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Games Entertainment

Is That A Railgun In Your Pocket PC? 138

Posted by timothy from the nope-just-happiness dept.
szcx writes: "Two days after the code release, Dan East has ported Quake II to the Pocket PC. With NeoMagic's 3D chipset for handhelds and XScale on the horizon, how long is it going to be until we're playing Quake III: Arena on the train into work?"
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Is That A Railgun In Your Pocket PC? More

Is That A Railgun In Your Pocket PC?

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  • Logistics? (Score:5, Informative)

    by The Great Wakka ( 319389 ) on Monday December 24, 2001 @10:13AM (#2747153) Homepage Journal
    Well.. The actual problem with this thing is that the PocketPC (those that I have seen) only have four buttons + directional pad. It would probably be fairly cumbersome. Now, I am not doubting the fact that the PocketPC has enough power, just the controls. Maybe a control-augumentation module is in order for the PocketPC? Becuase as far as I can tell, playing Quake requires about the whole keyboard (how does one talk?).
    • Maybe we could port Quake over to a Linux based GPS and have some real life Quake fun and have to Chace down or our oppenents?

      Seriously it might be a little tricky with only 4 buttons, any one know how the game play is?

    • Re:Logistics? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by purplemonkeydan ( 214160 )
      You're right. It's (well, Quake 1) bad, especially on older model iPaq's. You have to balance the stylus to look with one hand, and the other hand needs to push forward, sidestep, and fire.

      I could just be an un-coordinated git, but I couldn't get the hang of it.

      Being able to run Quake on your PDA is one thing, being able to play it is another.

    • Re:Logistics? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by choka ( 542297 )

      Could there be joystick add-ons? I think I could see an array of new add-on products for pocketPCs targeted for gaming, and this could be a real threat to handheld game consoles like GameBoy Advance.


      Now, we don't have to bring a GameBoy, hoping other people will think it is a PDA, in a long boring meetings. We can bring our pocketPCs and play games legitimatly. Another great way to pretend to work, but a lot safer!

    • Re:Logistics? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by PepsiProgrammer ( 545828 )
      From the looks of that screenshot, there is alot of extra space under the main rendering area. Since many of the controls in Quake 2 are things that dont have to be done very frequently or very fast, couldent they be implemented as stylus input buttons?
      Also a few games i have seen have an interesting form of input where the stylus is moved around in a definded box for joystick like control. This may be an option as well. I personally dont think a 'mouselook' type option would work well on a pocket device, and that youd be better off playing it like a fancy Doom.

    • How about a Gameface? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Myriad ( 89793 )
      Maybe a control-augumentation module is in order for the PocketPC? Becuase as far as I can tell, playing Quake requires about the whole keyboard (how does one talk?).

      Such moduals exist in a limited sense, at least for the Handspring Visor. Check out the Gameface [futureshop.ca] for the Visor.
      For the URL impaired, it is basically a joystick & button pad that clips over the Visor for gaming.

      Anyone know if they have a similar version for the PocketPC?

    • Re:Logistics? (Score:2, Informative)

      by oznet ( 217754 )
      It's not only a problem of not having enough inputs. I don't see how anyone can play Quake without a mouse to look around. Anything else is just goofy "keyboard" control... ugh... Like Quake3 on a PlayStation controller, hahahaha, man that must suck.

      And if you think you're "all that" with keyboard only/playstation controls, I'll play you any day you want and we'll see which is the best control method.
    • Not to make little of what the guy has done, but between the controls, resolution, and frame rate (3FPS), I'm not so sure it would be much fun at all.
    • Yeah indeed - I mean It's cool that someone ported my all time favourite game to the pocket PC - but if you think you have are playing Quake II and you are not using a mouse and a keyboard then you're 'avin a *LARF* mate.

      I saw Pocket GLQuake on an iPaq and it was amusing to see (but not as amusing as TTYquake :0 )but really - it wasn't playable by any serious definition.

