Port to RockBox

[TheFormulaJam]

Hey guys, I'll just initailly give you my undying love for allowing me to play BS1 again on windows XP, among other games. You've made an excessively good emulator.

Now, to business.

RockBox is an Open source firmware alternative for Archos and iRiver (among others) Mp3 players. Do you think it would be possible to get scummVM running on it?

www.rockbox.org

Go and have a look, please?

I was talking to the devs, and they said the main problem would be that RB is written in C and scumm in C++, do you think this would be able to be overcome?

Any interest greatly appreciated, i would bake pie for you all if you got it working.

Bountiful, unlimited pie.

Just think of it.

[clem]

well, if even the devs think it's hard to overcome I doubt anybody else will know

as I see it, either you create a C++ compiler for Archos, or re-write the whole ScummVM to C (don't ask...)

clem

[sev]

I took a look at it. What is really matters here is this Device specs chart.

Lower models, no way:

• * 11-12MHz could probably handle Zak & MM. Don't think about anything bigger
  * 112x64 b/w screen. No way. You _may_ run Hercules rendering mode which is b/w, but that is 720x350

Though iriver H3x0 could do it, as it has following specs:

• * 140 MHz Coldfire
  * 220x176 18bits screen. Smartphones use that successfully

And C++ compiler, just as clem mentioned. It should support all features including templates.


Eugene

[sev]

Ah, just took a look at Coldfire toolchain. It uses usual gcc 2.95. I am not sure ScummVM still compiles with it (we use 3.x and 4.x), but if not, backporting will be not extremely hard.

So ScummVM _could_ be ported to iriver. Of course no our dev could do it simply because nobody has the gadget.


Eugene

[TheFormulaJam]

Ah, well, i was hoping to do it for the H3x0, mainly because thats the one i own...

Maybe the RB devs could do it? if you gave them an outline of what needed to be done?

[sev]

Well, of course I could explain what should be done. Probably it's even time to create a Wiki page with that as I've explained it several times already.

Question about whether those devs be interested in creating the port or not is a completely different story, but if port will be created, we'd like to see it in our official tree.


Eugene

[TheFormulaJam]

Well, i would guess there would be sufficient demand from H3x0 users to make the devs think it was worthwhile.

You could always go and have a chat with them, the main devs are normally in their IRC room, http://www.rockbox.org/irc/ .

If you were to create a Wiki page, that would be very useful, because then i could just draw their attention to that.

Btw, what do you mean by "official tree" ?

[sev]

You could always go and have a chat with them, the main devs are normally in their IRC room, http://www.rockbox.org/irc/

No motivation for me.

Btw, what do you mean by "official tree" ?

As part of usual ScummVM sources. Just like WinCE, PalmOS, PSP, PS2, Amiga etc. And not like XBox port, DS port (though it is in the works), Nokia 770 port, whatever.


Eugene

[clem]

the ScummVM sources are in a CVS tree ( http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/scummvm/scummvm/ )

when creating a port, it can either be inofficial, means you have your port at some other website and update it whenever the main source gets updated.

or you create the port, then add the specific files in a subdirectory into that tree. to build the software, you just need to download the source once, then specifiy the platform you want the program for and compile it.

[Anotherguest]

And yes, ScummVM compiles with 2.9x off GCC, as the Symbian SDK is using a Symbian version of 2.9 so it should be ok.

[Llorean]

Actually, Rockbox is compiled on GCC 3.4.4 and I think now 4.something. Or at least they're moving in that direction as there have been a lot of commits to try and fix the code with it.

Rockbox will likely (relatively) soon show up on the iPod line of DAPs too, circumstances willing.