Quake on plan 9
John Carmack
johnc@idnewt.idsoftware.com
Wed, 2 Aug 1995 22:30:29 -0400
I am going to buy a system to run plan 9 on. Are there any =
integrators in the audience that will provide a ready-to-run, high =
performance pc system? I want to be able to make a standalone =
plan 9 network with a pc and a couple old NEXTStations, as well as =
mount some NFS volumes from our main file server.
My first project will be to bring up Quake. If anyone has any =
comments on troubles I am likely to run into, please let me know. =
The game's requirements are:
Good keyboard event handling. Up / down notifications for all =
keys is ideal, but I can live with some keys being special.
A rapid bitmap blitter. Mapping the framebuffer is ideal. A =
single copy to screen from shared memory is usually fine. Pumping =
a bitmap through a generic imaging function generally isn't. For =
actually playing games, as opposed to developing them, an easy way =
to change the display resolution, like xfree86, is great.
Low level sound access. Mapping the recirculating dma buffers =
with a call to get the current dma position is ideal. A blocking =
write to a sound stream is fine if I can get tight control of the =
buffering done in the driver. Does a sound driver even exist? It =
sounds like a fun and straightforward project if not.
Non blocking, non buffering TCP/IP. Any implementation that =
handles the BSD sockopts should be fine.
A way to get raw mickey counts from the mouse would be cool. Our =
NEXTSTEP and X versions have to live without mouse input.
John Carmack
Id Software