Orbit Amiga 68k Port

Orbit is a freeware space combat simulator in the tradition of Elite, Wing Commander etc, originally written by Steve Belczyk for Win32/Linux systems. Here you can find the port for Amiga/68k by Thomas Aglassinger, which is derived from the port for Amiga/PPC by Oliver Gantert. For more information, visit the Official Orbit Homepage.

News

• 15-Jul-2000: Added some more detailed info about stack and memory needs.
  Added screenshot demonstrating networking on the same machine
• 10-Jul-2000: Established site.

Requirements

First, you need quite some hardware:

• 68060 CPU
• AGA, CyberGfx or Picasso96
• 32MB of Fast RAM (On my machine, it consumes about 20MB during runtime)
• 10MB of harddisk space

Next, you need a huge pile of libraries, drivers and utilities (unless you have them already). Fortunately, all of them are available for free:

• AHI, responsible for making noise.
• lucyplay.lha (~10K), responsible for making it easier for programmers to make noise with AHI.
• ixemul-48.0.lha (~600K), emulating a basic Posix API, which makes it a lot easier for programmers to port programs relying on it.
• StormMesa, responsible for drawing 3D graphics via OpenGL. You just need the "Libs_68k" archive, unless you want to start developing yourself.
• NewWPA8.lha (2K) patches a couple of AmigaOS functions so that they are faster and work. This is only relevant for AGA users of AmigaOS 3.0.

Download

You need two archives, which are both available from Aminet:

• aminet:game/shoot/Orbit_68k.lha (~140K), containing the actual program
• aminet:game/shoot/Orbit_dat.lha (~3.0M), containing the data about planets, ships etc

Installation

Currently, the installation is not very Amiga-like. Maybe in a later version. For now:

• Extract the Orbit_*.lha archives wherever you like. They expand to a directory named "Orbit", so you don't have to create one manually.
• Install StormMesa. This seems a bit painful first, but basically all you need is that every *.library ends up in libs:. If you just want to run Orbit, don't bother too much about the environment variables (see Tuning Performance).
• Copy lucyplay040.library to libs: and remove the 040 in the name.
• Install AHI. This is trivial thanks to Installer.
• Install ixemul.library. This can also be a pain, but concerning Orbit, just make sure that the appropriate file ends up in libs:. Take care that it's optimized for your CPU if you're concerned about performance. If you're not concerned about performance yet, believe me, you will be after you ran Orbit the first time. Remember, we're talking about 68k here.

Running

Finally, the interesting part (again, not very Amiga like):

• Open a CLI and cd to the Orbit directory.
• Allocate some stack, for instance by typing stack 60000. (I watched StackMon while running Orbit, and it announced a maximum of about 50K, so this should be on the save side.)
• Basically, you can run Orbit by typing orbit.exe. But this will not give you much performance. Read on...

Tuning Performance

StormMesa offers a lot of options to finetune the OpenGL/Glut applications. Orbit is a Glut application, so you can use all the standard Glut options in the command line.

For users of Z2 graphic cards and AGA, these are the most interesting ones:

• -forcefs makes Orbit run on an own screen. Choose a small one, than it's faster. If you have a Z2 graphics card, it makes sense to use 320x240 because the Z2 bus becomes very slow with higher resolutions. If you have AGA, you need the NewWP8 patch from Aminet.
• -fast generally trades quality against speed
• -vfast trades quality against speed event more violently
• -forcedb uses double buffering

On my trusty Amiga 2000 with a 68060/50, Picasso-II and CyberGfx v3, the following seems to work best:

stack 60000
set MESA/FORCE_IR
orbit.exe -vfast -forcefs -forcedb

In the screenmode requester select something like 320x240x16 so you won't need any dithering. I've provided some screenshots so you know what to expect from the above configuration.

Refer to the StormMesa manual for more options and details.

Support

For questions and comments about the Amiga/68k port, contact Thomas Aglassinger <agi@giga.or.at>.

Issues concerning the Amiga/PPC port and the Amiga port in general should be directed to Oliver Gantert <lucyg@t-online.de>.

Everything else, like Orbit in general, the gameplay, planet maps and ships, should be discussed with Steve Belczyk <orbit@genesis.nred.ma.us>.