[quake2] Questions about Quake2 and Solaris :-)

Steve paradox at enterprise.tanabi.org
Fri Jun 14 12:25:35 EDT 2002


> Well, at least your problem is consistent with a known problem (I noticed
> that sound broke when I upgraded from 01/01 to 02/02 and I still haven't
> tracked the origin but I have at least two different workarounds: 1) use
> sdlquake2 instead of quake2 and 2) wait for the new sound routines borrowed
> from another solaris quake2 project) and it's not a new problem.. :)

	Yeah, using sdlquake2 fixes the sound problem; not only does it
not give an error, but you can actually hear sound (or such as it is from
the lil internal speaker ;-) ).  So I'll just stick with that I s'pose :-)

>
> Well, wait a minute.. an Elite3D m4 isn't all that bad.. on my SBUS 300mHz
> single-cpu Ultra2 with a Creator3d, I was able to get about 10fps in GLX
> mode at 512x384 res.. With your hardware, I bet it goes up to at least 20fps
> with the same settings.. that might be useable for gaming. What I recommend
> though, for people with non-accelerated HW, is to use "sdlquake2" with
> "ref_xil.so" (the DGA in XIL makes it much more interesting than plain
> X11, as you have already noticed).


Something I noticed as I was testing this, is if _windowed_mouse is set to
1 at start up, the Eterm which I start quake with retains the focus even
though the quake window has the mouse ;-)  No big deal, easily
worked-around, but you may want to make sure the thing grabs keyboard
when it grabs the mouse.  (this is probably a general, non-Sun-specific
thing.  There's even a vague chance I could fix this, I'll look into
it later)

Unfortunately GLX isn't fast enough to be playable at 512x384.  It's
close, but oh well.  So sad :-)  XIL is certainly the fastest, and the
largest if the screen's expanded with it.  If I had an Elite3d M6, it
would probably be fast enough; but the M4 probably isn't terribly useful
for anything other than the little "Elite3D" nameplate on the front of the
machine to make it look impressive ;-)



> Well.. on my current H/W, I'll run 320x240 if I want fps' or 400x300 if
> I want pixels.. :) Sun in sweden promised to let borrow a Blade 1000 with
> GXVR-1000 graphics but I haven't heard from them in several months so I
> guess I'll never play with that dream machine.. for those of you who
> don't know, the GXVR-1000 is that dual-slot card with 384MB RAM from SUN..
> It's a monster but yet its performance is perhaps not above that of an
> Nvidia Quadro4 card...

	It's funny how graphics cards are.  I'm sure that monster is great
for something, and some industry would rather have that then all the
GeForce3's in the world.  But gaming requires it's own thing. :-)

> I don't think it it would get us anything at all.. if you have a sparcv9
> cpu, OpenGL is already using the sparcv9/VIS enhanced OpenGL libs through
> GLX anyway.. And moreover, moving to a 64bit compile of quake2
> might require a lot of code rewrite and better performance is usually
> not the reason behind a 64bit port.. I doubt that quake2 will ever require
> over 4GB of ram anytime soon anyway.. :)

	Heehee, okay, that's what I figured.  Hense why I didn't try it.
Well, that, and I don't really trust the funky GCC 64 bit compiler I
currently have .... ;-P

> Could you try the sdlquake2 binary just to tell me if it works for you?
> I'm pretty sure it does but I'd like to verify that.. Also, please tell
> me if it works and with what version of the SDL library.. I'm using SDL-1.2
> but I'm pretty sure it will work/compile with SDL-1.1 since that's what
> I was using before (yes, SDL works fine on SUN's and it's even provided by
> SUN on the "Software Companion" CD that comes with Solaris 8 goodies).
>

	I tell ya what, www.libsdl.org definitely doesn't like to
advertise it's sun support ;-)  It's mentioned in passing as a third party
port or something. ;-)  ANYway, I actually did try that yesterday as
already mentioned and it works.  I did it with the latest SDL-1.2 off
their site.

> Thanks for the e-mail.. I was starting to think I was the only one playing
> around with Q2 under Solaris. :)
>

	No problemo; I like to support my platform ;-)  Solaris gaming has
always been an interest of mine since I first played Solaris DOOM on a
dual 75Mhz SS20 with SX graphics.  ;-)


Anyway, TTYL!


Steve




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