      Of much more interest and amusement this week was the Generations mod. for QIII - lets you play with the weapons and physics of Doom, Q1,2,3 and some other thing whih I suspect they made up :-/

      It is a absolute blast.
    • The display would be another matter, but for direction control using a gyroscope would seem to make sense.. you'd move the PocketPC/whatever itself to move up&down, left&right.

  • Oh yeah (Score:4, Funny)

    by ViceClown ( 39698 ) on Monday December 24, 2001 @10:13AM (#2747155) Homepage Journal
    Sweet. Now if it has a hotkey to instantly switch to my calendar so I don't get busted at work.... :-)
    • I remember back in the Quake1 days you could bind to "error" and the game would instantly perform an illegal operation and shut down. I haven't tested in the more recent Quakes, someone want to give it a try?
  • now can anyone tell me where to find the linux version? casue eery time i think i've finaly found it, the link is dead. Also, the quake3demo :). Im stuck wiht unreal, which is great, but SI need some diversity in my killing people.

    • ...and I apologize in advance for being a humorless pedant, but it's in your sig, so I see it every time you post, and it's driving me nuts.

      It's "you're ugly," not "your ugly." "Your" is possessive, "you're" is the contraction of "you are."

      Examples:
      • Shake your groove thang.
      • You're so fly.
      • You're risking your karma by engaging in spelling/grammar flames.

      Thank you, and have a happy holiday.

      • Re:Okay, I normally don't do this... (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Since you brought up the topic of grammatical errors, I am free to list my grammatical error pet peeves without somebody flaming me for being overly sensitive or some such.

        Here is a list of grammatical errors that constantly appear in message boards and newsgroups. I am only listing those that bug me, in order of decreasing "bugs me" factor.
        1. misuse of "your" and "you're"
        2. incorrectly using "then" rather than "than"
        3. incorrectly using "could of", "should of", and "would of" rather than "could've", "should've", and "would've".
        4. misuse of "there", "their", and "they're"

        Thank you for allowing me to get this off of my chest.

  • Linking to a forummessage (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Otis_INF ( 130595 ) on Monday December 24, 2001 @10:15AM (#2747160) Homepage
    It's perhaps not that wise to link directly to a forum, since most of these systems are not optimized to handle a lot of /. visitors :). You could have copy/pasted the whole message.
    • Umm dude.. alot of sites arn't optimized to handle a lot of /. visitors :P Thus enters (dum dum dummm) the Slashdot Effect :)
    • I don't think it's wise to link anything on /.
      Every story posted should have the page(s) cached by /. in that why those poor little server won't burst into flames. Not to mension people paying for accessive use of bandwidth.

      Some people pay a couple of bucks to get their page hosted. The hosting is OK for the 0.4 vistors a day. But when hundreds of vistors visit in a couple of hours they go WAY over their datatraffic limit. And have to pay up to $0.25 per Mb. Link to Google [google.com]'s cache is the least /. can do.


      Bad idea: Dood, w3 /.-ed that L4M3 p4g3 in s3conds !!
      Good idea: That guy must be glad, his /. mirror is pretty busy. It's a good thing /. can take the hit. His own page would have died after 15 minutes.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • The Q3 code was posted on 7 May, 2000. Here is the link: http://www.idsoftware.com/archives/quake3arc.html You may start your port right away.
      • Aaah, but I'm sure you're aware that the link you've provided is just to the source for the game logic code. The difference here is that the complete code for the rendering engine has been released for the first two Quakes.
  • From the page: Dan East (Pocketquake developer): I've got Quake II ported to the Pocket PC platform. It will be a couple days before release, because there are details yet to clean up (GAPI drawing and input controls). I've only tried it in the emulator, so I can't give you an indication of the speed. It runs 100% on my 300 mhz laptop in emulator, but that of course is no indication of what I'll see on the StrongARM. The main problem at this time is the shareware pak file is 48 MB. I don't know if I'll have gZip compression ready for the initial release or not. The way I implemented compression for Quake I is so freaking slow that at this point I'm considering something more advanced so the loading won't be so compromised. I only have 16 MB CF Cards, so I'm going to have to strip everything out of the pak I can to get it to install on my hardware. Here's a screen shot. This is in the Pocket PC emulator, using a non-standard resolution of 240x180 (same as Pocket Quake I in portrait). Dan East

