Slashdot Mirror
Minecraft Ported To the Raspberry Pi
An anonymous reader writes "The amusing 'but does it run Crysis?' question has a cousin: 'but does it run Minecraft?' The makers of Raspberry Pi can now officially say that yes, yes it does. Called Minecraft: Pi Edition, the latest flavor of the popular game carries 'a revised feature set' and 'support for several programming languages,' so you can code directly into Minecraft before or after you start playing. That means you can build structures in the traditional Minecraft way, but you can also break open the code and use a programming language to manipulate things in the game world."
Java has yet to be ported to the Pi's floating-point, so the only option is to use soft floats. I can't imagine Minecraft running at any acceptable speed. LibreOffice is also painfully unusable on the Pi at the moment, but I don't know how much that depends on float ops.
Some time last year I'd vaguely heard about the Raspberry Pi, and how it was a super-cheap, super-basic ARM board. I'd really not been paying much attention when I happened to click on a YouTube link apparently showing the Raspberry Pi running 'Quake'.
That's nice, I thought - expecting a 320x200 software-rendered Quake 1 running at an abysmal framerate, in a let's-try-one-up-from-Doom kind of way.
Shitting heck, it was Quake 3 - running at an anti-aliased 1080p at quite a speed.
Having owned multiple, expensive generations of PCs incapable of that kind of graphical performance - nostalgia's awful. Can't they just run Doom and be happy? Stop this relentless, amazing progress, please!
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
The day that a computer can run a modern-ish video game but not a console text editor, that text editor may need to rethink a few of its life choices.
Quick summary of the java situation on raspbian:
Oracle java doesn't currently work on armv6 hard float.
Openjdk with zero works but is SLOW
Openjdk with jamvm works and seems to be the most workable option right now
Openjdk with cacao is broken on all arm hardfloat platforms at the moment*.
I haven't tried openjdk with shark or avian.
* see debian bugs 688703 and 688702
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register