Quake on plan 9

Quake on plan 9

[Gary]

No!!!!  One of the features of Plan 9 for me is that there are
currently no exciting games on it, and you're offering to help
get Id software up and running.  Next someone will port netrek
and all will be lost :-(

Quake on plan 9

[Heiko]

>Next someone will port netrek and all will be lost :-(
Funny that you mention Netrek.
The only (:-)) reason why i was waiting
for the Plan 9 PC dist was to port Netrek to it
and can play from every PC after that.
(Windows (gulp :)) X11 server are so slooooooooow :-)

	Heiko Wengler
	Sometimes client hacker...

Quake on plan 9

[rob]

>  When can we start thinking about a brazil-fans mailing list?

Let's get Quake out first.

-rob

Quake on plan 9

[Scott]

Rob says:
| It's very easy in Brazil, but that's another story.

Tell it, tell it!

When can we start thinking about a brazil-fans mailing list?

Quake on plan 9

[rob]

You'll need to do some minor system hacking to give you up/down
events on the keyboard.  Plan 9 hides all that stuff for you as a service
to most software, so on machines that have up/down events (the
first few machines we ported to didn't) we generate UTF directly.
It would be a few minutes' work to make another device file that
gives you the up/down stuff in any form that's helpful.  Similar
comments apply to the mouse.  With a little more work, this could
even be made to work through the window system.

The framebuffer is mappable already, although you may need to
add a line to a table in the kernel and recompile before you can
get to it.  If you're on a VGA, you may also need a hook to get to
the routine that copies from the internal buffer to the page-mapped
display.  This is easy, too, although getting it to cooperate with the
window system is not.  (It's very easy in Brazil, but that's another
story.)

There is a sound driver for the Sound-Blaster cards and Nextstations.
I don't know it well enough to say if it does enough, but as you say
it's a straightforward project if not.

Again, unbuffered TCP/IP will take a little kernel work but not much.

-rob

Quake on plan 9

[philw]

(including system test ...)

Quake on plan 9

[philw]

Mapping the frame buffer using segattach is no problem.

Event handling can be made as good as you need.

We will give you whatever help you need.

philw

Quake on plan 9

[John]

I am going to buy a system to run plan 9 on.  Are there any =
integrators in the audience that will provide a ready-to-run, high =
performance pc system?  I want to be able to make a standalone =
plan 9 network with a pc and a couple old NEXTStations, as well as =
mount some NFS volumes from our main file server.

My first project will be to bring up Quake.  If anyone has any =
comments on troubles I am likely to run into, please let me know.  =
The game's requirements are:

Good keyboard event handling.  Up / down notifications for all =
keys is ideal, but I can live with some keys being special.

A rapid bitmap blitter.   Mapping the framebuffer is ideal.  A =
single copy to screen from shared memory is usually fine.  Pumping =
a bitmap through a generic imaging function generally isn't.  For =
actually playing games, as opposed to developing them, an easy way =
to change the display resolution, like xfree86, is great.

Low level sound access.  Mapping the recirculating dma buffers =
with a call to get the current dma position is ideal.  A blocking  =
write to a sound stream is fine if I can get tight control of the =
buffering done in the driver.  Does a sound driver even exist?  It =
sounds like a fun and straightforward project if not.

Non blocking, non buffering TCP/IP.  Any implementation that =
handles the BSD sockopts should be fine.

A way to get raw mickey counts from the mouse would be cool.  Our =
NEXTSTEP and X versions have to live without mouse input.

John Carmack
Id Software