Upgrade for Rockdoom?

[SpawnHyuuga]

Okay, so RockDoom is based on PrBoom 2.2.6 - I'm not sure what you guys did (but it was probably a lot) - but is there any thoughts of upgrading it to PrBoom 2.5.0?

It's still under a GPL-license I believe, and I think maybe now it has the ability to do the music as well....

I wasn't quite sure though if music might also be a memory use issue... but I also thought maybe it could fix that issue that a few Sansa Fuze users, like myself, experience where we can't map the "key off" button which I think is one of the scroll wheel directions.. I don't remember right now.

[funman]

Don't get high hopes, nobody is working on Doom and we'll probably disable it on Fuze and other players with only 8MB of ram

[nls]

A new version of prboom is unlikely to fix that kind of trouble IMO, also the biggest problem with music is that it's midi IIRC which takes a lot of cpu to synthesize (it's hardly realtime on a number of taargets in out midiplay plugin)

[lionfury]

Please don't disable Doom on Fuze it works fine for me.

[SpawnHyuuga]

I really don't think Doom should be disabled. Jesus, you guys got it playing on a frigg'in Clip!

I seriously think it's a programming issue, because like I said just a few minutes ago - it worked just fine up until about a week ago.

[funman]

Of course we would enable it again when you will have fixed it.

[SpawnHyuuga]

Why not just revert it? Althought the change log suggests that nothing has changed since 2006... -.-'

Now if I could get SVN to work, and I wish it was portable so I could edit code anywhere...

Or if nothing else, leave it - and just make it "unsupported."

[MItaly]

I don't have enough RockBox knowledge to support my guess, but I think that probably something in the rockbox core changed, so RockDoom now has a bit less available RAM than it used to have.

[torne]

The problem is not a change to Doom; there's nothing to roll back.

The problem is (we think) that the Doom code is broken in one or more unknown ways, and probably *always has been*, and that the change to the EABI compiler affected the way the Doom code is compiled, which seems to have made various issues more obvious. It also would've affected the size and layout of the Doom code, which might mean that less RAM is available to it than previously. Other changes to the Rockbox code also affect the amount of RAM available, since if more RAM is used for the core then less is available for plugins.

The fact that it worked fine for you until a week ago means nothing; it's been broken for other people on the exact same devices for far, far longer. Your settings are probably just different so you have more RAM available, or it might even just be a fluke

[SpawnHyuuga]

Well that sucks, so the options left remaining are:

* New Rockbox-supported MP3 with greater RAM
* An upgrade for RAM (Looking into it now)
* Finding a way to allocate more memory or reduce the memory for the core

[soap]

Well that sucks, so the options left remaining are:

* New Rockbox-supported MP3 with greater RAM
* An upgrade for RAM (Looking into it now)
* Finding a way to allocate more memory or reduce the memory for the core

* compile a bare-bones Rockbox with as much stripped out of the binary (and as many RAM consuming features disabled) as possible and see if you get any relief.

[MItaly]

and as many RAM consuming features disabled

Yep, I didn't think about it; maybe disabling all the caches (disk cache, DB loaded in memory, ...) could let it run a little bit longer. But I think that, at least for me, having the DB running fast outweights the benefits of being able to play the first level of Doom.

[saratoga]

A new version of prboom is unlikely to fix that kind of trouble IMO, also the biggest problem with music is that it's midi IIRC which takes a lot of cpu to synthesize (it's hardly realtime on a number of taargets in out midiplay plugin)

Do the WADs have to use MIDI or would it be possible to convert the audio to something like MP3 (or maybe speex since we have an optimized decoder in core already)?

[SpawnHyuuga]

Alright, so I did find the right thread. I had a thought - I think it is only certain versions of Doom. On my Sansa Fuze v2, I can play Ultimate Doom, Doom 2, and I think TNT just fine - but the Freedoom and Plutonia seem to crash on the menu or shortly thereafter...

EDIT: Freedoom works now that I was able to increase RAM by about 1 MB from decreasing cache sizes... so you just need to have a configure settings specially made for Doom and standard.

EDIT #2: I think I've almost completely "optimized" my RAM usage - but I'm not sure exactly what I have tweaked, and what can still be tweaked. I can play FreeDoom, but it will crash when trying to save with the standard data abort. I believe Plutonia is the same way - however I can play the straight and narrow Doom I and Doom II fine, save and everything. I'll try the Doom II: TNT later, today.

[nls]

Do the WADs have to use MIDI or would it be possible to convert the audio to something like MP3 (or maybe speex since we have an optimized decoder in core already)?

The original doom supported only a limited MIDI variant (max 9 channels) but recent ports like prboom support regular midi iirc, these are the only music formats supported though so hacking in something else is probably not trivial at least.