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[izackp]

Hi,
    I would really like to play dwarf fortress on the go with my tablet. I'm sure many other people would too. I dont imagine it would be difficult to port a text only mode of the linux DF build to the ARM architecture... If you don't want to do it, heck I would do it. Email me

isaac(a.t)justecho.com 

[MonkeyHead]

Ah, this old one again. Repeat after me: "The processor in my tablet would only run DF at a crawl, making the effort to translate the code a waste of time". Well done.

[izackp]

There are tablets running faster than my laptop with quad cores. None the less the effort should be nontrivial considering it isn't a crazy coded mess.. even then it shouldn't be too bad.

Source: Senior Mobile Developer (myself)

[Footkerchief]

Search before posting.  A preexisting thread came up from a simple search for "ARM architecture".

[izackp]

Creating an iphone version would require porting the graphics code, file system code, and a bunch of iphone specific stuff. What I'm asking is to port the linux version with text only mode.. Which only requires removing the graphics code. I don't really want to debate anything or reasons why it won't happen. This is the suggestions section and I'm making meh suggestion.

[zwei]

Search before posting.  A preexisting thread came up from a simple search for "ARM architecture".

To be honest, that thread is 3 years old ...

Jokes about portale hardware not being powerfull enough for DF and iphones melting are no longer based on reality.

I would support ARM port purely because porting C application to alien architecture reveals many subtle bugs and leads to usefull refactoring.

[Maklak]

> I would support ARM port purely because porting C application to alien architecture reveals many subtle bugs and leads to usefull refactoring.

An x86_64 version would also help with this and might actually be faster and not crash during large worldgens. So I support it over ARM port.

[betaking]

I would rather have DF be optimized for x64 architecture, (including multiple thread utilization). In addition to offloading processes to the GPU rather than place them all on the CPU.

[JanusTwoface]

The problem with pretty much all of these is that while they're pretty much trivial for a well designed code base and someone that knows a bit about the process, DF and Toady are not particularly either one of these. From what I've heard, the code base is over a decade old and sort of a hybrid mess of C and C++. It works well enough and Toady has been working on it long enough that he can do what needs to be done with it, but I have a strong suspicion that it's not the cleanest code. Although it probably doesn't use anything too exotic at least, which should help with the cross compiling.

But the bigger problem (this applies even more to threading or GPU support) is that Toady just doesn't know how to do it. And so far as we've been able to tell, doesn't want to take the time to learn. Neither threading nor GPU is particularly easy to do right (and if you don't do it right, you're more likely than not to get no speed improvement while introducing painful to debug bugs).

I think of everything presented, compiling for 64-bit should be the easiest (some people have already done similar things with third party tools, IIRC) and probably has the most short term benefit, particularly if you try running Stonesense with DF (since they share the same memory pool now, I think?).

[roothorick]

Ah, this old one again. Repeat after me: "The processor in my tablet would only run DF at a crawl, making the effort to translate the code a waste of time". Well done.

If my Turion64 X2 TL-60 laptop can run Dwarf Fortress, my Tegra 250 AP20H cellphone will only run it better, kthx.

That said, cellphone UI? blech.

[MonkeyHead]

Ah, this old one again. Repeat after me: "The processor in my tablet would only run DF at a crawl, making the effort to translate the code a waste of time". Well done.

If my Turion64 X2 TL-60 laptop can run Dwarf Fortress, my Tegra 250 AP20H cellphone will only run it better, kthx.

That said, cellphone UI? blech.

*Googles the processors in said cellphone*

A max of 1GHz? Not bad.

*Googles processor in said laptop*

2 GHz...

On my laptop (2GHz processor) I still have to use small maps, turn off temperature and weather, and lower the PopCap to end up with a playable mid to late game fort. Whilst the phone processor would run DF reasonably well if you applied the same settings (dont know enough about RAM etc to make much more of a comment than that), I doubt it would be better than the Laptop.

But yea, it would seem ARM processors are catching up. Not quite there yet though.