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[John Hopoate]

How do you think it'd do on ARM?

ARM chips all use less  than one watt of power so that's a big no no

What's that got to do with anything?

Almost all desktop CPUs use over 30w of power, most use over 65w.

I meant what's power usage got to do with anything?

Do you suppose that ARM has some sort of magical technology that makes them more than ten times more power efficient than Intel or AMD in single threaded applications? Do you imagine for a second that your dinky little mobile phone might have the guts to run something that the latest desktop CPU's run less than ideally in certain circumstances? If you've answered yes to either of these questions then you're being very unrealistic.

[Jamp]

I dont know very much about this, but intel architecture is known for being bloated and not designed well, due to backwards compatibility dating to 80's (or whatever). ARM and others are designed from scratch, so they can use more modern internals, being equally powerful at lower power. And when you are talking about mobile not able to run moderns apps, I doubt you can put your PC in your pocket...

[vegai]

How do you think it'd do on ARM?

ARM chips all use less  than one watt of power so that's a big no no

Frankly I think that Toady could be putting his time to better use by re-programming Dwarf Fortress to run on OS/2 Warp than listening to any of the other suggestions in this thread

Could be. Most probably (since we all know that Toady is a good programmer and a great human being), this "porting" process would be nothing more than a simple rebuild. That's how it is for just about every other piece of software I've faced so far.

[Dabi]

This thread feels somewhat pointless to me and is only headed in one direction. 

[Kogan Loloklam]

This thread feels somewhat pointless to me and is only headed in one direction. 

Yep, Forward.
I don't see how there should be a problem requesting compatibility. Just because only one person claims to use it doesn't mean there aren't two hundred out there not saying anything.

I do think that if the OP wants this, getting Toady a box to test it on and convert Kobold Quest for an example of what is needed would be the best start. Same to anyone else who wants it and hasn't chimed in. You want it, put your money and effort where your mouth is. Show how badly you want it.

[Daenyth]

Look, that's all besides the point. The problem is that in order for Toady to push out a PPC linux binary, he'd need to have yet another box to compile on... Unless he can get a dual boot system going for the Mac he compiles the mac ppc version on.

He doesn't need another box to test on. His existing linux build box will work fine provided he installs/compiles a ppc cross-compiler. You can compile binaries for architectures other than that of the host machine. The tricker part would probably be the libraries.

[immibis]

I dont know very much about this, but intel architecture is known for being bloated and not designed well, due to backwards compatibility dating to 80's (or whatever). ARM and others are designed from scratch, so they can use more modern internals, being equally powerful at lower power. And when you are talking about mobile not able to run moderns apps, I doubt you can put your PC in your pocket...

Not to mention Intel processors need more instructions to do the same thing, and more clock cycles per instruction. And ARM has more registers than x86 (but the same as x64).

The line of code: "a = b > c ? b : c" could be translated into assembly code for each processor like this:
x86:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Code: [Select]

; a is in eax, b in ebx and c in ecx
CMP ebx, ecx
JG label1
MOV eax, ecx
JMP label2
label1:
MOV eax, ebx
label2:


ARM:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Code: [Select]

@ a is in r0, b in r1, c in r2
CMP r1, r2
MOVGT r0, r1
MOVLE r0, r2


[vegai]

This thread feels somewhat pointless to me and is only headed in one direction. 

Yep, Forward.
I don't see how there should be a problem requesting compatibility. Just because only one person claims to use it doesn't mean there aren't two hundred out there not saying anything.

I do think that if the OP wants this, getting Toady a box to test it

This I could do, actually. I have a mac mini that's running Arch Linux PPC right now. How to get it to him though... I suppose there's no sort of NDA we could conjure up that would allow me to do the builds?

on and convert Kobold Quest for an example of what is needed would be the best start. Same to anyone else who wants it and hasn't chimed in. You want it, put your money and effort where your mouth is. Show how badly you want it.

This seems like a much higher hurdle than porting actual DF: since DF is already ported to Linux, getting a ppc version up is probably just a case of rebuild.



By the way:

[vegai@mini Dwarf-Fortress--libgraphics-]$ scons
scons: Reading SConscript files ...
scons: done reading SConscript files.
scons: Building targets ...
scons: `.' is up to date.
scons: done building targets.

OpenGL/SDL DF 40d19 from git just built without any changes.

[Kogan Loloklam]

Ask him for the Kobold Quest Linux build. Someone made it, I think? That means Toady probably has it around somewhere. Don't count on getting the DF stuff. That's Toady's baby, and he won't let no-one defile it.

Effort in is good coinage for a moment of his time. Start showing how you did it in such a manner that would catch the interest of people who like this sort of thing.