TLDR; It doesn’t work

With all the excitement of PowerPC NT being runnable under emulation, I thought I’d try to do something fun, and port Alexander Batalov‘s fallout1-re, to Visual C++ 4.0.

The ‘problem’ is that it’s written using a more modern C that allows C++ style variables in the code. In traditional C, the declaration of variables has to be at the start of each function, however C++ allows you to place them wherever you want in the code.

The ‘fix’ is quite simple, you just have to separate the creation of variables in the code, and place them on top, as simple as!

You can see in this case the deletions in red, and the additions in green.

115 changed files with 21,455 additions and 4,437 deletions.

It was a LOT of changes. It took me 3 days to go through the code. But with a lot of work I was able to get it to compile first with Visual C++ 2003. I then created a Makefile allowing me to compile with Visual C++ 4.0

I have to admit, I was kind of surprised that it actually compiled for the PowerPC. And instantly saddened that it doesn’t actually work. Maybe some code amputations may get around the running part, but that’s just speculation right now.

Shockingly the opening animations play fine, the menus load, however you get about one frame in the game, and it goes unresponsive.

I don’t know why but Visual C++ 2003 won’t debug it correctly. I’m not sure why it won’t set the working directory correctly. Attaching to the process seems to produce different results, where it’s stuck in some loop that I can’t peg down.

Obviously, I did screw something up, the ‘solution’ is to install a newer version of Visual Studio and ‘blend’ the files, to try to rule out where or what went wrong.

The annoying thing is that even if I go through the required steps to get the VC4 version working, it won’t matter as at best this would only be relevant for the currently unemulated Dec Alpha.

Oh well, sometimes you eat the bar, sometimes the bar eats you.(yes I know it’s BEAR).