Bug#701561: Please test ioquake3 on PowerPC, particularly without Altivec

Simon McVittie smcv at debian.org
Tue Jun 4 09:43:39 UTC 2013


Hi debian-powerpc,
Could someone please test a patched ioquake3 on PowerPC, preferably one
without Altivec? Please reply to me or to the bug, I'm not subscribed to
debian-powerpc.

You will need 3D acceleration supported by Linux (which probably means
some sort of ATI/AMD or nVidia). Testing on any of these platforms is
welcome, as long as you know which one you're using:

* PowerPC with no Altivec (e.g. Mac G3)
* PowerPC with Altivec (e.g. Mac G4/G5)
* powerpcspe with no Altivec

Please test ioquake3 from Debian unstable, with the attached patch applied.
Testing the unpatched ioquake3 from unstable for comparison would also
be helpful.

Brief background, from #701561: ioquake3 currently always builds with Altivec.
This causes it to FTBFS on powerpcspe (where Altivec doesn't exist),
and only work on a subset of supported powerpc machines (since, AIUI,
Debian still supports G3 Macs and other non-Altivec PowerPCs).
I would like to fix this, but I don't have a working PowerPC, and
I'm concerned that the bytecode JIT might have a hidden dependency on Altivec.

You can test the engine using either Quake III Arena (non-distributable,
but somewhat easier) or OpenArena (DFSG-free). Instructions below.

Thanks,
    S

Testing with Quake III Arena
----------------------------

If you have a copy of Quake III Arena for any platform (the only bit you
actually need from the retail game is baseq3/pak0.pk3), please try with
Debian's contrib quake3 package. game-data-packager can package the
necessary non-distributable data to get this working.

Testing with OpenArena
----------------------

This is a bit more involved, because the Debian package doesn't normally
use the bytecode JIT, and that's the part I'm worried about:

* Install Debian's openarena package

* Download http://www.pseudorandom.co.uk/~smcv/oa088upstream/vms.pk3
  and put it in ~/.openarena/oa088upstream/vms.pk3
  (it contains bytecode executables for the UI, server-side game and
  client-side game - we ship that part of OpenArena as native-code in Debian
  because it needs to be compiled with a non-DFSG compiler)

* Start openarena from a terminal

* Go to the Mods menu

* Select "oa088upstream" and click Load

* Open the console (Shift+Escape), you should see messages like this
  near the end:

  > Loading vm file vm/ui.qvm...
  > File "vm/ui.qvm" found in "/home/smcv/.openarena/oa088upstream/vms.pk3"
  > ...which has vmMagic VM_MAGIC_VER2

  If you see something about "DLL files" near the end instead, then the
  package of bytecode has not worked and I'll have to provide better
  instructions.

* Close the console (Shift+Escape).

* Start a single-player game and try it.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: ioquake3-noaltivec.patch
Type: text/x-diff
Size: 6075 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-games-devel/attachments/20130604/6c334c0e/attachment-0001.patch>


More information about the Pkg-games-devel mailing list