  • Forum Posting (Score:4, Redundant)

    by dun0s ( 213915 ) on Monday December 24, 2001 @10:22AM (#2747185) Homepage
    Dan East
    PocketQuake Developer

    Posts: 1742

    Date posted: 12/23/01 at 03:30:12
    I've got Quake II ported to the Pocket PC platform. It will be a couple days before release, because there are details yet to clean up (GAPI drawing and input controls). I've only tried it in the emulator, so I can't give you an indication of the speed. It runs 100% on my 300 mhz laptop in emulator, but that of course is no indication of what I'll see on the StrongARM. The main problem at this time is the shareware pak file is 48 MB. I don't know if I'll have gZip compression ready for the initial release or not. The way I implemented compression for Quake I is so freaking slow that at this point I'm considering something more advanced so the loading won't be so compromised. I only have 16 MB CF Cards, so I'm going to have to strip everything out of the pak I can to get it to install on my hardware.

    Here's a screen shot. This is in the Pocket PC emulator, using a non-standard resolution of 240x180 (same as Pocket Quake I in portrait).

    Dan East

    Last modification: Dan East - 12/23/01 at 03:30:12

    ----
    note: i am not dan east... another unrelated dan.

    • Re:Forum Posting (Score:2, Informative)

      by cetan ( 61150 )
      Not that there's much to it, but here's a mirror of the image mentioned in the post:

      http://www.necrosys.net/mirrors/q2.png [necrosys.net].
      • troll? jesus christ. I give up bandwidth and get marked as a troll?

        the moderation system here is so fucked up.

  • Not Useable (yet) (Score:4, Informative)

    by rikkards ( 98006 ) on Monday December 24, 2001 @10:29AM (#2747201) Journal
    I noticed down in the comments after reading the link that he was saying that it was only running at around 3 FPS and that was on an emulator. He presently can't run it on the Pocket PC as the shareware file is about 48M

    • Re:Not Useable (yet) (Score:4, Interesting)

      by RussGarrett ( 90459 ) <russ.garrett@co@uk> on Monday December 24, 2001 @11:21AM (#2747333) Homepage
      No, he said it was running well in an emulator, but only at about 3FPS at full quality on his iPaq, which he'd subsequently managed to get it running on.

      I'd like to see how it goes on my 206Mhz StrongARM HP Jornada...
      • PDA's are becoming faster and faster [infosync.no]. I wonder when they'll catch up with game consoles in terms of power. As for having joysticks, it would be ideal to use bluetooth. Bluetooth doesn't need to compete with WiFi, they complement each other.
      • The Jornada is almost identical to the iPaq hardware-wise.

        The main problem is that the StrongARM is awful at math. Integer addition, subtraction, and multiplication are fine, but there is no integer division instruction, and there is no floating point support at all (software only). The StrongARM is a nice, fast CPU for everything but math. (Some versions of the ARM line have math coprocessors, but they generally aren't used in handhelds.)

        Unfortunately, Quake uses floating point math, and lots of it. So it's going to be slow, and until handhelds have hardware math coprocessors, there's not a lot that can be done about it.

        Note that Doom (a port of the PrBoom project, specifically) runs just fine on the iPaq. As far as I know (could be wrong), Doom uses almost no floating point math.

        BTW, various people have successfully compiled SDL on the iPaq (running Linux of course; not sure about WinCE). I didn't do the Doom port, but reportedly it was a very simple port.

        -John
  • It'll be interesting playing this with the GPRS/GSM attachment you can get for the iPaq. You'd be sitting in the train waiting for the next stop fragging someone on an instagib server over the other side of the world.

