With the collapse of my vpsland archive, Neko has become lost once more again. Thankfully I had some fragment backups so I have been able to bring Neko back from the grave. again.

First I dumped everything I had over on sourceforge. With a bit more digging I found the old RISC versions as well. I even found the Itanium version, although I lost the ARM version. Im not sure I have an 8gb pi4 anymore, but I’d like to get one when/if prices stop being insane. Anyways I also uploaded the source to github, since it’s more hip and acceptable for zoomers. I do have to say the git mirror command was everything I’d hoped it’d be.

git push --mirror https://github.com/neozeed/neko98.git

It literally was that easy.

I put a binary built with Visual C++ 2010 SP1 over there too. Although if you need Visual C++ 2010 runtimes, I put them on sourceforge.

Also I should add in the settings make sure you click “Always On Top”, otherwise Neko will be hidden to the desktop surface and you won’t see him.

I hope you enjoy!

The CPU is an Intel Core2 Quad Q9300 running @ 2.50Ghz, with 8GB of ram.

The “Windows Experience Index” is 5.9 (It’s 5.9 across the board).

I’m using a redo of the SDL port of Quake 1 as a benchmark. You can download it here.

Unzip it somewhere, and I’ve tried to make this pretty easy to follow… There are precompiled EXE’s for various CPU’s and Visual C++ levels.

To build, setup your CLI with the VC environment variables, then simply cd into ‘ezquake\build’ and run:

nmake -f quake.mak

If you have Visual C++ 2.0 (I forget if I needed this for 4, and I just don’t feel like installing 5.0 right now) you may need a slight ‘hack’ to undefine some things that just don’t exist in the winmm.dll setup with the vc2.mak/b2.cmd .

And this should produce an EXE with the /O2 flags for a generically built maximum speed optimized EXE. If your make has issues, you can try the build.cmd file which just blindly compiles the thing one at a time…. It should work as well.

Then to test the exe, simply cd into the ‘ezquake\test’ and run:

..\build\quake -nomouse +timedemo demo1

Anyways, now for some interesting test results:

Visual C++ 2 x86 619.4 FPS
Visual C++ 4 x86 689.1 FPS
Visual C++ 6 x86 631.2 FPS
Visual C++ 2008 x64 375.7 FPS
Visual C++ 2008 x86 400.6 FPS
Visual C++ 2010 x86 772.2 FPS
Visual C++ 2010 x64 949.5 FPS

949 FPS in Quake1!

I’m blown away with just how fast this new version of Visual C++ is.

Considering how lackluster and scarce they were at the launch I guess it’s not surprising.

Anyways It’ll be nice to fire up the x64 CLI tools, and not be told that the ‘release’ is infarct a beta…

Anyways, there is some details over at the MSDN site.. And a demo/eval download.

On the ‘cheap’ front, the express editions are also updated to the 2010 level. I’d recommend getting the ‘offline’ ISO image… That way you’ve got all the bits in one shot.

On the UNIX front, I found that on OpenSolaris, that the SunStudio is a free download. This includes SUN’s C/C++/Fortran (77/90/95) compilers.

I took a quick look at the SUN F77 compiler, and it’s certainly the UNIX one from the days of v7 as it behaves the same way… I guess that’s not too surprising.

Other then that, not a heck of a lot going on.