Solarwolf game port for GP2X, and less sneaker net.
Yesterday I got some help from theoddbot on the latest changes on the gp2x scene.
There is now a serial over usb driver. So I can log into my gp2x and get a bash prompt through minicom.
Yah! much rejoicing. However the driver is buggy, and file transfers don't work. So it's still anoying to do some things.
My old development method, pre serial over usb. 'close down gp2x, then go over to win box, take out card, put card in reader, copy file over from linux to sd, then take out card, then put card in gp2x, then boot, then select program'.
Now I can make a bunch of changes, unmount the SD card through my bash prompt. Sneaker net them onto my windows box with the SD card reader. Then I can run the program, debug it, and make small changes with vi. I can also run code on the python interpreter.
Yah! If the program crashes, or gets stuck somewhere, then I can kill it from the bash prompt. However ctrl+c doesn't seem to work, so I need to run the program in the background to start with.
So after getting a few pygame examples to work nicely on the gp2x I began to get solarwolf running. With not much effort it was going fine. Now I am working on making it a good port. Making the buttons, and joystick to the expected things, increasing performance, and reducing memory usage.
One interesting thing, when I first ported the game sometimes it would get killed by the kernel on startup. This was because the game uses almost all free memory on the GP2x. I think the way that loading happens, sometimes because of the garbage collector there are times when memory is not freed right away.
There is hope in sight for using more memory... some of the reserved memory can be accessed through mmap, as well as by using hardware surfaces.
There is now a serial over usb driver. So I can log into my gp2x and get a bash prompt through minicom.
Yah! much rejoicing. However the driver is buggy, and file transfers don't work. So it's still anoying to do some things.
My old development method, pre serial over usb. 'close down gp2x, then go over to win box, take out card, put card in reader, copy file over from linux to sd, then take out card, then put card in gp2x, then boot, then select program'.
Now I can make a bunch of changes, unmount the SD card through my bash prompt. Sneaker net them onto my windows box with the SD card reader. Then I can run the program, debug it, and make small changes with vi. I can also run code on the python interpreter.
Yah! If the program crashes, or gets stuck somewhere, then I can kill it from the bash prompt. However ctrl+c doesn't seem to work, so I need to run the program in the background to start with.
So after getting a few pygame examples to work nicely on the gp2x I began to get solarwolf running. With not much effort it was going fine. Now I am working on making it a good port. Making the buttons, and joystick to the expected things, increasing performance, and reducing memory usage.
One interesting thing, when I first ported the game sometimes it would get killed by the kernel on startup. This was because the game uses almost all free memory on the GP2x. I think the way that loading happens, sometimes because of the garbage collector there are times when memory is not freed right away.
There is hope in sight for using more memory... some of the reserved memory can be accessed through mmap, as well as by using hardware surfaces.
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