[SoundComp-Develop] Emulation games...

[<js...@ya...>]

Dear SoundComp team,

I would like to inform you about "a giant leap for me, just a small step for SoundComp" :-)

Since one of the near-to-middle future goals is supporting FLAC and Monkey's Audio, and especially Monkey's Audio was written in a heavily platform-depending way and must be redone in this respect in larger parts (part of this redoing is already done), we will need a possibility to test this also on systems based on other processors. 

The best option would finding someone that runs such a system (PA-RISC, Sun SPARC, PowerPC...), something that is "big endian" because this switch is expected to create the most issues (besides 32- vs. 64-bit, but we can already thest this within x86 vs. AMD64).

Bad news is, I did not succeed in finding someone that runs such a system and would do testing on it for us.

Good news is, after a small odyssee I found an option to test it without access to such a machine - a running emulation of a PowerPC system, including Java, C++ compiler and network access. Runs on every 32- or 64-bit windows, BSD or linux. Can build SoundComp out of the box. I checked one resulting test file, it contained (as expected, since the present WavStruct generation is pure java) the absolutely identical bytes as the same file generated on windows/AMD64.

Bad news again, it takes loooooooooooooooooooooong to do anything. A complete SoundComp build takes about 14-16 hours (but we do not need it that way for testing, the actual necessary portion would be some 3-4 hours, we can copy the jar from other platforms that build faster), running (most) test cases took me 3-4 hours again. It only builds with "ant", and has no graphical user interface at all (that would make it even slower by probably almost another order of magnitude - unuseable). It needs a suitable machine (more than 2GB RAM and the faster CPU, the better, no single core machine, my experiments were done with an AMD 5050e, 2 Cores 2.6 GHz each).

Good news again, if anyone needs to do cross-architecture tests on a little endian machine (x86, AMD64) - or just wants to play with it, I can share with him the installed environment as a single (1.2GB) directory, not even an installation needed on windows. Perfectly legal, it is exclusively free and open source in it. Nobody has to re-experience all my dead end attempts.

I added a report, also about the dead-ends, on the wiki:

https://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/soundcomp/index.php?title=Cross-platform_builds


Comments are welcome! If anyone has a machine that greatly outperforms mine, please contact me for the files and test if it's really faster on that.

Best regards

Jan