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Like you guys know, I'm a GNU guy, yet I don't like hassle. I use GNU because of the freedom it gives me, really. And among that freedom, there's the great variety of flavours it has to offer.

I've been using Mint as my primary system for several years. I had been through some distro hopping before that, with different desktop environments in Ubuntu as well as Fedora and OpenSUSE at different points. And at work, I've been using mostly Rocky Linux, CENTOS and some Ubuntu Server, but those I use without GUI.

So now I thought it was time to go back for a while to some distro hopping and hopefully settle for a different distro this time. My first try was the new Debian 12. I saw many are endorsing it as the best Debian so far. My impressions these days with Debian is that it really is the very stable system you expect, which I love from it. Because it's stricter than other popular distros as regards software freedom, it does come with some difficulties:

- Hardware support is not as good. I haven't been able to get my desktop webcam working on it, although its microphone does work and my Jabra USB headset is also unsupported. Trying to find external driver has been futile and honestly, I don't know how to install external drivers. I understand this and highly respect Debian, but I admit it's annoying.
- For some reason, FAT32 hard drive partitions are mounted read only, yet this does not happens with USB drives. I don't know why. Trying to change this doesn't seem to work. So my bootable DOS partition, that I can use with FreeDOS, can't be written to from DOSBox while in GNU/Linux. Not a serious thing. I can just copy Stunts and other games to my ext4, but... it's a curious issue.
- Of course, no "universe" respository. That's Ubuntu stuff. So many programs, including some that are free software, cannot be found by apt. No problem, I download them from source, but this isn't something for everybody. I figure it must be possible to add Ubuntu's repositories to Debian, but what's the point of having Debian if you do that?  Ethical things.
- By default, libtinfo likes to get installed at version 6, but there's still software that looks for version 5. You have to manually tell it to install version 5 as well. Made me waste some time, but not a serious thing. Again, not something for everybody.
- A difference from Ubuntu and Mint, but once you know it, it's no problem at all: here the default user isn't a sudoer and you can't make it one. You can create new sudoers, but your installation-time user is not one. No problem, you can just do "su" in the command line and that's it. Just don't forget you're root.

A strange issue that's to be attributed to GNOME, not to Debian, really, is that, for some weird reason, the dedicated arrow keys are not recognised in DOSBox while in GNOME. If I log out and log back in in MATE, also in Debian, the problem disappears. Also, I understand GNOME wants to be special, but not being able to minimise your windows takes some getting used to.

So now I've downloaded a new ISO of Mint with MATE to have in one of my partitions and my new distro hopping test will be with Arch. Some months ago, I've been considering to try OpenSUSE again and see what's new with it, but I want something I have never tried and I think Arch could be my thing. The only thing I don't like from it's concept is the rolling release idea, but everything else is very much in line with my preferences, so I'll give it a try soon   I've already written it to a USB

The thing is this converter interprets each assembly line. The resulting C code is actually redoing the assembly, so it isn't more comprehensive than the assembly code itself and when you compile it, the code will be much longer and redundant. Besides, it's turning registers to variables.

A converter could help if it were aware of how a C compiler produces the resulting assembly code and then recognise the snippets and turn them into their probably original C code.

Spectrum

Right, whatever it does, if it still does it, must have to do with rendering strategies and not with whether to draw something or not, because there is another set of options for the latter that does work.

I really notice no difference by changing that option. Maybe it's not noticeable unless the computer in question is slow. Could try using fewer cycles in DOSBox. The other options do clearly show a great difference!

I remember I played Stunts on a true 386 and it was completely smooth, but on a 286, you could see it was slower, still playable. On a 486, I couldn't see any difference compared to a 386.

Uhm... I tried to watch the video, but it looks like a music clip

Well, my engine does that: it renders the whole track and you can move around and we've used it to make multiplayer videos of live races, though I think none has been published. Has one?

