[Wervyn]

Apparently someone in a community of Amiga enthusiasts has ported MZX to that platform. Someone really ought to go over there and { congratulate | beat the shit out of } them. I'm mostly glad they've picked Eternal Eclipse Taoyarin as an exemplar of MZX awesomeness.

"Yummy yummy yummy I've got <3 in my tummy."

[ajs]

It's a shame there's no sources, which is violating the GPL.

Guess I'll have to chase it up again..

--ajs.

[Wervyn]

ajs has clearly opted for the "beat the shit out of them" option. But seriously, good catch, and another good reason to inform them of the other community efforts on porting and developing MZX.

"We come in peace, shoot to kill."

[ajs]

I don't think a polite email is really "beating the shit out of them". Actually that's a pretty damn rude thing to say.

Fact is, no matter how hobbyist a mod is, the GPL requires you to release the sources if you release binaries. Clearly there is an awareness here as the license is noted and linked on the site..

I'm sure I'll have no problem getting the sources, I just wish people would actually comply with the terms before they release stuff. Actually I just want to make sure I can support the Amiga in future versions!

--ajs.

[mzxgiant]

It's kind of a pity really. Did you see the name of their organization? "Porting for Profit" -- profit from whom exactly? Maybe I've just missed the in-joke here.

"Whatever goes over my head hits you in the nose."

[Wervyn]

ajs: It was a joke. That's why the next sentence begins with "but seriously..." Sigh...

Also this. Guess that explains where salass00 came from.

"Well it was funny to ME..."

[ajs]

I just found it to be a cheap characterization. It's exactly the sort of crap people who might read this thread, related to the Amiga port, don't need to read. It makes me look like a GPL zealot, which absolutely isn't the case here.

Cast your eyes back to the GP2X port. Initially Simon released it outside of this community in exactly the same kind of format (and similar GPL violation); I emailed him, we got the sources, now I do regular GP2X builds. Simon even helps out with the port. Hopefully we can do the same for the Amiga..

--ajs.

[mzxgiant]

Despite MZX not being the most advanced GCS ever created, I'm pretty sure it holds the title for widest range of compatibility. Impressive all in itself, I'd say.

[ajs]

Most of that is due to SDL and Exo's great job with making the sources endian safe. Some additional work has been done to make MZX smaller and more stack efficient, which helps on NDS. I'm not sure what demands Amiga has, but latter day Amigas are okay power wise and there's a mature SDL port to Amiga. I guess the rest of the work is weeding out some of the I/O functions MZX uses such as rename(), link(), unlink() which tend to be poorly supported on non-glibc toolchains. I guess we'll see (hopefully).

Mr_Alert's Wii port is the most interesting port yet because it side-steps SDL and implements timing, event handling, sound and video basically on "bare metal". This kind of facility is actually part of 2.82, but it's not useful because all of the ports currently depend on SDL. NDS could certainly remove its dependency on SDL (sound is broken anyway, and video/events are manually hacked in). Not sure about the PSP port. GP2X definitely benefits from SDL.

For any port, the biggest jobs are:

• A suitable renderer (YUV or software can be recycled easily for initial hacks, but they may lack performance);
  
• Input (without SDL; joystick, mouse and keyboard). Sometimes these can't be implemented at all, but most of the ports make an attempt to support keyboard/joystick;
  
• Timing (without SDL). You need get_ticks() and delay(). Most systems have a monotonic clock source for this.
  
• Audio (without SDL). This brings in libogg/libvorbis or libtremor (non-FPU architectures). It also requires you to cross compile either ModPlug (FPU) or MikMod (non-FPU, crappy). This is usually okay to do bare metal but may adversely affect performance. Pretty much the first thing a port should cut.

Apart from that, MZX is in pure C and compiles with every version of GCC since 2.95 (and probably earlier, not tried) and MSVC. It's a damn portable program.

The worst thing about it from a portability perspective is the strict requirement for a 640x350 window. On Amiga, this isn't a problem, but most of the handheld ports either don't cut it or have hacks to work around it (NDS). Another issue is memory, since MZX games (especially modern games) can eat a lot of RAM if they use strings heavily, have large boards, or use any of the other layer features (vlayer, potentially sprites, etc.). There's probably many games that use >16MB of RAM now and simply will not run on embedded devices. I guess this is one reason why harsh limits are a good idea (pfft).

