Doom freezes on Fuze

[AdvMutant]

Great! I'll wait for v3.7 to come out.
I wasn't using my Fuze for a while, and it only became buggier than v3.5. I'm most annoyed by RockDoom freezing every 5 mins. But I'll guess they'll fix it, right?

PS. I'm thinking of starting RockBox development, but I'm not sure if what I know is enough.

[Llorean]

Doom isn't really a priority, at all, so if something improves the music playback experience but hurts Doom, it's probably going to happen and end up waiting on someone really interested in Doom to figure out how to get Doom working well again.

Important are clear, well documented bug reports, too.

[AlexP]

Doom hasn't really been worked on for years, as none of the developers really care about it.  Of course, were someone to work on it, that'd be great.

[AdvMutant]

That's weird. Why don't they care about it? IMO it's one of the greatest features or RockBox.

[torne]

Well, you said it yourself: in your opinion.

The developers presumably don't feel it's an interesting or important feature, at least not enough to warrant working on it. I certainly don't; I already own a half dozen portable devices that can play Doom perfectly fine with a better screen and controls.

[saratoga]

We had actually talked about just disabling doom on the AMS based players until someone gets around to optimizing it for low memory targets. 

[AdvMutant]

Well, you said it yourself: in your opinion.

The developers presumably don't feel it's an interesting or important feature, at least not enough to warrant working on it. I certainly don't; I already own a half dozen portable devices that can play Doom perfectly fine with a better screen and controls.

Of course! How come I didn't think of that? That's the reason why you devs work on other stuff... Well, let me use that chance of talking with a developer to ask you a question - will allocating some swap space help? Can it even be done?

PS. Don't disable it, leave it as is.

[[Saint]]

Well, let me use that chance of talking with a developer to ask you a question - will allocating some swap space help? Can it even be done?

I think the more appropriate thing to ask is "will it be done", and the answer to that is "probably not".

Not unless a devoper springs up with an interest in Doom and implements it.
In that unlikely event though, optimising Doom to run (well) on low-men targets would more than likely be the better course of action.



[St.]

[torne]

Of course! How come I didn't think of that? That's the reason why you devs work on other stuff...

You don't have to be rude about it...
The devs work, almost entirely, on things which are either of personal use to them (which tends to be mostly functionality related to audio playback, as that's what most of us use our audio players for...) or things which are interesting to work on. Fixing Doom is very unlikely to fall into that latter category, it's likely to be tedious and fiddly

Well, let me use that chance of talking with a developer to ask you a question - will allocating some swap space help? Can it even be done?

Probably not, most targets don't have an MMU and so it's basically impossible to implement a swap-type system except for programs which are designed explicitly to use overlays (an older, manual form of swapping). Doom is not. Even on targets which have the required hardware, we have absolutely none of the infrastructure to make this work (we initialise the MMU to a fixed set of mappings and never change them, and have no code to handle page faults other than by crashing the device), and it's unlikely it would be fast enough to actually make Doom playable in any case.

[AdvMutant]

You don't have to be rude about it...

Did I sound rude?
Sorry, I didn't mean to...
It's just after you said that devs have no interest in Doom, I was wondering why until you posted back. It really surprised me, and I couldn't find an explanation. I'm a programmer myself, and I know how hard working on a project can be. Sorry if I hurt you.

Back to our topic. I heard that Vista can use a flash drive as extra RAM. How about using a MicroSD for the same task? Just tell me if that's possible, because as about the 'will be done' thing, I might get into it and try to.

[torne]

It's just after you said that devs have no interest in Doom, I was wondering why until you posted back. It really surprised me, and I couldn't find an explanation. I'm a programmer myself, and I know how hard working on a project can be. Sorry if I hurt you.

No, it's fine; I just find it odd that it's not obvious

The doom plugin exists because some time in the past, one person ported it and submitted it, pretty much. That person isn't around any more. It's not that we used to be interested in it but now we've given up; it's that the currently active developers were never interested in the first place.

By comparison, the frotz plugin is also a weird game-playing plugin, and it doesn't work very well on the majority of targets because of the difficulty in entering text. The difference there is just that, well, I ported it and I'm still here, so if there was a problem with it then I would probably fix it. If I were to disappear then it might be neglected by the other developers who may not have much interest.

Back to our topic. I heard that Vista can use a flash drive as extra RAM. How about using a MicroSD for the same task? Just tell me if that's possible, because as about the 'will be done' thing, I might get into it and try to.

ReadyBoost is just a special kind of disk caching, it doesn't use it as extra actual RAM. As explained in my previous post, swapping is probably impossible, to any device.

[AlexP]

I split this off from the previous thread and moved it, as it was nothing to do with the original question about recording.

[AdvMutant]

I split this off from the previous thread and moved it, as it was nothing to do with the original question about recording.

Good, thanks.

@torne: Too bad. Maybe once I'll get into it, and try to figure it out. It's to early to talk about it now, as I'm just learning C(and trying to switch to C++). RockBox is really interesting me, and I always liked low-level programming. Very well then, it's 9PM around here. I'm very tired and better go to sleep. Good Night.

[sss]

For the cost of return shipping I will put a 16MB chip in your fuze with a new bootloader and rockbox firmware to match!  It will fix your low memory problem.  I only have a few spare 16MB chips, so I can't do this for everyone.

There WILL be slight notches left on the center portion of the sides of your fuze when it is done; it is almost impossible to get a fuze apart without leaving a small nick mark on at least one side.  I have a special tool to get watch cases apart and it works well but the Fuze is really not meant to be disassembled!

After doing this to four Fuzes I've gotten pretty good at it.  Make ABSOLUTELY SURE IT IS A V1 Fuze or you will be wasting your time-- the AS3525B in the V2 fuze is a completely different chip package and is missing all of the ball/pins that go to the external memory chip!

You can also send just the board (use an anti-static bag in that case) if you don't want to risk the screen cracking in transit, although that would require you to take it apart yourself.  If you decide to send it, please ship it insured and well-packed!

I can replace the battery too although my spares are not new, they are from fuzes I have picked up used, therefore only opt for this if your battery is close to dead already.

PM me if you would like the SDRAM and/or battery replaced.  I will not upgrade fuzes to 32MB due to the fact that hot air reflow on the CPU will be needed for that (it is also more work because I need to manually route and solder a tiny wire under the BGA), however I might sell a few premade 32MB fuzes eventually.  I estimate based on the current cost of 2GB V1 fuzes that I might end up selling a handful for about $40 a piece.  I was finding fuzes cheaper before, but now I can't even find a steady supply of refurbished fuzes for less than $30 a unit.  64MB chips are no harder to install but look in digikey (look for 512Mbit 133MHz SDRAM in a TSOPII-54pin package) at the price of such chips and you will understand why I don't buy them.

[AdvMutant]

Wow, didn't see that coming.
You should sell such stuff at your local market or something. There's no way I'm gonna send my Fuze half way across the globe just because one dude at the forum promised to upgrade it's RAM, for the cost of shipping. Sounds too good bro, just too good.