emulator to the modern OpenPOWER systems

« Last post by ClassicHasClass on March 11, 2025, 07:43:18 pm »

A worthy project!

64

Applications and Porting / Porting the Dolphin Emulator to the modern OpenPOWER systems

« Last post by isengaara on March 11, 2025, 12:29:51 pm »

As I am using my Talos II mostly for gaming currently, I decided to port the Dolphin Emulator. From my work on Libre-SOC I have a good understanding of the Power ISA. At the same time I will also continue working on OpenPOWER Microwatt and jit compilers. Hopefully I will be able to reuse some of the code that I plan to write for a later Box86 / Box64. As a first game for testing I have selected SuperTux Wii (or the GameCube port).

65

Applications and Porting / Re: [GAMES] Quake 3 source port with Vulkan renderer (vkQuake3)

« Last post by ClassicHasClass on March 09, 2025, 09:58:13 pm »

I'm happy to advise, but I can't really do much coding for it. I'm still committed to maintaining the Firefox JIT (in at least the current state) and the DOSBox JIT and my actual coding time in front of the Talos II is increasingly limited.

That said, https://github.com/ioquake/ioq3/blob/main/code/qcommon/vm_powerpc.c looks like where you'd need to do most of the work to get ppc64le to work. ppc64 is a supported target, so you'd need to audit this for endianness and write ppc64le-specific code paths for those sections that assume big endian. That may be sufficient to get it off the ground.

66

Applications and Porting / Re: [GAMES] Quake 3 source port with Vulkan renderer (vkQuake3)

« Last post by tle on March 08, 2025, 08:55:08 pm »

Btw, for Fedorans out there, the quake3 has been broken and so-out-date, I hope my PR https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/quake3/pull-request/2 would be reviewed and merged before Fedora 42 is out.

67

Applications and Porting / Re: [GAMES] Quake 3 source port with Vulkan renderer (vkQuake3)

« Last post by tle on March 08, 2025, 08:54:19 pm »

> I don't think this would work as written for the original PowerPC Q3VM, which was big-endian (little-endian PowerPC wasn't really a thing in those days). There may also be a few 32-64 bit edges, though I would think that would be minor.

@ClassicHasClass if you have capacity, I would love to pair with you to see if we could add optimisation for LE for the ioq3 port (which is supposed to be the most supported / de-facto source port for Q3)

ref: https://github.com/ioquake/ioq3/blob/main/code/qcommon/vm_powerpc_asm.c

68

GPU Compute / Accelerators / Re: Intel Arc Support in Kernel 6.8

« Last post by Hasturtium on March 07, 2025, 09:24:24 pm »

it does support the current Alchemist line; the only thing we'll likely miss out on is support for the HuC microcontroller. Without that support the video encoder is rather less capable...

Kernel docs only mention reference HEVC/H.265. The media driver mentions that either HuC or shader based encoding(which is hopefully still better than CPU based). Does encoding for h.264, VP9, and AV1 work that way?

I found this upstream bug tracking the issue. From the link in the last comment it looks like no accelerated decode on the A380 even with i915 driver? that can't be right...

There was a lot of hubbub earlier about the HuC code only being maintained for i915, with its functionality being rolled into some other component for DG3 that would work across both i915 and xe. Part of me wants to get my hands on an Arc A770 I loaned to a friend and try it in my Blackbird this week, but I’d love to hear about somebody running it successfully before evicting the W6600 that’s quietly worked for me in the past year.

69

GPU Compute / Accelerators / Re: Intel Arc Support in Kernel 6.8

« Last post by bobpaul on March 06, 2025, 10:16:19 am »

it does support the current Alchemist line; the only thing we'll likely miss out on is support for the HuC microcontroller. Without that support the video encoder is rather less capable...

Kernel docs only mention reference HEVC/H.265. The media driver mentions that either HuC or shader based encoding(which is hopefully still better than CPU based). Does encoding for h.264, VP9, and AV1 work that way?

I found this upstream bug tracking the issue. From the link in the last comment it looks like no accelerated decode on the A380 even with i915 driver? that can't be right...

70

Applications and Porting / Re: XenonRecomp

« Last post by ClassicHasClass on March 04, 2025, 08:37:38 pm »

It probably could be hacked to work on ppc64, though keep in mind that Microsoft VMX128 != AltiVec/VMX (and certainly not VSX) even though there is some overlap.