Post subject: Calling all Linux coders
upthorn
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I am looking for assistance in bringing the Linux version of gens up to speed with the windows build. However, I have been unable to set up a working Linux platform to dev on, and I have absolutely no experience with KDE or gnome GUI fuctions. Some recent developments in Gens make it somewhat imperative that the next version have a simultaneous Linux & windows release.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
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Not the reply you wanted upthorn, but can you elaborate on those recent developments? Gens homepage seems to be down or maybe it moved.
upthorn
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Well, I'll say that they are changes that affect movie sync, allowing movies to sync that would not previously have done so, (but not breaking compatibility with old gmv files). I would prefer not to make the full nature of the changes public before the emulator is released, for reasons that will become appearant when the chanages become public...
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
SXL
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why not using a cross-platform toolkit like WxWidgets ?
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upthorn
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SXL wrote:
why not using a cross-platform toolkit like WxWidgets ?
Because I don't want to have to rewrite the entire Gens GUI by myself without even having a working test platform.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
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If you would want to, I could make you an account on one of my boxes. * It has KDE installed * You will have shell access, with access to install new software * Accessible via VNC, or any other remote desktop program that you want to install. * The computer is online 24/7 * It's connection to the internet is 100/10 Mbit, hundred down, ten up. Specs of the computer: CPU: P4 2.4 Ghz RAM: 512Mb (I'm thinking of upgrading) Sound card: Creative Labs SB Audigy Graphics; Nvidia GeForce3 Ti 200 HDD: 2x40Gb, 1x300Gb Installed OS: Kubuntu 8.04.1 (Yeah, I'm a slacker right now). Just drop me an email, or private message if you have more questions, or if you want me to hook you up with an account.
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Upthorn, if your computer's descent (2 gb of ram or so), you could just install a linux distro in a virtual machine and use that for testing. If you don't have access to VMWare, VirtualBox is free from Sun and is a pretty good alternative (and open source to boot :P) Using a cross-platform toolkit for ui would probably be a good move as it makes it easier to maintain in the long run, though the initial investment of time is high. I'm sure someone could cobble something together in gtk or qt to handle the basic functionality ... assuming the current core emulator code is nicely decoupled from the ui code :)
Joined: 8/27/2006
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VMWare player is free. And you can find on the internet a way to create an empty linux virtual machine, on which you could install ubuntu.
upthorn
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Maximus wrote:
Upthorn, if your computer's descent (2 gb of ram or so), you could just install a linux distro in a virtual machine and use that for testing. If you don't have access to VMWare, VirtualBox is free from Sun and is a pretty good alternative (and open source to boot :P)
Yeah, the problem is that Linux hates me. I've tried installing kubuntu on my desktop, and it refuses to set up properly. I can't even get it to run make scripts that I haven't heard of anyone else having trouble with, ever. I doubt that setting it up on a virtual machine would alleviate the issue of Linux simply refusing to be configured properly no matter what I tell it to do. The result of which is that I can't even compile code to test it.
Maximus wrote:
Using a cross-platform toolkit for ui would probably be a good move as it makes it easier to maintain in the long run, though the initial investment of time is high. I'm sure someone could cobble something together in gtk or qt to handle the basic functionality ... assuming the current core emulator code is nicely decoupled from the ui code :)
The GUI is pretty much disconnected from the core emulation. However, I am not comfortable with converting it to an API that I am totally unfamiliar with. And I've always been of the opinion that if an OS provides a native GUI toolkit, then applications should make use of it, rather than requiring additional libraries, or bloating the executable. I am not opposed to maintaining two or three separate GUIs, but I need assistance getting the initial Linux platform GUI(s) in there.
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
Joined: 12/5/2007
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Just got myself the Linux port and sneaked through the readme:
If you want a GTK based gens, just type 'make'.
Way to fool the user. While the emulator itself runs fine and skillfully exceeds not to even think of trying to pretend to care about of the first three parameters, so far I couldn't get anything GTK-style to pop up... However, I could possibly act as a compilability tester, since I've seemingly been the first one quite some times now to come up with emulators that I couldn't even get to compile at all.
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./configure
make
sudo make install
If you're compiling the source under linux, it builds with a gtk interface. Just make sure you install it (make install just copies a bunch of stuff to wherever prefix is defined). Then run gens.
