Zugg Software :: View topic

Beginner Joined: 21 Oct 2000 Posts: 11 Location: USA

A little over a year ago, I completely got rid of anything M$ Window$ related on my computer and went 100% Linux.
It's funny to hear others who have done this say "I've got everything I need in Linux, except a Quicken compatible money manager."
My only problem? Never finding a Linux MUD client as good as ZMud. Are my priorities a little skewed? :)
Well, I've got 20030318 version of wine installed and will be trying ZMud 6.40 this evening. If it works, you'll hear back from me. If it doesn't, I've probably already slit my own wrists... :)

-HunterCo

Novice Joined: 12 Mar 2003 Posts: 37

Hunter,
I hope you haven't slit your wrists yet. How's running zMUD under WINE coming along?

Beginner Joined: 10 Apr 2001 Posts: 16 Location: USA

Anyone one have any new comments about running zMud with WINE? It's been awhile since anyone has talked about this so I was wondering if new versions of WINE have solved some of the problems people were having.

fyrie

"You may be a king or a little street sweeper, but sooner or later, you dance with the reaper!" - Grim Reaper

Newbie Joined: 19 May 2003 Posts: 1 Location: Russia

I used zMud 6.16 via WineX too :)
works fine, but only one incorrect thing i found: when program starts, mail windows flipping can be stopped only by pressing ALT-TAB..
and i have a question, maybe in the future porting zMud to Linux will be possible??
But really i think - no, cos of it written in Delphi..

-------- wbr, takegami.

Apprentice Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 132 Location: USA

It has been stated that it is unlikely due to the cost vs demand being very high. Ie high cost vs a very low demand.

Jaerin

Beginner Joined: 10 Apr 2001 Posts: 16 Location: USA

It would be cool if Zugg redid zMud using a more cross platform language such as C# or Java. It would be quite an undertaking though and he would probably have to hire on and/or get volunteer helpers to work on any Linux specific items (front end, testing etc...) as nothing is REALLY write once, run anywhere.

Heck, I'd even bet he could get a Kylix/Delphi cross platform version going if he did a redesign of the current system to separate the discrepancies into their own components.

Of course a Linux version might give him certain business headaches (Licensing/IP concerns vs GPL). He'd have to figure out a way to release it under a non-GPL license, and some sort of registration scheme.

The cost vs demand issue is very valid. Perhaps he could "Partner" with a person or persons to do the work for him. There must be a way to make it a win/win situation for all parties involved.

fyrie

"You may be a king or a little street sweeper, but sooner or later, you dance with the reaper!" - Grim Reaper

Wizard Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 1551 Location: Australia

The only 'win' situation is if it has a 'dows' on the end ;)

Zmud uses too many windows components (ado, mdac, docking, etc) to be portable to any other OS. The only real way to run Zmud and linux side by side is thru VMWare, or if you can get enough grapes, wine.

When it really comes down to it, Zmud is worth having a 200 meg windows partition. I know it's not the true linux-geek thing to do, but this mud client blows everything else away... and if you're really passionate about mudding, you'll do anything to run it, even if it means having an 'inferior operating system' kicking around :P

Oh and don't get me started on C# *shudder* :P

-- Rainchild

Beginner Joined: 10 Apr 2001 Posts: 16 Location: USA

Ah.. There is life yet in this thread!

I don't pretend to know how the architecture of zMUD, but if he could go to a more ntier design, the use of ADO and MDAC shouldn't really matter. The Linux component would use whatever is appropriate. However, I am assuming Delphi/Kylix supports polymorphism. I have no experience with either, so I may be completely off base. About docking etc... you do have a point. I feel that the front end is probably the most painful part about taking zMUD to a multi-platform app.

What's wrong w/C#? are you against MS's implimentation, do you think mono isn't up to par yet, or do you despize the language as a whole? I have been using it at work for a 1.5 years now and it has really been great so far.

fyrie

"You may be a king or a little street sweeper, but sooner or later, you dance with the reaper!" - Grim Reaper

GURU Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 4379 Location: USA

Two of the greatest problem of porting zMUD have been that it uses some third-party components that are only available for the Windows version of Delphi and, most importantly, that it does some speed tricks which are Windows-specific. Bottom line is, Linux zMUD would not be the zMUD we have come to know and love.

That is not completely true, since I believe Zugg could work hard to overcome these problems. However, since right from the start he is confronted with these sort of problems in porting zMUD, he needs a good reason for porting zMUD to Linux. Let's face it, although many us would buy zMUD with no problems, the Linux crowd is worse than the Windows crowd when it comes to paying for stuff they can get for free (even if the replacement is inferior). As a result, the risks involved in porting zMUD outweight the possible benefits.

Kjata

Beginner Joined: 21 Oct 2000 Posts: 11 Location: USA

Well, for those that were asking... I never did have any luck back then trying to get zMUD to work. Sice I last posted here, I've switched linux distros a couple times and now have removable hard drive trays (one of which holds a hard drive with Win2K solely for the purpose of zMUD).

I do want you all to know that whenever I have any successes via Linux, I'll post what I did and how I did it here for all to enjoy (and I strongly encourage any who may have already done it to also post away).

Beginner Joined: 24 Aug 2002 Posts: 23 Location: USA

And then there are those of us who already registered and then decided Linux better suited them, however like previously mentioned there is no equivilant of Zmud or anything that comes close for Linux, (and honestly Zmud is the only thing eating my brain about switching back)

But what can you do? Ahh I know, can I get a link of a known stable old release (that is newer than the the free one). 5.55 doesn't appear to be listed, nor 6.40. If someone could drop me a link, I'll see what I can do with it.

