ParaJVE : Parabellum's Java Vectrex Emulator   

Official Home of ParaJVE ... A travel through the programming of a freeware Vectrex emulator in java!

Thursday, November 06, 2008  

Linux release uploaded

ParaJVE 0.6.0 Linux packaging has been uploaded.

I must say that I'm not that happy with the Linux version as it seems to be the OS where ParaJVE has the most problems (on my system at least). I've tested it with a standard Ubuntu 8.04.1 (freshly installed), and the problems I've noticed so far are :

  • Chopped sound output. I had to turn sound emulation off.

  • Major graphical problems when using the sun-java5-jre (empty or black windows and so on...). After installing the sun-java6-jre package and selecting it, most of these bugs vanished.

  • The GUI (the default that comes with ubuntu - I think it's Gnome) is sometimes acting weird, and I get many unexpected warnings in the console, unless I run ParaJVE with root privileges (which is not acceptable)

  • Fullscreen still doesn't seem to be supported by the JRE (java 6)
Needless to say, I'm quite puzzled at the amount of issues I'm having when using not so "advanced" java on a linux platform (unless you consider OpenGL and Sound an advanced java feature, that is). Switching from Windows to Mac OS X is nearly as painless as it could be, but switching to Linux is such an hassle!

Now, I don't pretend to be a Linux guru, so of course, my box was maybe not properly configured... But what the heck, I just installed Ubuntu, downloaded all the available upgrades, installed the java runtime engine. With that you would expect java to work as expected ... And you would be wrong!

So well, I've uploaded the Linux build as is ; I hope it will work correctly for most Linux boxes. If it doesn't run on yours then I'm truly sorry, but I can't loose time to fight these compatibility issues.

<end-of-rant>  ;o) 

Labels:

posted by Parabellum at 11:24 AM

9 Comments:

  • Hello

    Thanks for the update ! I have just installed it on ubuntu 8.10. It works ok, I would say, the sound is a bit choppy though. I think it runs a bit fast too...maybe some timing issues on linux ?

    I also tried it on vista 64. Well I have only a black screen in the emulator window when I ran any game.

    Unfortunaltely I do not have xp or vista 32 anymore :( So I cannot really compare. Is it supposed to work on vista 32 ?

    Thanks for this great work.

    Eric

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 11/09/2008 11:05 AM  

  • Hi Eric,

    Thanks for your report!

    I haven't experienced it under Linux, but I know for sure that ParaJVE may also run too fast on Windows ; it's not yet entirely clear why, but it has something to do with dual-core CPU timing.
    Often, switching the timing resolution to Milliseconds instead of Nanoseconds will fix the issue (Menu Debug->Set FrameRate).

    Regarding the emulator not working properly on some Vista machines, I indeed already had such a report last week : Mark Vergeer from armchairarcade.com contacted me to tell me on the same black screen on vista 32.
    After a lot of tests and researches on the web - many thanks for that Mark :) - it has became clear that it is not an issue related to ParaJVE.

    In fact, it is not even java-related : it's a major compatibility problem between the latest vista service pack and OpenGL (many other OpenGL applications will have the same problem). You can read this article if you're interrested : OpenGL and Windows Vista

    So there's nothing I could do at my level, sorry. I can only hope for this problem to be fixed in the next release of JOGL (the OpenGL binding library used by ParaJVE)...

    HTH,
    Franck.

    By Blogger Parabellum, at 11/12/2008 11:03 AM  

  • Hello again :)

    Just to let you know that I have just installed vista 32 on my machine and your emulator works great ! I do not have the blackscreen anymore. I have the feeling it is a 64 bits issue.
    I have realised I am so bad at minestorm now :) I used to go to the 30th levels when I was 11 ! It's good memories though !

    Eric

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 11/27/2008 12:56 PM  

  • Eric,

    Great news, glad to hear it now works for you!

    I have never been that good on Minestorm back in the days... I think I've seen the "invisible" mines once or twice, which means I only passed level 13 that amount of times :)

    Franck.

    By Blogger Parabellum, at 11/28/2008 9:08 AM  

  • Hello. Very great emulator. Everything works fine on my Pentium 4 with XP. Thank you !

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 1/02/2009 11:38 AM  

  • Thanks Chainsaw :)

    By Blogger Parabellum, at 1/03/2009 11:15 AM  

  • Hello,

    I have Slackware 12.2 on my machine (jre version 6) and it runs ParaJVE just fine, even on fullscreen.

    Luis Henrique

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 5/01/2009 8:31 PM  

  • Thanks for the emulator!

    I'm attempting to merge it into MythGame as it's frontend. I noticed that you need to add a "$@" to the of the "ParaJVE" script so it can receive command line options.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 9/20/2009 2:40 AM  

  • Many thanks for the tip, I will fix this in the next version.

    By Blogger Parabellum, at 9/21/2009 10:57 AM  

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