Glfrontier / Elite2 Port?


Newsdee

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Aug 13, 2007
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There's a port of Frontier: Elite 2 made with SDL and mingw, and the source code is available... I was wondering if it would be possible to port it to GP2X?
I think it uses OpenGL but it can be switched off in favor of a software renderer.

http://www.tomatarium.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/glfrontier.html
Source code is the first link in the files section.

What do you think?
 
Wow... I really really hope someone takes you up on this one. I've been waiting for Frontier (or preferably, FFE, but hey, one can only dream) since the inception of the 2x. Tried it on Atari, and it always felt very very slow - and now someone's gone and made it C :D
 
Frontier was written originally in almost 99% 68K assembler and ran natively on the Amiga/Atari ST. The PC version was painstakingly translated from 68K asm to Intel asm.
I think this Frontier project still required emulation of 68K code to run. ie. it was basically running the Amiga version of Frontier with hooks into the control system.
There is a PSP version of Frontier available - it doesn't run *that* quickly but then the GP2X now has the advantage of being able to use Cyclone.
Without all that UAE to slow it down I would imagine that it should run rather well. I'd love to see someone do this. :)
 
I took a quick look at the source and it seems to have some kind of 68K emulation. But from the description of the site, it's more high level than low-level, i.e. kind of like UltraHLE for the N64, they don't focus on accuracy but rather to make it playable as quickly as possible.

I know some C++ but I think trying this port would be more than I can chew as it's been years. Could anybody with some experience give some type of guesstimate on how easy/difficult it would be?
 
Ravnos said:
Tobriand said:
(or preferably, FFE, but hey, one can only dream)
Was the source for FFE ever released? On the Frontier website it says they were planning on it but I don't know if it ever happened.


Not unless you fancy translating about 1.5mb of disassembled x86 asm. On the other hand, if you feel up to the job, this has the disassembled code on it - it was a project for getting FFE to work on modern computers, and it does a very good job, but only on x86 machines.

To be honest, if Frontier was somewhat prettified, I'd be happy... from memory it was supposed to be a more complete game anyway. But FFE is the one I repeatedly get addicted to, and ideally, I'd love to see it one day.
 
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