pSX linux port

[semson]

greetings devs, i read from an separate thread that you are planning a linux port, how are we going with this? just want to let you devs know, if tester is needed, i can be one. i am pretty sure i am not the only one though

for your information, i am linux desktop user, running 2 linux machines (gentoo and ubuntu). i am not a programmer but i know the routine of compiling packages from source.

[Ultima]

Somehow, I doubt knowing how to compile packages from source would be helpful, as pSX Author is not interested in releasing the source in the first place ;o

Thanks for offering a hand to test though.

[ZeXr0]

I think it's impossible for the moment, unless DirectX exist for linux ?

[patrickp]

It's certainly true that pSX Emulator is quite specifically DirectX 9.0 dependent. I would imagine pSX Author would have to make use of alternative methods to make it run on Linux, possibly with a concomitant hit in performance. However, this seems to be usual with Windows software ported to Linux, and I suppose Linux users will expect this.

[Ultima]

Direct3D can probably be changed to OpenGL without much issue, since pSX Author reportedly only uses it to draw. Not sure about audio or input, though. Of course, I could just be spouting junk out of my arse here, so take what I say with a grain of salt

[patrickp]

In that case, it would be interesting to see if a Linux port might have a backwards influence on the Windows version.

[Ultima]

Indeed, my (uninformed) speculation is that a transition to OpenGL (which pSX Author has said is not out of the question) and other libraries for input/output will likely happen around the time it is ported to Linux.

[Sune]

SDL seems to be the way to go these days.

I'm sure there are a lot of things to consider.

For one, I don't think the author is ready to release his source code, and there can be many different reasons for that.
One is license issues.. there always seem to be license issues.

[Ultima]

I don't see what license issues there could be, and going Linux doesn't mean going open-source either ;o

[Sune]

There could be license issues with whatever would replace DirectX and other Windows-only API stuff.

What's the point of a Linux port if it isn't open source?

pSX already works fine under Wine as it is.

[Ultima]

Indeed, it can run on Wine, but a lot of people don't like using Wine, and prefer native ports. Porting to Linux does not mean the source needs to be opened, and there are plenty of non-Free (Free as in FSF Free; free speech) softwares in Linux -- doesn't make them pointless either. Example? nVidia and ATI drivers for Linux. Sure, there are FOSS alternatives to them, but they don't work any good if you want to actually use your graphics card for anything. There's also Skype, and Adobe Flash (Gnash, the FSF implementation of Flash, is not fully developed yet). Obviously, there are a bunch of non-FOSS stuff that I'm missing, but these are just some random examples that popped into my head.

Libraries are libraries, and it'd be ridiculous for a non-FOSS application to be unable to use it (and I'm pretty sure there shouldn't be any conflicts with licenses anyway).

Edit: I'm going to look around a bit about non-FOSS linking up with Free libraries. The terms are a bit hairy, as I remember it, but I still doubt it should be a problem.

Edit: Okie dokie, (it appears that) if the library being used is licensed under the GPL, but not the LGPL, then pSX would need to open its source under a Free license. From what I can see, so far, though, many (if not most) libraries are licensed under the LGPL, a combination of the LGPL and some other license, or some other license that is at most only as restrictive as the LGPL with regards to linking to the library, so pSX's source should be safe even when porting... Here's some more information regarding LGPL (which... "proves" that most libraries use LGPL).