A free port of 3D death match game Quake 2 is on the cards after a programmer married the game's source code with the Iyonix's graphics acceleration. The alpha-quality RISC OS port, produced by Dave Brown, uses the OpenGL-compatible IyonixMesa library - which employs the 3D features in the Castle Iyonix's PCI GeForce graphics cards. Dave uploaded his efforts to the Internet earlier today, complete with source code and a pre-built version using the GCCSDK.Published in December 1997, Quake 2 was made open source in 2001 by developers id, although you need to buy the game to get the official level designs, textures and other data to play. Dave admitted that the software needs speeding up to be playable, but suggested a number of ways in which this could be achieved - such as including DMA support in IyonixMesa and tackling the library's use of floating point math.
IyonixMesa developer Simon Wilson has said he will look into the DMA issue, and added that a fixed point OpenGL ES driver is possible and would be sufficiently quick on the 600MHz Iyonix. Simon also reported a show stopping problem with the newer GeForce FX cards used in the Iyonix and his IyonixMesa software, although he believes DMA support will address this.
According to Dave, the game currently "crashes a fair bit and is pretty slow", requires RISC OS 5.10 and a GeForce2 MX card, doesn't support sound, leaves dynamic areas behind, and has yet to be documented. The port was first started on Dave's RiscPC, but was shelved until he bought and Iyonix and made the software 32bit-compatible. An A9home and RiscPC version may also be possible using a software OpenGL driver. Development of the port was first discussed on the Iconbar forums.
Dave said: "It's very difficult to say how long it will be until it's fast enough to be properly playable. It also needs a fair bit of tidying up to make it 'consumer grade'. I guess the best thing to do is just watch this space. As they say, in Duke Nukem Forever style, it'll be done when it's done.
"Personally, I've no interest in attempting to make any money out of it. THe port is for my own and hopefully others' entertainment. As Quake 2 was released under the GPL, this port will be under the same licence."
• According to Jeffrey Lee, punters need to download a PC demo installer, set its type to
&DDC (Archive), open it, and copy Install.Data.baseq2 to somewhere on your hard disc. Then edit !GLQuake2.!Run so that the Dir command is set to the directory containing your baseq2 file. Then at the game's console, type 'map demo1' to start a new game. The same can be done with the official game CD, and the Install.Data directory on it.