Scummvm is hanging and crashing like it's 1999

thanius · Post by **thanius** » Sun Dec 30, 2007 7:12 pm

Hi there! Love the engine, always has. I'm just about to go through some of the old games on my mobile phone, but Scummvm doesn't seem to like me very much.
The phone is a HTC Wizard/Qtek 9100, running the games of the SD card. The problem is, that the program jerks out what seems randomly, but mostly when I open up the F5-dialog after a while. But changing scenery in the game and such can also trigger the crash.
I've edited the ini-file to have the debug mode on, but the logfiles doesn't mention anything about it - the last time I tried, it printed the key pressed and then nothing. I've tried to reproduce the crash, but it seems completely random. I've got fair amount of RAM left, so it shouldn't be that. Anyone else got this problem?

Also, when playing Sarien, the hardware keyboard respond very slowly and doesn't send the enter/return signal; making the games barely playable (I REFUSE to aknowledge the virtual keyboard). Is there going to be a fix for this soon?

Other than these two, three small thingies, love the app. Keep up the good work!

knakos · Post by **knakos** » Mon Dec 31, 2007 9:45 am

Assuming you're talking about the recent snapshot build:

* Random crashes

Noting that your device is using the Pocket PC/Phone version of WM5, I'm afraid that there's little we can do at this time. The problem is that the size of the ScummVM executable has grown too much with the addition of new engines, together with the fact that even on a clean boot, your specific OS leaves too little free RAM for scummvm to run properly (about 13-14MB IIRC). I may try optimizing the code for size for this release which would suck in every respect other than enabling the application to run with a reduced memory footprint. But all is not lost! Work has been underway to move to the fabulous ScummVM Plugin Architecture (TM), which will mean bucketloads of free RAM for every engine

. But, there remains a serious restructuring of the architecture to enable such a feature which for stability reasons will not be included in the 0.11.0 release. Be on the lookout for that stuff coming shortly (we hope) after the release on a new snapshot build.

* Keyboard issues

Perhaps your device is sending a custom chorded enter keystroke (it's like the gazillionth time this is happening). The only way I can see that is to enable diagnostic output, tap on a few keys including enter, then file a bug report.

Thanks for your support,
Kostas

thanius · Post by **thanius** » Tue Jan 01, 2008 4:04 pm

I'll file that bug report then! Can't wait to go through some of my old AGI games (and new fanbased ones!) again. These shouldn't drain too much RAM, should they? Or perhaps it's the program all together that's too big.

knakos · Post by **knakos** » Wed Jan 02, 2008 9:10 am

My tests here show that you should be able to run AGI games pretty much OK.

BTW, for AGI we also have the predictive input dialog, which enables quick text entering using only the stylus or the numeric pad in smartphones.

thanius · Post by **thanius** » Mon Jan 07, 2008 1:24 pm

Hey there! I'm just messing around with a few fangames to see which ones work (Enclosure doesn't seem to, noooo) and I was just wondering if there's a way to map the cursorkeys on my keyboard (slide-out qwerty) to the cursorkeys in ScummVM for making the ego walking around. They're mapped to mouse movement by default, and I can't find any keys to map in the mapper. It would be great only having to use the keyboard in AGI games.

knakos · Post by **knakos** » Mon Jan 07, 2008 2:23 pm

You can try unmapping the cursor keys from their default actions. They *should* then register as normal cursor keys. Edit your scummvm.ini file and in the action_mapping line replace 0111, 0112, 0113 and 0114 with 0000.

thanius · Post by **thanius** » Mon Jan 07, 2008 7:45 pm

Well, I did just that and now the cursors work! But the directions are fudged up - left is right, wtc. time to fill in that bug report?

knakos · Post by **knakos** » Tue Jan 08, 2008 8:35 am

The cursor keys obey the screen rotation currently selected: f.ex. the right cursor key acts normally in portrait mode, as down in landscape and as up in inverse landscape modes.

thanius · Post by **thanius** » Tue Jan 08, 2008 12:17 pm

Is there a way to fix this in the ini? I'd really like to have the respective keys mapped to their physical directions.

knakos · Post by **knakos** » Tue Jan 08, 2008 3:06 pm

nope

thanius · Post by **thanius** » Tue Jan 08, 2008 7:02 pm

Ok, let's try that again...

Will it be possible to change this in the ini, in the future? *featurerequest*

spookypeanut · Post by **spookypeanut** » Tue Jan 08, 2008 7:58 pm

But... but... but... why? I don't understand? Surely you'd want to be able to move the character left by pressing the button that's on your left? Have I misunderstood something here?

thanius · Post by **thanius** » Wed Jan 09, 2008 7:51 am

That's the thing! When I press left on the keyboard the ego walks down! Or up. Can't remember. But certainly not left.

thanius · Post by **thanius** » Wed Jan 09, 2008 3:43 pm

[edit: I now noticed that if I slide out the keyboard BEFORE starting ScummVM, the directions are normal.]

Ok, now I'm totally confused.

I was tinkering a bit more with scummvm today, and when suddenly my cursors were working as they should - with any orientation! That is, on the phone's, what to call it, "joystick". And that's only when the keyboard is slided inside the phone.

When I slide out the keyboard, however, the phone automatically goes into landscape orientation by default (without ScummVM changing its orientation) and thus the keys change direction. So this means, ScummVM does what it should do when the keyboard is tucked away inside the phone; but when I slide it out the orientation on the keyboard is rotated 90 degrees clockwise.

And if that's not enough, manually changing the orientation to have the screen facing the keyboard makes the keyboard rotate 90 degrees yet again.

So it comes down to this - If I want to play AGI games using the keyboard, with the right screen orientation; pressing left (that's up during portrait) on the keyboard/joystick will make the ego walk downwards.

Does this make any sense? Or should I report a bug?
Here's my phone, a Qtek 9100 (alias i-Mate k-Jam or HTC Wizard), so you get the picture.

Also, and this is just me being lazy not having read the PPC readme, is there a way to disable the pocket menu on the bottom and the mouse pointer during startup? That would be great, not having to map a bunch of buttons I have to press each time I load a game.

knakos · Post by **knakos** » Thu Jan 10, 2008 1:07 pm

Such a behavior has been reported in the past, and in most cases it was a problem of the display driver on the OS side. To decide on it, I need to see some stderr/out output for 1) portrait starup and 2) landscape startup (and in the bug tracker of course

). Also please take a look if any official OS patches from the device manufacturer have been released for your device.

Scummvm is hanging and crashing like it's 1999

Scummvm is hanging and crashing like it's 1999

Keyboard

Keyboard working, but now what?

go left. left, i say. LEEEFT!