Castle Paradox

[gagekilmer]

I have heard conflicting theories on whether or not an emulator could be used to make an ohrrpgce game mobile. thoughts, suggestions anybody? if not then why not, if so, which emulator can I use. I kind of need an answer quickly, so my team isnt wasting

[Bob the Hamster]

The last version of the OHRRPGCE that could run in the DosBox emulator is the old Hasta-la-QB version from 2006. I recommend that you do not use it. If you want to know why, just look at whatsnew.txt and just keep scrolling down until you find 2006. That is how many bugfixes and features you would be missing out on.

You can also run the current Windows version of OHRRPGCE on the Wine emulator, but that doesn't help you at all since, wine has not been ported to any mobile devices yet.

You can also run the OHRRPGCE in an emulator like VirtualBox or Qemu, but again, that does not help you, because you need a powerful PC to run those. The current generation of smartphones and tablets have zero chance of running them at anything close to a useable speed.

[TMC]

Actually James, VirtualBox is not an emulator, it is a virtualiser. It can only run guest x86/x86_64 OSes on top of x86/x86_64 host OSes. The performance hit of virtualisation is not too much, even less if you have a CPU with modern virtualisation features (any AMD, or a high end Intel CPU). So you don't need a high end PC; I recommend at least 1.5GB of RAM though. (QEMU can work as both a emulator and a virtualiser.)

And I mispoke in mentioning Wine, as it is not an emulator either, so would also only be helpful on x86 phones (good luck finding one of those). Wine has been ported to Android but I don't think it's been released yet.

Anyway gagekilmer, the answer is no, an emulator isn't a realistic option.
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[gagekilmer]

So does that mean that besides waiting for the release of wine, it is not possible to have an OHRRPGCE game run on a mobile phone?

[Bob the Hamster]

Ah, thank you for the clarifications, TMC.

I guess if the Wine port to android requires an x86 processor, then that really severely limits its usefulness. I read that x86 android devices work, but when I actually search for one to buy, I come up dry (same thing with MIPS android)

gagekilmer, I think our own android efforts are most likely to bear fruit first, but as I said before, it is hard to guess how long it will take us (or the FreeBasic devs) to solve all the porting issues. Could be years :(

[TMC]

I'm much more optimistic about how long it will take for us to get the Android port running. However I learnt from the Mac port that even though it only took a week to get that running, most of the work was in dealing with all the little details like packaging, compiling HSpeak and the other utilities, lots of Mac-specific code (directories, key combinations, the menu bar, etc), and especially hunting Mac-only bugs. I think it's only completely usable now after well over two years.

But porting only Game and not Custom should drastically cut down on what needs to be done.
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"It is so great it is insanely great."

[gagekilmer]

so then TMC how long do you think it will be until an emulator would be available, just for game and not for custom?

[TMC]

We are planning to start properly playing around with Android after Beelzebufo is released. We should have a Beelzebufo release candidate real soon now (next few days). Only at that point would I be able to give you an informed estimate. We don't know yet what needs to be done. Sorry for dodging the question, but right now I only know that a port is possible, not how much work it is. Also I promised myself that I wouldn't make people any more promises!
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"It is so great it is insanely great."