THE POTATO - CDDA on a 486DX

[kevin.granade]

Your biggest problem is getting a dos nurses library set up, I have no idea if there’s a dos version of it.
A c++11 compiler that targets dos may or may not exist, if not it’s basically impossible.

[Zhilkin]

[quote=“Kevin Granade, post:39, topic:14022”]Your biggest problem is getting a dos nurses library set up, I have no idea if there’s a dos version of it.
A c++11 compiler that targets dos may or may not exist, if not it’s basically impossible.[/quote]
There is PDCurses - https://pdcurses.sourceforge.io/. As far as I know ADOM uses it.

Open Watcom V2 can probably compile to DOS, but I don’t know if it supports c++11 though.

[Rot]

If you need an older version to run more smoothly, I have an ancient version 0.A 1951 file on my computer.

Also, how many potato batteries do you need to power the potato?

[Treah]

Also, how many potato batteries do you need to power the potato?

Considering its a 486 from 1994 I would venture probably a whole lot of them in parallel after getting to the correct 12v and 5v.

[Zhilkin]

[quote=“Treah, post:42, topic:14022”]

Also, how many potato batteries do you need to power the potato?

Considering its a 486 from 1994 I would venture probably a whole lot of them in parallel after getting to the correct 12v and 5v. :D[/quote]
around 1 V and up to 1 mA for CuZn-battery

[Treah]

So I was able to get the potato to successfully connect to the internet via a serial cable connection to a spare laptop that I have docked to a docking station with a serial connection. I then connected it to watchcdda and saw if the game would be playable via a ssh link. Needless to say it dident go well :P. But it does connect. I suspect this is something to do with fonts my terminal cant understand.

Here you can see the serial ports being used to connect it to the interwebs via pppd and iptables nat.

Here is the main game menu on watchcdda. Note that all the other text before the screen session looks fine, its only in the game it does this.

Ingame its all a jumble.

[Treah]

Wanted to let anyone know that I haven’t given up on this yet. I have just been really busy with other things ATM and plus I’ve hit a bit of a block with trying to get things working with older versions of Linux that will still run on this box. I do plan to revisit it soon tho and hopefully get some type of working solution.

[Litppunk]

technically you’ve already succeeded. Proper working for the ??? Profit!!! but it does >run< its just not playable.

[Treah]

Well that was just connecting via SSH to the watchcdda server. So its not running local. I really would like to get a locally running one if i could. Im probably going to have to do some type of partial LFS build on the system to get anywhere near working order tho. And compiling on a 486 is not alot of fun…

[Litppunk]

Ah. Good luck with the project then… I’ll just…butt out till I understand more. Im interested in what the result will be though.

[Mantar]

And compiling on a 486 is not alot of fun…

That’s why you don’t do that, cross-compile on a fast machine instead. For my own potato I installed a second copy of Basic Linux in a VM on my main machine, and just used it to compile with --march=i486 so I’d have 486 binaries linked to all the old libraries and stuff.
Sadly my potato’s case busted at the hinge, and getting a replacement case for an IBM Thinkpad 701c (butterfly) is not easy. (Attaching the hinges directly to the ruggedized plastic case probably seemed like an okay idea at the time, but after a couple of decades the rubber in the plastic shrinks and its once mighty surface gets brittle as all heck.)

[Litppunk]

sounds like you need to custom build a case.

[Mantar]

Pretty cool, but I’m rather inept when it comes to small-scale mechanical stuff. I wonder if I could get a new case 3d printed somehow?

[Adragis029]

I was looking at your screenshots and I think I know why you’re having issues.

[Treah]

FINALLY!!! after so long I was able to finally get this working. I have compiled and loaded the game sucessuflly on the potato and was able to launch the game. However it will not load a game world, even one previously generated. Not sure what the issue is as its not ram as it was doing this on the VM i created as well. Anyway here are the screenshot of it finally working, along with the error.

[Treah]

So I had to do some really hacky shit to get this working on Debian Etch. My next try will be to build a full gentoo or LFS on the system and see if I am able to load it. The error im getting might be related to the tons of errors ldconfig gives me when loading new libraries.

[Mantar]

Ldconfig errors sounds likely to be involved there. Can’t wait to see what happens when you try Gentoo or LFS.

[Treah]

Yeah I very much suspect thats whats going on, I am actually working on getting a gentoo up and going. Looks like they have a i486 build which greatly simplifies things and I should have just started there… Ohh well lesson learned.

[Treah]

Success!
Looks like the recompile with Gentoo seams to have fixed the weird error i was getting when trying to load a world. However now that it is using Gentoo the system seams to run a order of magnitude slower… Probably some option I need to enable in the kernel or something I suspect. But I did get it working. I took a short video of it going though some of the main menu options and starting to load a world. Its actually still loading right now as I type this and I suspect its going to be a long while before the game world actually loads up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmIMMT_DvSQ

[Zhilkin]

Haha. Potato rendering IS slow.