I've got Molk working and it boots Tiger. I'm trying to play a game called GridWars, which is written in BlitzMax. The game works fine on my Intel MacBook (though it's a PowerPC app). Under Molk, when the game runs, it crashes saying it has closed unexpectedly. The game can be found here. Is there anything I can try to get it working?

Thanks in advance.

hi!
afaik gridwars needs opengl, which isn't available in mol :(

You're right, it does need OpenGL. Is OpenGL support for MOL being worked on by any chance?

OpenGL for mol was quiet often discussed a longer time ago on the mol-mailing list.
As gentoo's josejx seems to be the only active developer
on mol (please correct me if i'm wrong :) ),
maybe he's the man to ask this :)
(no idea how hard it would be to implement this, but at
least for mol-fullscreen mode it could be more problematic
as some kind of opengl-wrapper under framebuffer is probably
impossible (?)

Thanks for the info frostwork. I will try to contact josejx and report back. I hope it's possible, as the alternative is buying a Mac Mini :? (unless somebody feels like porting GridWars to MorphOS 8) )

The port could be a problem as it is written in Blitz (?)...
I have seen GridWars, it's nice but there are better (opensource) games:
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/
http://homepage2.nifty.com/isshiki/
http://www.sjk.co.jp/c/w.exe?y=shinh.skr.jp/

They are all written in D.
A opensource D-gcc-frontend can be found here:
http://dgcc.sourceforge.net/

I'm trying (for a longer time already) to build them all
for linux-powerpc & several already work.
All others which don't work very likely have a ppc-problem in
bulletml-code ...
Any help is very welcome as those games simply rule!
(I already contacted several d-programmers & got friendly
help with other incompatibilites, but the bulletml "bug"
is still left)

I have seen those games, but GridWars is still my favourite. I found it when trying to find a Geometry Wars clone. I don't play Geometry Wars any more now I have GridWars :-)

GridWars is written in BlitzMax, a language of which I have no knowledge. The code is actually included in the GridWars archive, and I was able to recompile it as a native Intel Mac binary, and make some slight modifications to the locations of the config/gfx/sound files.

I have asked on amiga.org about its similarities with Blitz Basic, and the languages are too different for the code to be easily portable. This is mainly because BlitzMax is OO, and Blitz Basic is not. The suggestion was that porting to another OO language, like C++, would probably be easier than porting to a non-OO language like Blitz Basic.

So, who wants to give it a try? :-)

Hi again!

geometrywars? Then maybe this one is interesting for you:
http://members.cox.net/msikora2/GW.html
Sources are included.
It makes use of the ancient + deprecated glaux, but
http://chaoslizard.sourceforge.net/glbmp/
can replace this.

btw, I just successfully built "psyno" on my linux :)
http://shinh.skr.jp/psyno/psyno3.jpg

Wow, that port looks even better than GridWars! It's for Windows though. Unfortunately my "coding" skills are limited to scripting. I'm at the mercy of a real coder to port one of these to MorphOS (or remove the requirement for OpenGL so it will run inside MOL).

Hmmm, sadly that GW clone is no good as I need joystick support (see below for reason why). Shame as it has C++ code which probably has a better chance of getting ported to MOS.

Basically, I have built an Arcade machine which currently houses an XBOX. The 8-way arcade stick and 6 buttons are soldered on to an XBOX pad, so I can play emulators and XBOX games with the old-fashioned controls. I am thinking of replacing the XBOX with something which will let me play GridWars. Since I already have PegII I want to use that, but there's no port of GridWars for any of the OSs supported by the PegII :-(

Hi again :)

I doubt that it will be much fun without gl, but
it should be quiet easily portable to linux & maybe to mos.
Without big programming skills, I was at least be able to
remove the glaux stuff & build an "executable" for linux.
Not really executable, as I simply didn't know what stuff I should write into "int main()" :(

This stuff is really way above my head. I think I'll have to buy an Intel Mac Mini and run GridWars on that. Thanks anyway for all your help.

You're giving up hope quiet fast, eh?
Why not wait a bit & see if someone wants to look at the code?
There are tons of other cool game you can play meanwhile :D

Well, I am giving up hope of porting it myself :-) If someone else is able to (and has the time to) port it to MOS for me, then I would be eternally grateful. But I don't want to burden anyone with that as it looks as though it would be quite a lot of work.

I don't think that it will be so much work.
I'm not very much interested in mos currently & not skilled enough to build it, but some weeks ago I already pointed a mos-game-porter to the sources & he has it in his todo list -
(which is long & his time is limited) (Hi! Hi! :D )