  • Only in emulation (Score:4, Insightful)

    by metlin ( 258108 ) on Monday December 24, 2001 @10:34AM (#2747222) Journal
    I've only tried it in the emulator, so I can't give you an indication of the speed. It runs 100% on my 300 mhz laptop in emulator, but that of course is no indication of what I'll see on the StrongARM. The main problem at this time is the shareware pak file is 48 MB.

    Like he says, I'm not sure if an emulator would give you a true indication of how it may actually work. Although the screenshot looks impressive, it may not work or look the same once the PAK files are stripped.

    Also, he may need to make some compromise for a sufficiently faster gameplay. In my experience so far, emulators always perform a lot more faster than the real things.

    Still, a great start. Way to go...
    • "Also, he may need to make some compromise for a sufficiently faster gameplay. In my experience so far, emulators always perform a lot more faster than the real things."


      First off, great grammar. Now.. Emulators only work based on what you're emulating and what the emulator is running on.. Sure, PCs emulating Atari2600s and arcade machines from 10 years ago work great.. But try running those on a P90 and see how slow an emulator can be. Plus, emulator design has come a LONG way.. remember the early days of MAME, when galaga would chug.

    • If he is only emulating on a 300Mhz PC their may not be all that much difference in speed from it to a pocketPC, if anything i would expect it to be slower emulating on a 300Mhz PC than on a higher end PocketPC. As a side note, in a later post he replies: John Carmack released the source 2 days ago. I started porting it last night. It runs around 3 FPS on my iPaq (at full quality rendering, 240x180). Dan East
    • I think the emulator is actually an api emulator. Ie you compile to x86 code - it riuns directly. Not an arm enulator. Quake generally uses a lot of floating point - no FPU on the ipaq, so it will be deadly slow without changing everything to fixed point.
    • The good thing is, there is alot of detail that can be reduced without noticing.....

      Since the game is going to be running at a pretty low resolution anyway since the screen is so small. I think you could probably get away with decreasing the texture size some without even noticing a significant difference in graphic quality.

      And if someone is willing to spend the time, converting all the floating point to fixed would speed it up immensely as well.

  • But I do wish someone would port Wolfenstein 3d to PalmOS.

  • a novel novelty, but a novelty just the same... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MessiahXI ( 48280 ) on Monday December 24, 2001 @11:27AM (#2747348) Homepage
    wow, now that it runs on PocketPC, all that remains is to find some shred of a reason to play it on PocketPC. I'm not trying to knock your work here, Dan. As a programming exercise, this is an amazing milestone. But seriously, I don't have to elaborate on why a 4 inch screen and wonky pda controls suck the life out of 3d action games. Besides, as many hours as I've tossed away playing games like Q2 online, the last thing I need to be doing is pretending it's fun to "play" it on a train on an iPaq. Harldy a real "Palm-killer", since the mainstream pda market will largely ignore this admirable science project.
    • No, it certainly wont be as fun in a handheld version as on the pc, But you cant very well bring your PC to long meetings or boring classes either.

      If your gonna say that you might as well say PDA's themselves are useless because the programs on them arent as usefull as their PC counterparts.

      • If your gonna say that you might as well say PDA's themselves are useless because the programs on them arent as usefull as their PC counterparts.

        that's not true at all. PDA's have many useful functions. 3D gaming just doesn't happen to be one of them. its a cool novelty. very neat. but not fun. One could proly port PalmOS graffiti to Windows, but it wouldn't be useful now would it? Does that make PC's worthless? no. Does that make graffiti worthless? no. Does that make graffiti on a pc a waste of time? no. Will anyone use it? no.

        really, I understand. it's a cool thing. but not that cool. not worth more than 5~10 min of "gameplay".

