Any chance of a version of Argentum for Qtopia?

[Ez]

back when argentum was in development and i was getting bored of waiting for it to be released, and annoyed with microsoft's lame pocketpc os, i decided to wipe my ipaq and install linux on it, with the environment (a fork of the qtopia environment the sharp zaurus uses). this was months and months ago now, and i was so impressed with linux on my ipaq that i never even thought about anything pocketpc-related...

...until today. having just bought myself qtopia/opie ports of strategic assault, interstellar flames, and bust'em i began to recall a cool-looking strategy game that was still in development when i made the os switch. i remembered the name, and have just looked at the site to discover it's been released...and i wanna play it...
so - shall i setup my ipaq to dual boot into windows ce just so i can play this game...or could you think about releasing a version for qtopia?

cheers,
ez

[James S]

Anything, just for you~

[Mechcommander]

Ummmm.. unless many people, I mean, many... Do this, no. Youll have to dual boot. Btw, Im interested, how do you do it?

[Ez]

would the argentum team be interested in working with eongames to do a linux port?
eongames have already ported quite a few high quality pocketpc games (xen games' strategic assault and interstellar flames, and digital concepts' rocket elite and bust'em) to qtopia; i'm sure they would do argentum justice.

as for the "just for you" and "many people" comments - the sharp zaurus pda runs the qtopia environment, so if a port was done there would be a lot of interest from the zaurus community as well as the smaller opie community

regarding dual boot --- it's still a bit flaky at the moment due to differences in the way the two operating systems handle the ipaq's flash rom and ram.
windows ce installs itself in flash rom and uses the ram for file storage and memory
linux also installs itself into flash memory, but uses the rom as its filesystem (ie: you can read from/write to the flash memory - it's not 'locked' like it is with windows ce), and it uses the ram as program memory and as a temporary ramdisk

so if you have a dual-boot system, every time you reset the machine and go into windows ce it's just like you've done a hard reset of windows ce and none of your data's stored
people are working on ways around this (saving windows ce data to compact flash before reset is one)

dual boot works by having one operating system on the ipaq's rom and the other on a compact flash card. the ipaq bootloader lets you select between them when you reset the device

references:






cheers!
ez

[sponge]

I remember the conversation too, but due to many reasons they wouldn't give out the code for others to port. Unless their opinions have changed now, forget about it.