There are some things I still haven't fixed in rendering, like... I haven't found a good way to render wheels and some track elements are seen with artifacts not because the engine can't draw that, but because the design is optimised for Stunts' original engine and I can't guess exactly what it does... particularly, regarding Z-bias and especially when the top object is not a polygon (typically, a line). But except the wheel problem, the rest can be solved by re-building the track elements optimised for my engine. They'd look the same

What I have to do is move forward towards physics

Pinball

I reckon the reason why there hasn't been much (if any) talk about hiring somebody for this lays not in the realm of money investment, but in that of "belonging". I'm not sure of others feel the same way as I or if it really makes sense to put it this way, but from the heart and not from the mind, my feeling is that hiring somebody to do the work would make it less ours and we'd feel less of an attachment to the final product, even if free software.

You will surely argue "Yes, but what's the point if you'll just sit and do nothing and never achieve anything?"... and thinking of this rationally, certainly, that's a very good point. Yet, the heart is the heart. Again, maybe I'm totally mistaken and other community members feel it very different from what I do.

Count me in! 

Yeah, I usually don't push with it because I know that most people using GitHub really mean well in terms of software freedom, but I personally avoid GitHub (not just uploading things to it, but downloading them from it if there's an alternative) because of that reason. And I agree, if it's about standard language, we're talking about C. It's veeeery far from perfect, but it's the only language that can be called a standard.

The points I mentioned, of course, are not a matter of "what's right". I don't think there's one right way. Those points are details about what I feel that we, the members of the Stunts online community, generally would like to have.

Like Dreadnaut said, to really reproduce the behaviour, you need to fully interpret the code. I think it is possible to create from scratch a physics set that's convincingly close, without being compatible, but just how close is something we won't be able to know until we really try hard to do it. And in all honestly, I don't know if it takes less time to comprehensively reverse engineer the physics engine of Stunts or to develop a convincingly close brand new one. I don't know it.

Hiring people... I agree that'd be a great push and probably would also make us want to participate as well... and I don't think we here are not willing to pay. I personally would be happy to contribute. My only fear is that maybe the person(s) won't do it the way we would like or maybe we end up paying and not obtaining what we want. Also, while there are many skilled programmers, I wonder how many are skilled in software based, low level graphics and physics... The few I know about are here in this forum or have been here.

Precipitation

There was a period of time in the middle to late decade of 2000, when at least three community members cooperated to reverse engineer Stunts. While the process was not completed in the way they planned, a very great advance was made.

Thanks to them, we currently have a source code (in assembly) that builds to Stunts. The original intention was to port all this to C... for DOS, originally. Some translation began, but most of the code has always remained in assembly.

I, personally, think that there is no need to fully create a C equivalent of the complete Stunts code because many parts of it can really be reproduced much more easily by just looking at the behaviour and doing the same because they're very simple, such as the menus, for example, but also, with a little effort, things like the intro or the internal track editor. Besides, we don't really need to replicate the intro and we have external editors. About graphics rendering, any rendering that resembles the essence of Stunts is good enough. So what really needs to be reverse-engineer is solely the physics engine.

And even that, which is the most cryptic part of the code, in my opinion, does not need to be interpreted or copied. As long as a physics engine is made that feels like Stunts in the sense that, if you play on it, you really can't tell the difference, even if they are not compatible as to be able to reproduce the same result... as long as that is done... it'll be enough. But... it turns out it's not easy to build a physics engine.

If it weren't that my job consumes all my energies, I'd be putting a lot more time into it. But well, what I want to point out here is that there are some things we would like Stunts to have and it doesn't... but there are also things it has that we don't want to change. The key here is understanding which are which. We don't all agree exactly, but we have a generally good consensus on this.

To give just a few examples:
- We would like to be able to make bigger tracks, to are new track elements, etc.
- We would not like an engine to feel more realistic
- We would like to play multiplayer Stunts
- We would not want to change the way the game looks except simple things such as smaller pixels
- We would like the game to run natively on GNU/Linux and Windows
- We would like the game to be free software
- We wouldn't want a new game that's "Stunts' sequel", but Stunts itself to be improved (a new engine or mods)

Things in which not all members think the same way or may have doubts:
- Programming language and libraries to choose
- Whether the program taking a lot of space matters or not
- Whether maintaining DOS support is important
- Data file format to use

Augusten

King

Good!  The guy really sat down to try the game. I guess if there were more awareness of Stunts, we'd se many more people playing it. Besides, everybody loves retro now