Topics

1

Zaurus - pdaXrom / RC5: ScummVM 0.6.1b uploaded

« on: October 10, 2004, 12:50:22 pm »

Ok, so here it goes.

Both windowed and fullscreen QVGA and VGA modes are supported. The default setting is to use fullscreen QVGA, which is the fastest mode, but everything is tweakable from the game launcher GUI. Actually, advmame2x looks quite playable.

Additionally, fullscreen vertical flip is available to facilitate playing with the clamshell closed -- so you can easily use the backside buttons. This can be selected from the launcher GUI, too.

The touchscreen works the way it worked in scummvm-console -- clicks are produced by releases, not presses. This gives you an opportinity to aim the cursor precisely, so you'll never miss the right dialog entry accidentally etc.

The following buttons are mapped: backside Cancel acts as a left mouse button, backside Ok acts as the right one, jogdial left acts as an Escape, jogdial right pulls down the in-game menu.

Suspending is working perfectly, but only when choosing the 'Suspend' option from the in-game menu. Please do not use the usual 'Power off' backside button, as it would not work correctly. This way, most of the time sound get screwed up when restored. I failed to catch that button (xmodmapping doesn't seem to help), so just don't push it.

Uploaded to the usual unstable feed, though it does not seem to be the best place for RC5 packages. We need an RC5 feed

Have fun!

2

Zaurus - pdaXrom / Opie-Reader uploaded

« on: July 16, 2004, 05:06:14 pm »

So here it is.

This all happened thanks to the author of the program, Tim Wentford, who have also helped with the packaging.

3

Zaurus - pdaXrom / unclutter uploaded

« on: June 08, 2004, 07:15:44 am »

This little program hides your mouse cursor after a period of inactivity.
This is useful because you only need to see the cursor while you\'re tapping, and it becomes useless afterwards. This program will get it out of your way. Hope you\'ll find it useful :)

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Zaurus - pdaXrom / ScummVM console edition uploaded

« on: June 06, 2004, 07:47:26 pm »

Being a big fan of the Lucas games, I made this to be able to actually play, not just for the sake of completeness.

This version is meant to run from the console (framebuffer) only.

Here are the features:

Hardware 320x240 fullscreen -- works real fast and smooth;
Operates with touchscreen directly (via libts) -- no more mouse emulation problems;
Hardware backside buttons are mapped to be handy, so it is perfectly possible to play with a clamshell closed;
Has a built-in suspend functionality, you can select it from the in-game menu.

Using this version of ScummVM, I have successfully completed \"Day Of The Tentacle\", full talkie version. In fact, I was enjoying the every moment of it. Other Lucas games should work fine too. Even \"Full Throttle\", the complete CD version with movies and speech, works just great (but you will obviously need a 512Mb card to hold it :)

Enjoy the playing!

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Zaurus - pdaXrom / Software floating point as a library versus kernel emulation

« on: April 27, 2004, 01:32:47 pm »

We all know that Z has no floating point unit. Therefore, all floating point operations have to be emulated.

The current pdaxrom kernel still uses Netwinder floating point emulation. It works fine and all, but it is quite slow. While there is an option to use alternative in-kernel floating emulation, which is faster but doesn\'t always work, there is a better way to cope with floating point issues.

There is a possibility to tell gcc to use library functions to emulate floating point operations, rather than to emit floating point instructions which are then emulated by the kernel. This approach would be much more faster. The relevant gcc option is \'-msoft-float\'.

Unfortunately, when I try using it with SDK, gcc complains about crtn.o / crtend.o using hardware FP, while the program itself uses software FP. It looks like the current environment needs to be reconfigured and recompiled by the pdaXrom team to make this work.

Answering the question about whether it really works or not: it does. Once upon a time I had a natural Debian running on my Zaurus. I tried that trick there with a simple program and I got 2x floating point speedup. The \'-msoft-float\' option just worked there. The only thing it needed was \'libfloat\' library (it was apt-get\'able).

Unfortunately, it doesn\'t seem to work in pdaXrom. It would be very good to move to the in-library software floating point entirely, as it is the most natural way of execution, and, most notably, it is significantly faster.

This is a call to pdaXrom developers. I would very much like you people to look at this issue. This may be a great improvement to the much beloved pdaXrom.  That would help us all.

///

p.s. I abandoned all attempts to get natural Debian working acceptable on Z since then -- the main issue was poor X server. I had my breath hold when I found the pdaXrom project. Now I switched to it entirely and enjoying the thing. I just would very much like to have floating point support improved though

6

Zaurus - pdaXrom / Playing video in 320x240 fullscreen

« on: April 17, 2004, 12:30:29 pm »

Here are the steps needed to play videos in 320x240 fullscreen:

1) First, install mplayer from the pdaxrom feed. No other additional software is needed.

2) Next, create the file /etc/fb.modes with the following contents:

mode \"qvga\"
    geometry 320 240 320 240 16
    timings 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
endmode

Now, to play your file, you must first exit from X if you\'re running it (issue \'killall X\' in terminal). You can only play fullscreen video from the console at the moment.

3) When you\'re in console, run mplayer with the following command:

mplayer -vo fbdev -fbmode qvga -vm -ac mad file.avi

assuming \'file.avi\' is the file you want to play. You can supply any other options as well, or put them in your ~/.mplayer/config file. The only relevant options are

-fbmode qvga, which instructs mplayer to switch to the mode \'qvga\' described in /etc/fb.modes, and

-vm, which enables video mode switching

After the playback is finished, your screen becomes garbled. Issuing \'startx\' command to get back to X works ok, but when you quit it back, the console is unfortunately still garbled. No solution for this yet, apart from reboot that will surely help