Porting PDCurses to libretro

[abakh]

A libretro port would enable many games to run inside retroarch, which is a multi-console "emulator" that runs on many platforms and has many users. This would make the games easy to install and easy to play on phones, consoles, etc. This should be one of the easier ports and libretro community are cooperative as well. I wanted to do it myself however you guys would probably do this before me beginning an effort 10 years later.

For those who might be interested: @Bill-Gray, @GitMensch, @juliusikkala, @rmorales87atx, @shugo

[abakh]

Inspecting this might be helpful, this is a SDL1.2 port to libretro
https://github.com/r-type/sdl-libretro
@r-type might be interested too.

[abakh]

I tag libretro people too, because why not? Maybe someone does it or gives an opinion. This would help running a lot of Unix retro and lightweight games (Nethack for instance). Maybe you can tell other interested people until someone does it. You can look at the fb port or this implementation guide.
@RobLoach @kivutar @gouchi @XerTheSquirrel

I wish continued success for these two efficient, hyper-portable, retro-related projects.

[RobLoach]

sdl-libretro is a rather large hack. I used it for ChaiLove, but ran into a few issues.

Since you mentioned a framebuffer, this alternative I put together may be of interest: pntr. It's a small graphics library that handles a framebuffer. The wrapper application, pntr_app, can be used to compile as a libretro core. ChaiLove has since moved from sdl-libretro over to pntr_app, and it's working quite well.

Another half-baked framebuffer solution I was playing with was libretro-gfxprim, which builds off of gfxprim. There were compatibility issues I ran into with it though, so I've stuck with pntr for the most part.

Getting pntr_app to work with PDC would mean leveraging the two libraries, mapping the events over, and then having the Update() method PDC_doupdate(), and render the screen using the pntr_draw functions. Or using a pntr_image representation of the PDC fb directly.

[abakh]

I am aware of that. I provided the link just in case it might give someone ideas. Thank you for introducing pntr_app.

[XerTheSquirrel]

This is not something I can give an opinion on at this time.

One large issue with POSIX applications and such is that you have a large number of system calls that you are going to have to wrap and map accordingly, so it is not just having a terminal backend but a POSIX backend.

[juliusikkala]

I'm not really sure if this is the right tool for the job. PDC is not a general "terminal but in WinGui/FB/SDL/etc.", it's specific to NCurses applications. To run a game with PDC in retroarch, the game would have to use ncurses AND be recompiled against PDC. A console application not using the ncurses API would not be compatible.

IMO as a user of retroarch as well, a general terminal emulator would probably be more straightforward. That way, you could just run the locally installed nethack / whatever without having to recompile it.

[abakh]

I know that. There are a lot of curses games that would be fun to play on many platforms (ascii-p0rtal, nbsdgames, bsdgames, tons of various small games I could find for you) a libretro port could enable them to run on e.g. Android, PS2, PSP and so on. We could make a grand compilation taking all those in a single core and it might weight like 20 MBs.

I don't think a retroarch terminal emulator would be a more useful idea (because if someone already has nethack on their terminal, why wouldn't they play on their terminal?) However I also did have an idea of having https://github.com/NetBSDfr/smolBSD (accelerated very lightweight Unix) on QEMU as a core (Maybe this idea would interest @RobLoach)

However the PDC-on-libretro would be much lighter and more portable than the QEMU idea. That idea might be good for running old X11 games someday.

[abakh]

A curses port would also enable porting whole terminal emulators to retroarch too (tmux uses curses)

[abakh]

Also they wouldn't have to recompile it. People would download the cores from the retroarch server.