[Feature Request] Support PowerPC64 LE

[runlevel5]

The PowerPC community has been playing Quake 3 for quite awhile.

If the core team accepts Pull Request to add support for PowerPC64 LE, I am more than happy to contribute.

If not, please feel free to close this ticket

[NuclearMonster]

I don't have any PowerPC hardware to test a patch, however I'm hoping to get an iMac g3 at some point to keep support for that older platform if it possible, but we don't have that resource at the moment.

[runlevel5]

I have been involved with the PowerPC community so I could ask them to help with the testing. Furthermore I could do video recording to prove the changes works as expected.

[runlevel5]

.. however I'm hoping to get an iMac g3 at some point

Btw iMac G3 is not PowerPC64 BE nor PowerPC64 LE

[NuclearMonster]

What is the status of functional hardware for this platform if it isn't simply PPC?

[runlevel5]

What is the status of functional hardware for this platform if it isn't simply PPC?

Many options. For example those POWER8/9 machines from IBM or Raptor Computing

https://raptorcs.com/content/base/products.html

[NuclearMonster]

These don't appear to be accessible at 8k and up at least through that retailer. Are there more reasonably priced machines, commonly available on the used market perhaps?

I don't believe it's reasonable for the project to focus on this platform versus more common platforms that are accessible to more people. However, I wouldn't turn down support if it were a reasonably easy patch with minimal changes.

[runlevel5]

These don't appear to be accessible at 8k and up at least through that retailer. Are there more reasonably priced machines, commonly available on the used market perhaps?

Well, IBM POWER-based computers have never been affordable... The more affordable PowerMac G5 costs like $4k. Unfortunately it is just the nature of this architecture

I don't believe it's reasonable for the project to focus on this platform versus more common platforms that are accessible to more people. However, I wouldn't turn down support if it were a reasonably easy patch with minimal changes.

Changes are quite minimal

[tomkidd]

A question I would have is what is the status of SDL on this platform? With the Mac one of the issues is that SDL official support is limited to an older version (2.0.1) and only goes so far back on operating system versions. What's the status of SDL on IBM POWER?

[runlevel5]

AFAIK SDL2 is running fine. Major distro ships with up-to-date SDL2 versions.

[smallmodel]

@NuclearMonster PowerPC can be debugged using QEMU if you wish, I do it for some projects (using Big-endian and not Little-endian however), then X11-forwarding can be used, however it's slow.

Here are the install arguments for qemu-system-ppc64:

qemu-system-ppc64 -accel tcg -M pseries -m 4G \
    -serial stdio \
    -cdrom "iso/debian-12.0.0-ppc64-NETINST-1.iso" \
    -hda "disks/system.qcow2"

And the running (post-install) arguments for qemu-system-ppc64:

qemu-system-ppc64 -accel tcg -M pseries -smp cores=8 -m 4G \
    -serial stdio \
    -hda "disks/system.qcow2" \
    -nic user,model=e1000,hostfwd=tcp::2224-:22,hostfwd=udp::27960-:27969

• SSH to the PPC machine can be achieved using 127.0.0.1:2224
• The PPC machine can access the host using 10.0.2.2

For example, Windows shared folders can be mounted in the emulated machine using:

mkdir -p /mnt/ioq3
mount -t cifs -o vers=3.0,username=the_username,password=the_password //10.0.2.2/ioq3 /mnt/ioq3

The Debian PowerPC64 ISO can be downloaded from here, and the ppc64el iso here