[Adonthell-devel] Endianness (Adonthell and Solaris)

[Kai Sterker]

I've been exchanging mail with a guy who tried to run Adonthell on
Solaris, and there are a number of problems.

The first one are the precompiled python scripts. For some reason, Python
does not like them on his box, even though they were compiled on it. (He
said that he tried different versions of Python, so possibly something
went wrong there.)

Anyway, running with the -g option and the data-tarball worked, sort of.

When it gets to loading the title graphics (the jewelbag, etc ...) there
are some errors. (He wasn't more specific though.) I imagine that this is
a matter of byteorder, as I dimly remember that the Sparc is a big-endian
system, whereas the x86 is little-endian. Have no confirmation yet, but
it's the only explanation I have.

Fortunately, SDL provides all the means to work around this. So once I get
Brian's reply, I'll add the necessary code to convert the data after
loading, in case the byteorder differs. Shouldn't be a big deal.


Should that fix the problems, we'll have to make sure to do this
byteorder-testing (and swapping if neccessary) everywhere where data is
saved and loaded. 

Btw, the same problem would occur with a port to MacOS X, as the PPC is 
definately big-endian.

Kai