Tink in IT

Found a nice flash game. Its called Captain Forever, you are a space ship and everyone is trying to kill you. You upgrade your ship by destroying others and salvaging their modules. Its pretty nice.

See http://www.captainforever.com/captainforever.php

This page is about me trying to learn about creating an Operating System.
I started out trying to do this all in Windows and Mac OS X. However most tutorials and the required software is all written for linux. (Note while OS X has much similarities with linux the default ld command doesn’t work as shown in any of the tutorials.)

I set up a linux box with Ubuntu server and followed the Putty instructions on SSH Authentication so I don’t have to type in a password and a shortcut aswell. If you don’t have the hardware, I used VirtualBox on my Mac to run Ubuntu server. That will work for windows too and so will Microsoft VirtualPC.

I downloaded and installed the following:

• Bochs IA-32 Emulator - The docs are here - sudo apt-get install bochs bochs-x
• Putty and PuttyGen - SSH Auth instructions Here
• XMING - So You can do X11 forwarding. See this page at UNSW for info.
• sudo apt-get install binutils nasm make bison flex

Important Documents and Sites:

• Intel Manuals. Intel will deliver you these if you follow the links on the site.
• OSDev
• OSDever
• JamesMolly
• OSRC
• OSKit (Bunch of Libraries and stuff to help you build your OS)
• http://www.brackeen.com/ - Video stuff maybe useful later.

Book: Beginning 3D Game Programming by Tom Miller
I bought the book with the same name as the title to this post.
Two things to note:

1. The book code does not match the code on the cd.
2. I couldn’t get the source code to compile in Visual Studio 2005 using the instructions in the book. I googled around and found Tom Miller’s blog and then a link to zman’s site which had some updated code. So if you have this book then run around to http://www.thezbuffer.com and you can find the code in the downloads section. NOTE: That site has some adult advertisements, none seem to be hardcore.

Some Links:

• NeHe - Good site with lots of tutorials, not as clean as the above but more there.
• SDL - I need to look into this a bit more, seems like the way to go.
• Lazy Foo SDL Tutorials
• Some Photoshop stuff
• Game States
• Some C++ reference

My Simple Game Code
I have done a little bit of work and have gotten a BASIC asteroids clone done (just a player that can move and shoot (only 4 bullets on the screen at once ATM). There is enough there to strip out the files in the Game Group in Xcode (as long as there is the Game.h and Game.cpp files with the right methods), and replace with whatever you want.
Here is the Game Xcode project

Other Thoughts

• See std::cin.peek for handling input in a simple text based game.

Unreal Anthology and Linux
I spent a little bit of time getting my Unreal Anthology pack to work under Ubuntu 7.04. This pack only has the windows installer whereas some of the individual games had linux installers. If you don't have a linux installer this may help you. So far I’ve only tried Unreal Tournament 2004, or 2k4.

Here are the steps I followed to get it working:

1. Install Unreal Tournament in Windows and copy the install directory over to your linux machine. You may be able to use WINE to install the game if you do not have Windows.
2. Download the linux patch for the game and extract it into your game directory. You can get a copy of the patch on the Files Page.
3. You need to copy some libraries to your UT2004/System directory.
   1. You need openal.so and libSDL-1.2.so.0.
   2. I found libSDL-1.2.so.0 in my /usr/lib dir.
   3. I had to apt-get install libopenalpp-cvs1 and then cp /usr/lib/libopenalpp.so.1.0.0 to openal.so in my UT2004/System dir.
   4. Apparently you should use libopenal.so.0 instead. But it worked for me.
4. Create a file in your UT2004/System called CDKey with your anthology cd key.
5. Run UT2004/System/ut2004-bin and enjoy.

If anyone wants me to try and get the other games working let me know and I can try that.

I found how to do this from these websites:
Some forum with most of the useful info.
An Ubuntu forum which I used to find where to get openal and get that working (the openal instructions from the above link didn’t work for me).

Command and Conquer Gold FREE

Westwood/EA has released Command and Conquer gold for free. I tried downloading from their site but their links were broken for me. Internode also has the iso’s available.

You need 3 files:

• NOD ISO
• GDI ISO
• Windows XP fix.

I haven't tried playing this in Vista.