Yamagi Quake II

Our build of Debian’s yquake2 8.70 on its gl1 renderer, with the Quake II demo data. It plays the demo pak’s timedemo at 68.7 steady fps with almost no stalls (batch 2026-10-18-mesa-407-lut) since its random-number table shrank from 32 MB to 64 KB, and its played session had a 60 fps median, a 1% low of 33, no dropouts and no crash.

Packages, data and settings

• yamagi-quake2, yamagi-quake2-core (/usr/lib/yamagi-quake2/quake2, renderers ref_gl1 and ref_gl3), packages/yquake2, COMPONENT=contrib: debian-ports builds nothing arch-specific in contrib, so Debian has no ppc64 binary. The gl1 renderer (GL 1.4 fixed function) is the one that runs; gl3 and gles3 need GL 3.
• 0001 swaps the 16-bit WAV samples to host byte order at load: uploaded little-endian, they played as white noise through OpenAL (the investigation).
• 0002 YQ2_KISS_QSIZE: the KISS PRNG’s lag table, allocated at first use with 4096 entries by default instead of a static 16 MiB array in both quake2 and game.so (the investigation). Its upstream offer is drafted in upstream.md.
• 0003 the default bindings (yq2.cfg, run after id’s default.cfg and before the player’s config.cfg): W/A/S/D instead of Yamagi’s E/S/D/F (the power shield from W to E), and a game controller’s buttons, which Yamagi left unbound (the sticks moved and looked, nothing fired): R2 fires, L2 walks, Cross jumps, Circle crouches, L1/R1 the previous/next weapon, Square uses the item, Triangle the inventory, the D-pad left/right selects an item, up the help computer, down drops the item, Select the score; Start is the menu already. A saved config.cfg keeps its own bindings (Yamagi writes them all), so a home that has played keeps E/S/D/F until Options, Customize controls, “reset to defaults”. Checked on the PS3 (2026-10-29, a fresh home): the config.cfg the game writes has bind w "+forward", bind e "use power shield", bind BTN_SOUTH "+moveup", bind TRIG_RIGHT "+attack"; the pad by hand is for a played session.
• Two menu entries of ours (desktop/launchers), the gl1 renderer fullscreen at the desktop’s resolution (r_mode -2): “Quake II (demo)”, -datadir /usr/share/games/quake2-demo, and “Quake II”, the full game, -datadir /usr/share/games/quake2. Both are packed hidden (NoDisplay=true) with X-Walnut-Requires= their data’s baseq2/pak0.pak (/usr/share/games/quake2-demo/..., /usr/share/games/quake2/...): ps3-game-menu shows each only when that file exists. The full game’s data is game-data-packager’s quake2-full-data (build.toml [data_setup]).
• The data (licensed): quake2-demo-data (/usr/share/games/quake2-demo/baseq2/, the demo’s baseq2 with demos/q2demo1.dm2 in its pak), built once with game-data-packager 89 (make game-data, the demo archive downloaded from id’s mirrors and kept in build/downloads/game-data) as quake2-demo-data_89_all.deb, Section local/games, and published once to the licensed suite. Quake II’s demo may not be redistributed at all. game-data-packager’s output isn’t reproducible: the version 89 file the LAN repository published is in the retirement backup’s ps3-licensed-debs/, and make publish DEBS="<that file>" before the next make game-data keeps it the same. The full game needs the player’s own Quake II data (the data guide on the game’s page).
• The config lives in ~/.local/share/YamagiQ2/baseq2/config.cfg (~/.yq2 before the XDG build).

How it performs

• Bench (batch 2026-10-18-mesa-407-lut, same boot, x2): kiss4k (now the default) against the old table: RSS 125 to 56 MB, swap used 80 to 9 MB, gameplay stalls 22.6 to 0.05 s, longest frame 4.5 s to 91 ms, steady 65.7 to 68.7, 1% low 20.1 to 31.1, 46 MB free at the lowest (12 before), 48 MB of VRAM, no underruns.
• How it got there: first runs on 2026-10-17 gave 56.1 fps with OpenAL, 58.4 with SDL audio; Mesa ps3.246 51.4, ps3.262 63.9 (+14-24%, batch 2026-10-17-mesa-262).

The recipe (benchmark/recipe.sh) runs the engine directly (Debian’s quake2 wrapper is contrib, not ours) on the demo pak’s only demo, +timedemo 1 +demomap q2demo1.dm2, vsync off. The timedemo repeats in one session: autoexec.cfg’s bench alias sets nextdemo again, disconnects (which prints the pass’s line; a chained demomap would reconnect and clear the counters) and starts the demo cold. Each pass also prints “ERROR: Disconnected from server”. Variants: sdlsound, kissbig, kiss4k, the OpenAL Soft variants.

Known problems

• Particles (blood, sparks, bullet trails) drew as squares: nv30 ignored GL_POINT_SMOOTH. Mesa 0050 draws smooth points with a variant of the bound fragment program (ps3.874: round on the PS3). Then every particle was a 40-pixel disc at any distance: nv30 never set POINT_PARAMS_ENABLE, so the RSX ignored the attenuated size Quake II asks for (gl1_pointparameters 1). Mesa 0051 with ps3rsx PS3_ABI 2 fixes it, checked with dev builds on 2026-10-27; the release check is docs/TESTS.md’s batch mesa-0051.
• Movement shipped bound to E/S/D/F (Yamagi’s defaults) and the pad’s buttons unbound: 0003 gives W/A/S/D and a pad scheme to new homes (checked on the PS3). The menu and HUD text is small at 1080p (the automatic scale is 3 there: 1920/640).
• Sys_LoadLibrary failed: libcurl.so.4: the optional download library, harmless.

Investigations

• 2026-10-16 OpenAL white noise: little-endian WAV samples played as noise (0001).
• 2026-10-18 the PRNG table: 32 MB of random-number table and 22.6 s of stalls (0002).
• 2026-10-26 point smooth: square particles (Mesa 0050).
• 2026-10-27 point size attenuation: particles of one size at every distance (Mesa 0051, ps3rsx PS3_ABI 2).

Research

What the surveys and plans said about it, newest first; each line names its source, the section and the date.

• 2026-10-15, the user’s first wish list (backlog.txt, commit 7d58e3d), “2. GPU driver and game support”: a strong candidate with its gl1 renderer: light and portable.