GemRB Port Request/Idea.

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hilltopper06
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GemRB Port Request/Idea.

Post by hilltopper06 »

From developer's site:
GemRB (Game engine made with preRendered Background) is a portable open-source implementation of Bioware's Infinity Engine which was written to support pseudo-3D role playing games based on the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset. It should run on GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, OS X and possibly other UNIX derivatives. It is licensed under the GPL.
Not sure what the requirements are from a hardware perspective (I would think the DC could handle it if certain PDA type phones are). If someone could take a look at this, it would be a great way to play some classics (like Baldur's Gate, BG2, Icewind Dale, Planescape Torment) on the DC. Just an idea, thanks for any responses.

http://linux.prinas.si/gemrb/doku.php

Source code is on their sourceforge site

http://sourceforge.net/projects/gemrb/files/

Thanks again!
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Re: GemRB Port Request/Idea.

Post by hilltopper06 »

Sorry to self bump, I just wanted to add some additional info that I have found. This is from the README in the source code.
G E M R B
*********
$Id: README 5508 2009-01-02 10:59:55Z lynxlupodian $


GemRB (Game Engine Made with preRendered Background) is a "port"
(actually a new implementation) of the original Infinity Engine (the one
of Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Planescape: Torment, ...) to
Linux/Unix, MacOS X and Windows with some enhancements. Would you like to
create a game like Baldur's Gate?

It means that you either need some of the original game's data
somewhere on your harddisk, or you can try to use the data from the
Dragonlance Total Conversion project - see the link below.

The original game data has to be installed on a windows
partition and mounted to your Linux/Unix filesystem, installed on
windows and then copied to your filesystem, installed with WINE or
extracted manually from the CDs using the tool `unshield'.


What little documentation exists is mostly in gemrb/docs/en/ and
subdirectories, the gemrb.6 man page and this file.

Supported (i.e. we got reports about successfully running GemRB) systems:

Linux x86, x86-64, ppc
FreeBSD x86
MS Windows (98, XP or Vista)
some Nokia N8x0 systems
various Macintosh systems (even pre x86) also should work ...

Requirements:

SDL 1.2
OpenAL 0.0.7 or above, (not required if you don't want sound)
Python 2.2 or above, with shared libs (binaries are compiled with 2.5!)
ZLib 1.2
Png 1.2 (optional)

If you compile from source, you will need the development packages!

Contacts
--------

Our homepage:
http://gemrb.sourceforge.net

Our project at sourceforge.net:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gemrb

New GemRB forum (users):
http://forums.gibberlings3.net/index.php?showforum=91

IRC channel:
The best way to talk with us is by joining the #GemRB channel
on the FreeNode IRC network. There's somebody to talk with most of
the time.


Useful links
------------

IESDP, documentation for the Infinity Engine file formats and more:
http://iesdp.gibberlings3.net/

Near Infinity, Java viewer and editor for data files of the original games:
http://www.idi.ntnu.no/~joh/ni/index.html

DLTCEP, MS Windows viewer and editor for data files of the original games:
http://forums.gibberlings3.net/index.php?showforum=137

Unshield, extractor for .CAB files created by InstallShield
http://synce.sourceforge.net/synce/unshield.php

Valgrind, a powerful developer tool to fix programmer errors (leaks, buffer overflows and all the like that happen)
http://valgrind.org/

SDL, Simple Directmedia Layer, the graphical library used for GemRB
http://www.libsdl.org/index.php

OpenAL, Cross-Platform 3D audio libraries, the sound library used for GemRB
http://openal.org/

WINE, Open Source implementation of the Windows API, useful for installing the games
http://www.winehq.org
So from what I can tell it uses SDL for graphics (yay!) OpenAL for audio (not sure on this one) and you can acutally use this as an engine to make BG type games (also very cool). I notice it also uses python (not sure how nasty that would be to deal with). It also appears to work with pre-x86 OS X so there (hopefully) isn't any x86 assembly that would have to be removed.

Again, sorry for the self bump, I just wanted to add some more info that might give developers a better idea of how feasible this port would be. Thanks.
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