--ajs.

[Wervyn]

ajs: I keep forgetting that you have no sense of humor. Anyway, I apologize for slandering your reputation, and the last thing I want to do is scare potential newcomers off. Just so long as you'll acknowledge that there are good reasons you're not exactly perceived as cuddly, and this is a prime example of them.

Now, as to the more important topic, I'm always enthusiastic to see MZX expanding into new communities and platforms, and still have high hopes that it might eventually become a widely used indie platform for cult games, outside of the 50 or so people who actually use it now. As ajs has said, this wouldn't be possible without Exo's fantastic work in writing and solidifying the port; and if I may toot his horn for him, MZX would have still stagnated by now without ajs's amazing work as a development manager and project maintainer. Not to mention the excellent work put in by people like Mr_Alert and Logicow towards graphical rendering, and I have always envied Terryn's focus on QA. And then of course, all of the work that has been done towards porting to more esoteric platforms, as already described. It honestly amazes me that there's still such a strong drive for development after all this time, and I wish I knew how to get the rest of the community as enthusiastic about the possibilities for expansion as I am. But of course, I'm lazy.

"Look at me, I'm Wervyn, I use sarcasm and aloofness to disguise the fact that I'm too lazy to do anything myself."

[ajs]

(@Wervyn: To try to put a stop to the mud slinging I'm not going to bother responding to the insult about my healthy sense of humour.)

As it turns out, I may not need to see the code (but I'd still like to talk to the guy). I spent the last hour or so "porting" to AmigaOS 4 which was actually not really a port at all. The libraries available on AmigaOS 4 are mature and widely available. The toolchain works like a charm. Most of the code changes are due to namespacing issues in the MZX source code compounded with namespacing issues in the SDK headers; a common problem in large C programs. Despite the original developer's comments to the contrary, I didn't find that the "clib2" package on OS 4 lacked any single POSIX function required for a full compile. This could mean my build doesn't work, or that they were using a different/older C library. It would be good to find out..

Here are the code changes necessary to build an AmigaOS 4 binary, in case anybody's interested. I've commited it to SVN and it'll show up in 2.82b. I'm not able to test it yet; I guess somebody from the Amiga community will help out if I release broken binaries in the future; that, or I'll get in contact with the original developer. At the moment I've not bothered getting the OpenGL renderers working, but I believe the MiniGL package would make that a possibility. The build also hasn't been tested against libpng for which there ARE binaries, but I was too lazy to check them. It only works on OS 4 on PPC Amigas.

http://mzx.devzero.c...amiga-port.diff

So the decent ports are: Windows, Linux, AmigaOS 4, OpenSolaris, OpenBSD, OS X
The okay ports are: PSP (slightly squashed, reportedly buggy), NDS (no audio, low memory), GP2X (half resolution renderer)
The broken ports are: Wii (Mr_Alert will fix this I'm sure!)

Anybody got anything else stupid to port to?

"I guess I'm not very cuddly."

--ajs

[Terryn]

I'm still anging for a Dreamcast port (by way of KallistiOS), but I don't yet have a Broadband Adapter with which to test builds, and BBAs are expensive.

Also, dorm's got MZX running on PS3, hasn't he? We haven't made an official build for it, but at least we have a build shown. QED.

[commodorejohn]

This has all the awesomeness that my eventual one day maybe planned port of ZZT to the Commodore 128 will have. Coolness.

[Exophase]

Is this ported to one of those "Amigas in name only" you see? If I saw it on an A500 or something, that'd be impressive. I guess they'd at least have to redo the renderer into something that worked there, like the NDS port, but even then it'd still only play the simplest games well.

I wonder if this has any connection to GP2X devs, via word of the GP2X MZX port. Those guys love Amiga. I can't find one though, so probably not.

[Terryn]

Name-only - it's AmigaOS 4 only (Yet Another PPC Platform, not the old m68k Amigas). Surprised it got there first instead of MorphOS, actually; I was slightly expecting a MorphOS port to spring up outside of ajs's domain, but not this.

[ajs]

Yep as you say Exo it's not really a port at all. That's why the diff is so small.

I was originally under the impression that this was a "bare metal" Amiga port, but that is not the case.

--ajs.

[djtiesto]

They picked the weirdest and most random MZX games for that site...