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Wtf? I got the "Grrl" Linux port from bluetoaster.net and there is no configure script included, though there is a Makefile. Could you point me to your source code?
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Ah. I built from the version on sourceforge ... which btw was updated on June 19. Upthorn, have you checked the main branch of gens to see if there 's anything new in there you could incorporate into your version? (Assuming you're not one of the official project maintainers ... which you may just be :P). As for grrl, it looks like there's a glade ui included, but it's not part of the makefile, so it never gets built. The version of gens I compiled this morning (2.15.2) has a gtkui directory under src/gens which we could probably port to Upthorn's version without (hopefully) too much difficulty.
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The stretching doesn't want to work for that good, but what the hell. Thanks for the hint :)
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I managed to compile Gens on Linux, and hacked the source code a little to make it compile too. Also, I thought that Gnome widgets were cross-platform - that's why you can get the GIMP and Pidgin on Windows.
do not forget to *ENJOY THE SAUCE*
Zucca
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I once chat with one guy who has made some really serious improvements on Linux Gens. I still have the sources here. You can try to contact him somehow. His nick was wah_wah_69. Here's some links to forum topics about this fork: - the most earliest forum post where he/she annouced his fork of gens (that I could find). - forum post were I was posting
trazz wrote:
Killing the skeletons sooner or letting the skeletons live (unlive?) won't affect that at all.
Zucca
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I've talked to GerbilSoft. He said that he will include recording capabilities eventually (and that's what reads in the docs). I guess he will be the answer to Linux port of Gens recording project. He's already made really good work with Gens/GS.
trazz wrote:
Killing the skeletons sooner or letting the skeletons live (unlive?) won't affect that at all.
Joined: 11/1/2007
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If there's a working -recent- build of Gens, what stops someone from just forking and porting the rerecord patch?
Joined: 12/5/2007
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While I'm looking forward to actually seeing something newer than 9f or so (still 2.1 on Linux), why not try and fix svn of the version we already use? This way we won't run into two versions with possibly different sync.
upthorn
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ccfreak2k wrote:
If there's a working -recent- build of Gens, what stops someone from just forking and porting the rerecord patch?
Possibility of different sync, and the current Linux version started from an earlier release of gens than the current rerecording version, so it returns everything from C++ to plain C, which makes some of the improvements impossible just to straight-port over to that. Additionally, at this point, it is probably less works to take the current rerecording SVN code and fix it for linux compatibility, than it would be to take the Linux code and duplicate all the rerecording improvements. For what it's worth, there's already been a branch made for that purpose, but the guy who was going to be working on it has been really busy (and also kind of got bored with the TAS community...).
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
Zucca
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ShinyDoofy wrote:
While I'm looking forward to actually seeing something newer than 9f or so (still 2.1 on Linux)...
Gens/GS is for Win and Lin.
trazz wrote:
Killing the skeletons sooner or letting the skeletons live (unlive?) won't affect that at all.
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Sorry for years old bump, but I am really interested in what the outcome of this thread ever was. I know of the Grrl branch of Gens, but it has been outdated for a LONG time. Is there an updated linux version of Gens rerecording these days? The reason why I am asking is that the current version as of this date does not work well for me in wine. A native gens-rr would be nice, and of course preferably with GUI and hotkeys equal to the windows version. Cheers
upthorn
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There is not. I don't use linux, and I've not had any success recruiting anybody who knows how to program for linux to help create a version that runs under linux. The one time I thought I'd been able to, the guy ended up creating his own separate branch of gens that had nothign to do with rerecording...
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.
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Sad to hear that. You could still use VirtualBox to install various linux distros in. Virtualbox is free and really good I must say. I've been using it a lot. Get it at https://www.virtualbox.org/ I don't know how to program, but would gladly help out with anything you can use me for. Testing etc maybe? Potential programmers should be quite easy to find around here, unless they are busy with their own stuff of course? Would it be possible to use any parts of the last build of Grrl or is that a completely different branch?
WST
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I have to run gens-rerecording in wine. It takes all available CPU time and runs not so smooth as the native version. Same wish, it would be great to be able to run gens-rerecording natively under Linux (and other UNIX systems too!)
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