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[wierd]

Basically, I got DF running natively on an android tablet today. (and a cheap one at that.)


Preamble:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Last night, I decided that I deserved a new toy, so I bought myself a cheap tablet from Walmart.

Now, Intel has been pushing to get its Atom based SoCs into the tablet space for some time now, and this particular tablet has such a beast inside. 

The tablet in question is a 78$ special: A Nextbook Ares 8.

Before purchasing, I whipped out my phone to check and make sure the tablet is able to get root access, because it is necessary to use linux deploy. (a tool to set up a chrooted linux environment on android tablets. To set up the chroot, you need root access.)

Sure enough, it has instructions on XDA forums. Cranky, easy to screw up and brick the tablet instructions, but they work.  I followed them, unencrypted the tablet, installed custom recovery, installed supersu from the custom recovery, flashed an unlocked bootloader, and the tablet was mine.

This tablet has 1gb of RAM, 10gb of internal flash storage, and comes from the factory with zram swap enabled. It has a 64bit quad core intel atom SoC. It is suitable for running the linux flavor of DF without any emulation.

I installed busybox, linux deploy, and a vnc client to talk to it with.  For the linux deploy, I used the 64bit ubuntu Trusty option, on a 4gb image file container. For shits and giggles, I installed WINE as well. will test that later.

After installing all the necessary libs, and disabling sound, I was pleased to see that DF linux runs nicely. Generated a small region to 1000 years history in just a few minutes.

I will edit this post with pics of it running shortly. Well, sometime tonight anyway.

But suffice it to say, this is totally a thing that can be done, if the tablet is atom based.

I will see just how stressed I can make it before it becomes unplayable. The tablet has zram baked into the kernel, and with root access I can adjust how big the compressed ram swap space is, and with it being quad core, the cpu hit shouldnt be a problem. I think it should be able to handle medium size worlds with some jiggery pokery.

And they said it couldnt be done.....


Ok, as they say, "pics, or it didn't happen"--

here they are.

[wierd]

Now with pictures!

Let me know if you want video.

[MoonyTheHuman]

Amazing, i now am going to root my tablet the moment i can c:

[sirdanilot]

That is awesome !

See how far you can take it.

DF in the airplane, in the bus, while waiting for your train... !!!
(yes of course that can be done on a laptop too, but how cool is it to do that on a tablet)

[wierd]

Amazing, i now am going to root my tablet the moment i can c:

It absolutely MUST be an atom based tablet!!  Atom CPUs are extremely low power x86 CPUs, which are what DF is compiled for. 

But still, Yeah. This totally works, if your tablet has the right chip in it. The one I bought does.

[MoonyTheHuman]

Amazing, i now am going to root my tablet the moment i can c:

It absolutely MUST be an atom based tablet!!  Atom CPUs are extremely low power x86 CPUs, which are what DF is compiled for. 

But still, Yeah. This totally works, if your tablet has the right chip in it. The one I bought does.

most android tablets run atoms these days :p

[wierd]

Most of the more expensive ones at Walmart were ARM based systems. Hmm. I know intel has been pushing pretty hard, but I think ARM still has the advantage on battery life.

But if you want to run DF, you need Intel Atom.

Anyhow, yup. This is a thing. My tablet's battery is very low, so I am not going to play with it tonight.

When picking a VNC viewer from the playstore, I use bVNC. It gives you arrow keys and ctrl, shift, and alt keys. Most of the others dont give you those. It also supports encrypted SSH tunnelling for the VNC sessions, which is a feature most others dont have. YMMV.

[Linkxsc]

All my tablts are ARM.
=(

Well hows the game run, id assume kinda slow. But a 2x2 embark shouldnt be super bad.

[WillowLuman]

I guess the obvious question is how does the FPS compare?
But seriously, this is neat. Perhaps one day, on my phone (on second thought, the eyestrain...)

[wierd]

It chewed through a custom parameters small region gen to 1050 years in just a few minutes. I had caves and megabeasts turned up.

I havent really playtested yet. I will experiment with different sizes of zram swap space, and see how performance vs capability are affected.  (I can theoretically get 1gb of swapped out pages to fit in a 500mb zram allocation, since DF's memory compresses really well. That should get me close to 2gb of effective "memory" before I run out, which should be enough for medium worlds... in theory.)

Since it is quad core, and DF is single threaded, the zram compress/decompress can happen on less busy cores, and not interfere with the DF process itself.  also in theory.

I am not expecting this to run like it does on my i7...  But if it can handle a typical 4x4 embark on a medium world, I will be impressed.  We'll see once the battery fills back up. (they never ship these things with a full battery.)

[WillowLuman]

It's a shame DF mouseclick controls are so iffy. The current menus would actually translate pretty well if you could just click the indicated green keys in each menu.

[wierd]

Initial testing shows that medium worlds may be a bit much for this tablet.

Stock medium worlds (medium everything) has the game hitting 0fps at 100% cpu, and 250ish MB of swap by the time it hits year 150 of worldgen.  The "bootup" default parameter for the zram swap space is 256mb.

I have bumped the size up to 500mb, and am going to see how long it takes to exhaust available memory. This will let me know the maximum number of years a stock medium worldgen can run.

Once I have a medium world made, I will start play testing.

[Skorpion]

So, uh, how does it run, how long does it run FOR, and does it try to go all china syndrome and melt it's way through the surface?

[Diamond]

As you seem to be playing without graphic sets, you would be better off picking up a telnet client for android and running DF with dfterm (the second) on a remote PC, thus only being limited by your internet connection. And that PCs hardware. And electricity bills. And your imagination. And absence of proper keyboard. And...

[wierd]

I can just as easily set it to ncurses mode, and invoke over local ssh, using something like connectbot.

the point is that the process is running *ON* the tablet, not how I access it.

I am thinking the longest history I can safely generate on a medium world is 150 years. It gobbles up too much memory and freaks the tablet out otherwise.

The small region I generated earlier tonight went without issue, and went through 1050 years.

I want to play with several world sizes to see where the happy medium is.

From a full charge, android estimates 5 hours of runtime with DF going balls to the wall on worldgen.