Bay 12 Games Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

Author Topic: Dwarf fortress on a kindle 3?  (Read 701 times)

Thedogjob

  • Escaped Lunatic
    • View Profile
Dwarf fortress on a kindle 3?
« on: June 23, 2013, 07:23:14 am »

Recently I've been thinking, "would it be possible to make a kindle the (the one with the keyboard) into a portable df machine" I was doing some research, and apparently you can jailbreak it to run a terminal, I was thinking I could install df on the kindle from a computer, and then run it using a terminal command. So my questions are;

1) Is it even possible to get df on a kindle and run it in the first place?
2) Does the kindle have enough processing power to run df?

Now I did a little research into number 2 as well. The kindle has, for technical specs;
CPU: Freescale i.MX35 (ARM1136JF-S core, 532MHz)
Memory: 256MB RAM, 4GB Flash (~3.3GB user accessible)
Processor: ARMv6-compatible processor rev 3 (v6l)

If anyone could answer these questions and maybe supply some information on how to go about installing and running it I would be forever grateful.
Logged

Boltgun

  • Bay Watcher
  • [UTTERANCES]
    • View Profile
Re: Dwarf fortress on a kindle 3?
« Reply #1 on: June 23, 2013, 07:48:15 am »

It get asked often, but mobile devices running an ARM chip cannot run DF.
We'll have to wait for a virtualization solution and faster devices before it is even possible.

So short answer : nope.
Logged

Toxicshadow

  • Bay Watcher
    • View Profile
    • github
Re: Dwarf fortress on a kindle 3?
« Reply #2 on: June 23, 2013, 01:06:19 pm »

It get asked often, but mobile devices running an ARM chip cannot run DF.
We'll have to wait for a virtualization solution and faster devices before it is even possible.

So short answer : nope.
No offense OP, this needs to be stickied.  Also see, Running Dwarf Fortress On BeagleBone Black - Mobile DF

Thanks for pointing out the instruction set issue.  I might be able to still run DF using a tool like Wine.  I'll have to time in the weekend to see if I can compile Wine on the board and then I can see what the DF's performance is like.

Wine stands for WINE Is Not an Emulator. It provides the Windows API on Linux, it doesn't emulate CPU instructions. ARM CPUs will not run applications compiled for x86 without virtualization courtesy of qemu. Performance will suffer because ARM doesn't have much hardware support for virtualization, unlike x86 & x64.

In short, your only option is to run an x86 operating system inside of an emulated x86. This will not be "cheap" in terms of CPU, and DF will require more processing speed (as many a fort can attest) than this scheme will likely give you. Getting DF to run doing this will likely work. Getting DF to run well, on the other hand, will likely not.
Logged
Quote
'ere the Chias get hungry...

Putnam

  • Bay Watcher
  • DAT WIZARD
    • View Profile
Re: Dwarf fortress on a kindle 3?
« Reply #3 on: June 23, 2013, 02:34:34 pm »

Read the OP. He's talking about using DFTerm to run Dwarf Fortress on his computer then using his kindle to access DF.

EDIT: read as "install onto computer then run from terminal", not "install from computer through terminal" :X

Boltgun

  • Bay Watcher
  • [UTTERANCES]
    • View Profile
Re: Dwarf fortress on a kindle 3?
« Reply #4 on: June 23, 2013, 05:37:21 pm »

My bad, using a terminal to connect on a computer running df is definitely possible.
In that case even a screen sharing solution could work.
Logged