Possible to port GridWars 2

[cyperghost]

@spud11 I made a screenshot of the game. So you see how the intro looks like. The flares are spreading in all colors but are super slowmo. So that is lightyears away being playable like the video I've posted in 2016. We need hardware acceleration for this and I hope @fluffypillow and @toto2000 can make it run. It's a super cool game I've played long in 2007 during my student time.

[toto2000]

My idea was to recompile the real sources, not the ones patched by @fluffypillow, and use a real hardware accelerated opengl driver... I'll try tomorrow to compile the original sources with gl4es. Adding this lib (that is a wrapper that mimics openGL and make calls to GLES instead) to LD_LIBRARY_PATH at link time was not enough apparently.

[cyperghost]

@toto2000 ;) Thx for digging deeper. I'm afraid I can't help furthermore.

My experiences with the GL4ES wrapper were that the introvideos, which for example run in some episodes of OpenBOR, ran without any problems with this library. Without linking, the refresh rate (felt) was below 10fps. The user @zanac used the switch lGL for this purpose. Therefore he patched makefile.txt ... I hope this is also possible with GridWars and that the game can benefit from some accelaration.

-LIBS += -Wl,-rpath,$(LIBRARIES) -lSDL2 -lSDL2_gfx      --> original
+LIBS += -Wl,-rpath,$(LIBRARIES) -lSDL2 -lSDL2_gfx -lGL --> modified

You can provide the GL4ES wrapper with special options, e.g. that only GLES1.1 is used etc.
The github of ptetSeb with the usage link gives hints. I've patched OpenBOR to not take the library from the /lib directory, but the version in the same directory of the binary.

[spud11]

@cyperghost Very strangely, when I use ldd gridwars-armhf-rel I get the response not a dynamic executable. I'm really not sure what that means as I copied the binary into the same folder as the other files, and made the binary executable.

[mitu]

@spud11 Can you run file gridwars-armhf-rel and see if it's an executable ?

[spud11]

@mitu Thanks, mitu.

What I got was:

gridwars-armhf-rel: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, EAB15 version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib/id-linux-armhf.so.3,  for GNU/Linux 3.2.0, BuildID[sha1]=b7e8dd092b0a3e8b03642021eb0cee8bca9e80a24, stripped

I've copied that from a photo I took on my home. Hopefully, I've transcribed it correctly.

[cyperghost]

@spud11 Wrong version of ld-linux-armhf.so.3? - I'm still on Jessie-build!

[mitu]

@spud11 Looks fine - i.e. it seems an executable.

[cyperghost]

@mitu Do you know why it fails in this case?

[mitu]

Have no idea - @spud11 are you downloading the file and then transferring to the PI ? Can you try downloading it directly on the PI with wget:

wget https://github.com/mmatyas/GridWars/releases/download/first-build/gridwars-armhf-rel

[spud11]

@mitu @cyperghost I'm still on Jessie. Yes, I did transfer from my PC to the pi so I'll use the wget method. Thanks.

[spud11]

@mitu @cyperghost. Alright, so I used wget and sudo moved the file to the relevant roms folder and tried running it with ./gridwars-armhf-rel. I got the permission denied error again. I then used ldd and got the same response as last time. Using the file command, I got the same information as last time. Very odd. Maybe it is something I've done to my system and that is why it just won't work. Or maybe it is the wrong version of id-linux-armhf.so.3.

[cyperghost]

@spud11 The error permission denied is a user right error. I think it's the filesystem - if you are using FAT32 then it's very likely you receive such a message. Try to upload/unpack the archive in directory /home/pi. Do not use any sudo command this will overwrite user permission from pi to root.

Then use command chmod +x binaryfilename to make the binary executable then run the binary with ./binaryfilename no sudo no bash just like I wrote.

As ultimate ratio you can use command sudo chown -R gridwarsdirectory pi:pi

[spud11]

@cyperghost Thanks. I wound up putting the files in a sub-folder of my /home/pi/ folder because, as you said, my roms folder is on a USB drive. Unfortunately, I still couldn't get it to work. Effectively, I had the same error messages. It's a bit of a pity, but I wonder whether any progress has been made on the porting of it in the meantime by @toto2000.