Can't play on big-endian system

[Link4Electronics]

Hello,

Trying to play this game on a system running linux 64-bit big-endian (32-bit big-endian has similar issues).
When trying to play Missions, it asks for the cd-rom.
Mouse cursor has wrong icons (always the denied cursor)
Level editor works and can play it.

Best regards,
Link

[Skywalker13]

Hello,

It's not a surprise for me, and I never tried to run the game on big endian systems. For example I've a FIXME here about big-endian

planetblupi/src/decmap.cxx

Line 59 in 1fb6208

// FIXME: add big-endian support

I don't plan to fix this problem soon. I'm very busy on other projects.

Thank you anyway

[Link4Electronics]

Hi,
I commented out lines 3508 and 3539 inside file event.cxx and could bypass CDrom check screen

I understand you sent as an example the FIXME: colours in file decmap.cxx, but they render properly on big-endian, only issue remaining for a playable game is reading the world files in right endian order, it loads a blank map instead of the mission

I understand that you may be busy with others projects, this has zero priority, but I wonder if you could point me where should I look to try to fix this myself? maybe inside decio.cxx where it mentions data/world*.blp? Since project uses SDL, maybe a "SDL_swap16LE or 32LE" could make read world*.blp files which probably are little-endian, to work on both little and big-endian machines?

Kinda regards,
Link.

[Skywalker13]

I understand you sent as an example the FIXME: colours, but they render properly on big-endian,

Good to know, thanks

Yes, decio.cxx is a good candidate, event.cxx too because only these files use fread and fwrite. Note that this code is historical because we should use the SDL file IO abstraction (SDL_LoadFile, etc.) instead of stdio. Maybe, using the SDL abstraction will fix these endian problems.