  • PQ2 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dan East ( 318230 ) on Monday December 24, 2001 @12:15PM (#2747443) Journal
    Actually it is running on my iPaq now, in addition to the emulator. As stated I'm achieving an estimated 3 fps @ 206mhz , which will increase with strategic fixed-point conversions, and reduction in rendering quality (such as reducing the number of particles that can be used in effects).

    The control scheme will of course be the same as what I used for Pocket Quake and Pocket Wolf3D. The stylus is used onscreen for mlook and weapon selection. The directional pad of the device controls movement and strafe. This is the typical configuration used by FPS players with their mouse / keyboard. Devices that use the D-Pad as the fire button (iPaq, many Pocket PC 2002 devices) give their owners an extra advantage, because they can fire without taking their hands off of the critical controls.

    Admittedly, Quake 2 is a bit much for the hardware of the current generation of Pocket PCs . However, devices better suited for this type of software are just around the corner. Perhaps the availability of classic, mainstream, groundbreaking games such as Quake and Quake II for the Pocket PC platform will encourage OEMs to produce more capable hardware. All I ask is for a math coprocessor! :)

    The timing of the source release just prior to Christmas is preventing me from working on this as much as I normally would, so keep on eye on the Pocket Matrix [pocketmatrix.com] site for notification of the release, which should be before the end of the year.

    Dan East
    dex-plor.com [dex-plor.com]

  • Gameboy Advance (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Master Of Ninja ( 521917 ) on Monday December 24, 2001 @12:17PM (#2747444)
    Ok, someone got Quake 2 to run on a pocket pc... But is it really worthwhile to do such a thing? I mean it might be a good programming challenge, but playing the game might not be so much fun. It would have been better to program a dedicated engine that would be optimised for PocketPC. YOu could make the engine so that it could use the four(?) buttons on a PPC unit, as well as having small runtimes and maps or whatever.

    If you really wanted gaming on the move why not try the Gameboy Advance. It might not run quake (and it might cost a bit), but the games are tailored to the Gameboy, and the system is built just for games. I've heard that the game Ecks vs Sever is good, while there is still Doom for the GBA.

    • Re:Gameboy Advance (Score:2, Informative)

      by nerpdawg ( 6937 )
      My guess is that the reason he did it was that he thought it would be fun. And it's done. You complain about something that's been done, is available, and you can use if you want? If he had fun, it was worthwhile. If you want a gaming engine, or gba games, make em, post em, and say "eat that. you *should* have done it like *i* just did."

  • Argh! (Score:3, Informative)

    by tcc ( 140386 ) on Monday December 24, 2001 @12:26PM (#2747462) Homepage Journal
    Why did they remove the floating point unit portion of most Handheld processors? I have a E115, without FP it's pretty useless for games like quake... I ran quake 1 on it, 0.5FPS max, while it know a 3d chipset would have done the job, I still don't get it... you're trying to cut everything down for the least power usage, okay, fine with me, how about switching off the portions of the chip that is not used and turn it on when called? it's already done with other functions in other microprocessors and it would keep the lifespan of the PDA more than 1 year. Especially at the price they cost, it's not much asking.

    This is frustrating.

    At least Compaq understood this.

    • Re:Argh! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by GeorgieBoy ( 6120 ) on Monday December 24, 2001 @12:56PM (#2747533) Homepage
      It's not just a cost savings but a space and (like you mentioned) power savings. It can significantly reduce complexity in the processor, and most embedded applications for PDAs. They don't need hard float for performance, action/FPS games are not a selling point for these products. Most PocketPC PDAs being made today are ARM based(some are MIPS) I'm an embedded developer, I don't believe I've ever developed for an ARM device WITH an FPU, in fact.

      Floating point alone won't necessarily expand the life of a PDA. For most people it's actually the physical construction of the PDA that determines it's life (if they actually intend to use it for it's scheduling/notetaking etc. purposes). PDAs are never designed around real gaming after all.

