Exult Ported To Haiku
Earlier this month, one Michael Peppers uploaded a port of Exult (the latest version, 1.49rc1) to Haikuware, an online software repository for the Haiku OS (an open-source OS inspired by the ancient BeOS operating system).
It’s not a perfect port; Peppers had to subtract a couple of features during the process:
– It doesn’t play MIDI music, not even using Timidity (can somebody test and confirm this? It may be also a problem on my end). There is even a legacy “be_midi” driver, among others, in the code, but it should be updated to support Haiku, as it doesn’t compile. Exult’s own digital audio, on the other hand, plays fine, but I didn’t include it since it is a rather big download. If you want it, here is the Exult digital audio pack; unzip it into the “/boot/apps/exult/data/” folder, then enable the digital music and SFX from the “Audio Options” menu.
– Exult Studio (U7 map/mod editor) is not included as it depends on GTK+.
Still, for those of you who might have been experimenting with Haiku, you now have the ability and option to get Exult — and thus The Black Gate and Serpent Isle — running on your Haiku-powered computer.
Naturally, I’ve added a download to the Exult project entry.
While it’s great to see Exult ported it’s also a bit sad to witness another port that seems to have no interest to submit a patch with needed changes upstream ;(
Sometime ago this behavoiur of submitting patches turned ;(
There was a port to iOS floating around right? Any change I can beta-test it on my iPad/iphone?
not yet. Fortunately the ios port is done directly in our SVN. If you can compile ios stuff yourself you can give it a try. No binary to test yet.
“ancient BeOS operating system”
haha… this sort of comment makes me wonder what you think of AmigaOS or some of the other operating systems released in the 1980s.
I would argue that “ancient” in a computing context implies a much shorter span of time than in…say…the context of societies or physical structures. The term is relative.
Example: Windows 95 is, arguably, ancient as operating systems go…and Windows 3.1 more so. Both of these date back to the 1990s.
Canada (dating back to the 1860s) and my parents’ house (dating back to the 1970s) are, on the other hand, not ancient.
It really depends what’s being referred to, in other words.
@Dominus: I see what you mean with your comment, however the build I made and uploaded to Haikuware is more of a test than a serious porting attempt. My intention was just to test Exult (and play U7) on Haiku; when I found out it worked *almost* flawlessy (on an EeePC 701, no less!) I decided to upload it for the sake of Haikuware’s community. As a test, I did things very quickly, butchering stuff way more than patching it. Now that I know exactly what to tweak and where, when a new build of Exult will be required for Haiku I’ll be sure to make patches and send them upstream to the Exult team.
That said, porting Exult is a piece of cake, and for that we must thank its developer team for putting a lot of effort on trying to be as cross-platform as possible. (Team of which, btw, I know you’re part of, Dominus 😉 )