[Pyro1588]

this is making me want an amiga again, though not one of those newfangled powerpc ones. an ORIGINAL 2000!

[Frobozz]

Does the license cover the source only or the source and all the files included that are required to build it? Because they may not have done anything at all to the source itself thus not bothering to put up the source. Especially considering the comments about libraries on there being really stable.

[ajs]

Section 3 of the GPLv2 or section 6 of the GPLv3 covers the specifics here. For this package, the GPLv2 applies. Neither version makes a distinction between modified and non-modified source, it is simply illegal to distribute programs in any binary form without either corresponding source or (in some cases) a written offer of source.

I've already linked what I think are the changes necessary to compile for Amiga OS 4. Unless I've missed something obvious, at least these changes would have been necessary, and this would have required modified source. So from a non-legal, practical standpoint, I'm still keen to see the changes.

--ajs.

[Mr. Apol]

Wervyn, on Jun 30 2008, 05:22 PM, said:

ajs: I keep forgetting that you have no sense of humor. Anyway, I apologize for slandering your reputation, and the last thing I want to do is scare potential newcomers off. Just so long as you'll acknowledge that there are good reasons you're not exactly perceived as cuddly, and this is a prime example of them.

Now, as to the more important topic, I'm always enthusiastic to see MZX expanding into new communities and platforms, and still have high hopes that it might eventually become a widely used indie platform for cult games, outside of the 50 or so people who actually use it now. As ajs has said, this wouldn't be possible without Exo's fantastic work in writing and solidifying the port; and if I may toot his horn for him, MZX would have still stagnated by now without ajs's amazing work as a development manager and project maintainer. Not to mention the excellent work put in by people like Mr_Alert and Logicow towards graphical rendering, and I have always envied Terryn's focus on QA. And then of course, all of the work that has been done towards porting to more esoteric platforms, as already described. It honestly amazes me that there's still such a strong drive for development after all this time, and I wish I knew how to get the rest of the community as enthusiastic about the possibilities for expansion as I am. But of course, I'm lazy.

"Look at me, I'm Wervyn, I use sarcasm and aloofness to disguise the fact that I'm too lazy to do anything myself."

i'm constantly trying to get the indie games jerks on select button to check out megazeux. someone was even talking about how there should be a game about hobos, i linked hobo dan with screenshot and latest mzx version. no one seemed to care

i'm thinking that i'm going to suggest the next SB: Game Club be a megazeux game.

[weasel]

Mr. Apol, on Jul 3 2008, 01:36 PM, said:

i'm thinking that i'm going to suggest the next SB: Game Club be a megazeux game.

Make everybody play Forrester.

[asgromo]

weasel, on Jul 3 2008, 04:03 PM, said:

Make everybody play Forrester.

That's the only MegaZeux game any of them HAVE played.

[commodorejohn]

weasel, on Jul 3 2008, 10:03 PM, said:

Make everybody play Forrester.

Forrester's cool and all, but I'd go with a game that better encapsulates the feel of MZX's golden age, like Bernard the Bard.

[djtiesto]

Mr. Apol, on Jul 3 2008, 08:36 PM, said:

i'm constantly trying to get the indie games jerks on select button to check out megazeux. someone was even talking about how there should be a game about hobos, i linked hobo dan with screenshot and latest mzx version. no one seemed to care

i'm thinking that i'm going to suggest the next SB: Game Club be a megazeux game.

I'd suggest Kikan but those hipster dorks don't like any RPGs except Earthbound.

[asgromo]

How about a game with considerable merit as a game instead of a game we especially appreciate as having been made with MegaZeux

[MadBrain]

I'd suggest packaging in the megazeux binaries (win32) along with the game, and setting up the config files so that it starts up your game automatically. Yeah, it's not hard or spectacular, but it seems to have worked well for a quick demo. This adds around 2 megs to the download, which is quite acceptable in exchange for making it available to everybody.

[ShloobeR]

Aww,

I was hoping I Could use it for the 1200 or 500 : D

I'm gonna go play old amiga games.

[commodorejohn]

ShloobeR, on Jul 19 2008, 10:52 AM, said:

Aww,

I was hoping I Could use it for the 1200 or 500 : D

I'm gonna go play old amiga games.

You could if anybody would port it for you, but it would be more limited - no SMZX and only 4 channels.