      If you want portable gaming try Gameboy Advance [nintendo.com]. It happens to be based on an ARM processor, coincidentally, but I don't know if it has an FPU.
      • Yeah it's got some special chips in it to handle 3d. It'll do your typical 2d Z scaling and whatnot for fake 3d as well as a chip that'll handle polygons and rendering. Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 uses actual polygon characters, for example.
        • No. The polygons in THPS2 are coming straight out of the ARM processor. Take note that there are only 30 polygons or so in each character. The special chip you are talking about was meant to handle kick ass 2D only. However, since it supports 2d scaling, rotation, skewing, alpha, etc. many clever programmers have taken advantage of that and used those abilities to create 3D engines, but the chip was meant for 2D only.
      • My point was about added value for a device that cost almost the price of a decent used laptop.

        At the price it cost to produce a chip that is ALREADY being produced, cutting down part of it and making a new waffer costs a lot too I guess, so even if the chip costs 25 cents more to produce per unit, how % is that on a 500$ device? I'd pay 501$ for that extra value.

        While YOU might not use floating point, while YOU may not see the use of it, ask yourself why are 3d embedded chipsets being manufactured right now? if there would be 0 need for that, people wouldn't put up R&D efforts on them.

        Gameboy advance? hey, why paying 250$ for a device plus some games if for the double of that price I can get the same plus UTILITIES and mp3 player and video playback and sync with my devices and surf on the net?

        There's a lot of places to cut to save money, processor features is not one of them. Go ask intel with their celeron 300.

        Besides, who has a full color PDA and never tried any games on it? okay... and who wouldn't like 3d games or similar on it?... thought so :)
      • The GBA runs at about 16MHz and has no FPU or 3D acceleration. That's still fast enough to get Doom going on that little screen, but at a third of the price of an ipaq and Hanaho gamepad extension I'd want more than 1/13 of the oomph.

        Of course if you prefer other kinds of games rather than first person shooters, as I do, the GBA is a better choice just by virtue of having a few thousand Gameboy and Gameboy Color games out there for it. Not to mention a perfect port of Chu Chu Rocket. And the homebrew community rocks.

        On the other hand the ipaq can run MAME ;)

  • Nice to see a new "Pocket PC" will cost me as much as a desktop PC...I would like to see a good Pocket PC with USB get to the sweet spot under $200...Must be a popular price range because all of the stores were sold out of that serial HP 52? or whatever with 16 megs ram and a CF slot. I guess I will stick with my Palm for now. (Maybe my grandkids will live to see a linux based PDA on the store shelf someday hu?)

  • ASCII Quake II (Score:4, Funny)

    by Ratbert42 ( 452340 ) on Monday December 24, 2001 @01:12PM (#2747569)
    So we can expect a sequel to ttyquake [mr.net]?
  • How long is it going to be until we're playing Quake III: Arena on the train into work?


    I can just see it now ... the next big thing is gonna be ... subway massacres. lord save us.

  • 3 FPS (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 24, 2001 @05:16PM (#2748120)
    Well, at least it's faster than their webserver right now.
  • With NeoMagic's 3D chipset for handhelds and XScale on the horizon, how long is it going to be until we're playing Quake III: Arena on the train into work?"

    Is this not fucking good enough? I'm tired of people saying, This is cool, but it'd be *REALLY* cool if a:we made a fucking cluster of them, b:you could store mp3's on it, or b: we could get an even more impressive program to run on it.

    Goddammit. When you've played THIS game enough to wear out any possible replay value, spend that hour on the train to and fro (which i assume is the time that you're wasting with this) porting it yourself. You probably shouldn't be running bullshit like this on the handheld that your company possibly gave you so graciously.
  • Is That A Railgun In Your Pocket PC
    Or are you just happy to see me!
    r00tdenied
  • When I saw the headline I thought this was a hardware add-on article.
  • And next time we'll have an interview with someone who got his PPC to talk to a Geforce 3 :o)
  • Does anyone know any websites that talk about creating Quake 2 skins, and mods for the quake 2 engine?

    Thanks in advance.

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