how-to: Get pocketquake/doom4ce to work on BE300!

[powerman5000]

Aight, it goes like this, and its pretty damn easy too. Okay, you download EpodXP, this is an itemish/themish thing that 1) makes ur be300 look like windows xp, 2)has add functionality 3) new features. (You may want to backup ur old system first though :) ) okay, after you install it on ur be300 (when you download it it tells you how to install) then, you just import a folder from ur pc with all the necessary files (quake/doom ones) and then go into your be300 and double click!!!!!

[Mike Bannick]

[Dan East]

Even with eXpod, EpodXP, whateverPod, the BE-300 will only have around 5 MB available RAM. That would not be enough to run Pocket Quake. My question is have you actually played Pocket Quake on the BE-300? Basically the only chance of playing PQ on the BE-300 would be to build a special version to work around the memory restrictions, but even then I doubt you could fit everything (loaded exe, stack and heap) in 5 MB.

Dan East

[sponge]

[James S]

Number 2...

Well, I'm glad those BE300 users finally have addition functions in their built in calculator!

[Dan East]

No, there is a 5 to 5.5 MB limit, because that is all the free memory remaining on the BE-300 after the kernel and critical OS components are loaded. The stock Casio Shell enforces a 1 MB cushion, reducing that further to 4 MB, but that can be eliminated with 2 simple registry changes to allow access to the whole 5 MB. Another .5 MB or so can be gained by not loading a bloated shell and other non-critical components at boot, getting up to close to 5.5 MB free RAM. The BE-300 has 16 MB RAM, but the flash memory the kernel resides on is very slow. So Casio has to decompress the kernel from ROM and load it into RAM after a reset, and that sucks up at least half of the 16 MB alone. All Pocket PCs execute the kernel and many other critical OS components directly from ROM.

I've done substantial testing on this and determined it first-hand. Varium can run on a BE-300 (and actually pretty well too at 14 FPS), but I don't know if we can stay inside the 5 MB limit. The cave map you see in the videos does fit inside the 5 MB limit, but not the very large maps the public has not yet seen. My first indication is that the BE-300 is not a worthwhile commercial market, so I don't see us going to the effort to reduce the memory footprint just for this platform. However, if we have to reduce the memory consumption for other more significant markets, then we may release a BE-300 version based on that custom low-memory content.

Dan East

[abannedguy]

[sponge]

[James S]

[SiGen]

[sponge]

[James S]

[sponge]

[Courtney White]

[James S]

But removing the limitation is still improving it. I understand what you're saying, but overall an improvement is being made when a limitation is removed, generally speaking.