Luhta

Wizard Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 1551 Location: Australia

Just a thought, but I was browsing the internet for an Ix86 emulator and came accross this open source project http://sourceforge.net/projects/bochs ... you can apparently install windows (not sure what version 95 at least) inside bochs... so maybe that'd be a way for you guys to play from inside linux?

Just read the documentation some, they've got installation instructions for most x86 OS's... linux, minix, openbsd, freebsd, freedos, gnu, dos, windows 95, windows nt4, windows 98, windows me and windows xp. They didn't have instructions for windows 2000 or 2000 server so I'm not sure if they're compatible or not.

Still, could be useful? Apparently bochs is OS independent too, so you could run Zmud on a Mac if you were so inclined ;)

Wizard Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 1551 Location: Australia

Haha, well I just downloaded bochs and are half way through installing windows 98 se... this is funny. I guess I should be doing some work, but this is more fun ... ;)

Took a bit of reading the manual to work out how to set up the 'virtual pc hardware' though. Also, it's taking 100% CPU on my AMD 1800 to emulate the Pentium II 400mhz that I told it to emulate... it's possible that the CPU hog is just because it doesn't have a 'sleep' cycle, kinda like my atari emulator which takes 100% CPU to emulate an 8mhz Atari ST...

Still, this is an interesting experiment ;)

Beginner Joined: 24 Aug 2002 Posts: 23 Location: USA

I'm downloading it now, let me know how it goes on your side

Wizard Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 1551 Location: Australia

Its takin' aaaages to install windows, it was telling me about 500 minutes when it was copying files, now it's down to 16 minutes at the detect hardware phase... It hasn't been 500 minutes tho :)

I think the hardest part is going to be setting up the network card *grin* I think it'd be much easier to get it to use a modem and just dial up to the 'net. We'll see :)

Beginner Joined: 24 Aug 2002 Posts: 23 Location: USA

you've got it easy I'm still trying to figure out where to start lol (so I'm more user than guru -grin-)

Wizard Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 1551 Location: Australia

Well, I did this all in Windows XP so not sure what the linux commands are, but what I did was first:

copied the 'bochsrc-sample.txt' to 'bochsrc' and opened it up in a text editor

went through and checked everything was correct by uncommenting the lines in the file which I figured I'd need, such as "romimage: file=BIOS-bochs-latest, address = 0xf0000" etc...

then I got to the ata config, and you gotta create a hard disk image with the "bximage" program, it tells you what line you need to put in the bochsrc, etc

then I put my windows 98 boot disk and windows 98 install cd in the drives, and ran bochs... had to 'fdisk' and 'format' the virtual hard drive from withing the bochs program, then installed windows 98 like usual...

just had a problem when windows 98 was detecting hardware, but I think its working again now after tying 'cont' a couple of times, will let you know

Beginner Joined: 24 Aug 2002 Posts: 23 Location: USA

that's a huge help, the documentation jumped right into the config files but didnt' tell me where to locate them or anything else that would be useful ;) but now I know that there's a sample that'll help me alot thanks for the info, I'll keep you informed

Wizard Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 1551 Location: Australia

Lol, I just set the clock in windows and the second hand was moving about 3x too fast. I might try the "pit: realtime=1" option that is supposed to keep the virtual PC timer in sync with your real PC :)

Windows 98 is doing the 'updating your settings' drumroll thing, so ... looking pretty good, I expect in a few minutes I'll be booted into Win98 *grin*

Then I gotta try and install mdac, the network card, and zmud :)

Hehe, should be fun :)

Beginner Joined: 24 Aug 2002 Posts: 23 Location: USA

I just got it to boot off the cdrom, but am having problems with it noticing the cd, did you have a problem with win98 running setup but then asking you to insert the cd?, I think I just simply have the wrong drive letter assigned somewhere but I'll have to keep nosing around

Wizard Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 1551 Location: Australia

I actually booted into the dos prompt, then copied the install directory over to the local hard disk like I always do with my Win98 installations. That way it doesn't 'forget' the CD rom driver half way through installing as it used to do to me in the past... I'm actually kinda glad I've moved on to XP now, because at least you don't have trouble with DOS drivers and stuff :)

Oh I think it installed my CD as drive "R" as well, no idea why... that might just be my boot disk being silly though.

Beginner Joined: 24 Aug 2002 Posts: 23 Location: USA

that's what we did different, once I formatted the image manually it worked fine, installing now, though without a mouse, gotta fix that

Beginner Joined: 24 Aug 2002 Posts: 23 Location: USA

this is very weird seeing windows install in a window I have to say that lol

Wizard Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 1551 Location: Australia

Just had another couple of 'panic' errors which I had to type 'cont' to get past (actually I typed 'alwayscont' to make it stop prompting me for that type of error). But windows is now fully installed and is (slowly) bringing up the 'Start' menu right now Very Happy

I think it gets these errors when its doing something weird with drivers, not 100% sure. It says: "jmp_ev: IP out of CS limits!" Whatever that means Smile

Beginner Joined: 24 Aug 2002 Posts: 23 Location: USA

sounds like it could be network related, I disabled the networkcard in the rc.txt for the installation, I figure I'll figure that out after windows is running