Chess game

[simon]

Hi,

there is a working port of Tom Kerrigan's Simple Chess Program (TSCP) now. Input and output are text-only. I will write a neat graphical frontend later.

Simon

[netwar]

Thats cool maybe one thing we could get working are old amiga/c64 games or atari? just a thought maybe through some compatability layer/emulation? if this has atleast 256k of ram it could emulate the c64 or c128 no problem.By the title of the webiste "is smart" (took German in Highschool) i'm assuming your German so maybe the ZX spectrum would be something interesting for you to emulate?(then again the zx and c64 were on par for german sales so its a coin toss)

[simon]

Yes, I thought about games from these platforms. I guess the 68k is not fast enough to emulate these computers. And I like to use Kiwi's capabilities like stereo sound and colorful graphics. As there is a GCC toolchain already I would probably go the way to port existing (Linux) games.
I don't know how difficult it would be to program a SDL port for Kiwi. Or one just steals the in-game logic and writes new routines for all the stuff around it (sound, video, input).

Correct, I am German. I assume the Spectrum has been more popular in the UK. Back then I only knew one person with a speccy. All others were playing around with an C64 and later with the Amiga.


Simon

[netwar]

I think porting SDL to it would be less troublesome atleast in the long run anyways and it also gives the end user more flexability to develop their own programs just like the original consoles. I think maybe porting some command line unix/linux games would be cool take a look at bsdgames,Includes all those BBS classics

[simon]

I looked into porting SDL as well as a curses library. As there are versions of curses which support SDL it might be the best to port the latter first.

I suppose porting SDL is not as easy as porting newlib. I could not even find a guide of which functions are needed to port. Anyway the video access is probably pretty different to what SDL expects: The framebuffer is only accessable via VDP registers (this could be changed for a next revision) and - which is more important - to be really useful for games, SDL should make use of the VDP tile mode and sprite features. I think every single game has to be ported though to run with the tile mode or just to convert graphics into the correct format.

Simon

[Zbigniew]

I'm not sure, is porting SDL the way to go. SLD is great, if one's going to write one program for many available platforms. In Kiwi's case we've got one platform, therefore we've got a consistency - then why the (supposed) need for SDL? It's better to use Kiwi's capabilities "old style": by direct access to "bare metal"... by operating the memory and registers directly.

[simon]

HI Zbigniew,

your are completely right. I dismissed the idea of porting SDL. Well, the first idea behind porting SDL was to make use of the many already written programs. But all in all it doesn't make sense for several reasons.

Simon