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DJDEV 2.04 "beta" (2003) and CVS (Announce)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 01.12.2011, 06:33

(this thread is already too long, sorry!!, but just to clarify ...)

> V 2.04 is not finished but there are recent updates of DJDEV 2.04
2.04 is "beta", but they haven't had a release manager since then (Andrew Cottrell??). At one point [2009?] CWS almost (?) seemed to suggest I do it. (Uh ....) I have no idea how to do that (or anything)! The stock DJDEV204.ZIP is from late 2003 (approx. 8 years ago) though yes, some CVS updates have happened since then, just no official release. (IIRC, there are only 8 people with CVS access, and I'm certainly not one of them. To say that development has slowed and "almost" died is an understatement. It's been said that "nobody wanted it badly enough", and perhaps [almost definitely] I've noticed that some of them have "moved on" to other platforms. Most of the recent ports have been done by Juan, and I'm hugely thankful, but I'm surprised too.)

> by author
> of new Hexen II engine and it seems to work fine. It's necessary to update
> if you want to use latest GCC 4.6.x correctly.
Yes, Ozkan is one of the maintainers of Hexen 2 (which I finally purchased a used CD of just to test the full game, heh, 1997 id Tech 1 ftw!). It works in pure DOS now (and 1.5.1 was just released a few days ago) by clamping memory to 2 GB or less. (Previously it accidentally tried to malloc a negative number as it had lots of old hacks from when CWS tried to get Quake [DJGPP 2.00 beta 3] to run in Win95 in 16 MB or less.)

IIRC, all Ozkan did here was recompile one of the latest CVS releases (from Martin's page??), nothing else. It seems to work in Hexen 2, but I've not used his DJDEV CVS snapshot for rebuilding anything, so I don't know otherwise how good it is. ("if you want to use latest GCC 4.6.x correctly" ... I don't know what that means, and I halfway doubt it. It works, more or less, with stock 2.04 "beta" from 2003. I haven't checked, but I assume it was also compiled with similar library version. EDIT: Hmmm, no, apparently not, it must use Ozkan's compile. That's weird for an "official" DJGPP GCC release. BinUtils 2.21.1 still used stock 2.04.)

> I use this updated DJDEV, GCC 4.6.2 and CWSDPMI 7 on PC with 4GB and it
> works fine.
"Works fine" is very very generic. I'm not doubting you except from my own experience. IMO, DJGPP is rock solid ("like VMS", says CWS). I know CWS thinks highly of its "well-debugged code". Of course, Japheth would probably do a spittake if he read that. ;-) Some people are pickier than others. (cm dislikes CWSDPMI as buggy, for instance. I always thought it worked fine, or at least plenty good enough.)

I'm ashamed to admit that I had to get a new Win7 Core i5 (6 GB) machine because my old XP P4 machine (128 MB RAM ftw!) died. Does it work with native FreeDOS? More or less. Hexen 2 (now) works okay (without sound, natch), but other stuff (Seed7 compiler + GCC) has issues. In short, I'm not sure most (if any) DOS software was ever truly expected to handle 2 GB, much less 4 GB, or 6 GB. At least, r7 is the only one even noticing 4 GB, and it's got a few (newly-found) bugs. HDPMI32 only recognizes 2.6 GB or such (similar to largest free XMS block, ??), but even it is not flawless. Dunno, maybe it's this weird machine, maybe it's just some "dark corners" in various software, but it's certainly not perfect (sadly). Old classic CWSDPMI r5 has issues too (sees 1.8 GB), so nobody is safe. (And GCC hogging hundreds of megs of RAM just for silly optimizations doesn't help either.)

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