Quick ports to run alongside Cacko/Sharp

[iamasmith]

Hi,

I've spent a couple of days playing around with PDAXROM development systems in my spare time, both onboard and the cross development environment and realise that the real thing that was tempting me towards PDAXROM was the ability to compile basic stuff with X GUI that I was able to pull down and make fairly minor change file mods to.

I think that probably what is more important to me is to have that ability alongside the Cacko ROM which I flashed back to and again realised what I had been depriving myself of.

I have had an idea about how to turn this into practicality.

Essentially I'm thinking about using just the basic XQT server as a starting point and building a set of Gnome and GTK support libraries. Then turning this into a cross compiler environment using the current cross compiler stuff and an add-on cramfs for dev-img so that Gnome or GTK based apps could be compiled on the Z.

Essentially the idea is to mount the additional cramfs then extend the environment variables already set up by dev-image to include the new includes and lib files for building on the native build environment.

I think QT X applications (KDE Applications and others) should be backported to Qtopia as you are approximately 1/2 way there with having QT calls in the apps and I think it's quite possible that there may be some clashes with the Qtopia libraries unless this was carefully plan. So I'm treating this as a sort of 'toe in the water' just to get Gnome and GTK apps built.

Additional cramfs images could potentially include framework to build QT apps for X or a version that would carry zports SDL stuff so that simple SDL games could be compiled in this manner. (_Psycho do you fancy having a go at this ? - need your SDL_mixer sources for this too).

Practically speaking the number of SDL games that are suitable for the Zaurus are limited either due to lack of 3D extensions or simple bitblit bandwidth at the higher resolution - anyone that has trawled through www.libsdl.org on a mission to bring the funkiest game to the Z will know this already so there seems to be a more limited driver to do this.

Probably the most 'sought after' SDL port on the Z is Quake, however, having built a copy of this for Qtopia from the PDAXROM source (Thanks Sash for pointing me in the right direction) I could only achieve 3.5fps on Qtopia whereas PDAXROM with the Vector Floating Point kernel can achieve 15 - 20fps depending upon your configuration. Personally speaking this alone didn't give me personal justification for PDAXROM - my thoughts on Quake on the Z are that I can just about handle the number of keybindings available for prboom and I get good performance out of that on Qtopia. So thinking back the main attraction as I say was the ability to port X stuff quickly.

I was thinking that it may be useful to grab a subset of the GPE stuff as they would have the pre-requisite library list for most Gnome ports.

My next task is to look at the X extensions for XQT to see if they meet a good set of pre-requisites for common, useful applications.

Anyway, all this is just a statement of intent and to be fair I don't have a huge amount of time to spend on this so don't expect anything soon (meaning don't bug me on it ) but if anyone has any suggestions about applications that should form a benchmark for the build environment then please say.

- Andy

[lardman]

Probably the most 'sought after' SDL port on the Z is Quake, however, having built a copy of this for Qtopia from the PDAXROM source (Thanks Sash for pointing me in the right direction) I could only achieve 3.5fps on Qtopia whereas PDAXROM with the Vector Floating Point kernel can achieve 15 - 20fps depending upon your configuration.

Which ROM were you running this on? Cacko? If so, you might try it on OZ (which has optimised fp like pdaXrom) and see whether this improves matters.


Si

[iamasmith]

Personally speaking I gave OZ a try and found several problems that I just couldn't live with, including the incredibly annoying Calendar and Addressbook issues that make the apps appear 320x240 in the middle of the screen on an 860 when you call them up from suspend using the applications buttons.

+ I didn't see any way of running OZ in Zoomed mode on an 860, most SDL apps are just too darned slow when running at 640x480.

- Andy

[lardman]

I wasn't necessarily suggesting you move to OZ, just that running it on OZ might produce the same speed improvements that have been seen with pdaXrom.


Si

[_Psycho]

As for me, since i repaired my PDA this week, and im quite happy (I didnt had one since may or so, thanks to treke (Greg) for it). Im quite more active in the zaurus scene, I updated my debian and im settign up my developement environement again. So i might have some time to put into something soon enough.

Of course i had in mind to compile 3-4 packages first, but something else could be nice too.

Btw for the SDL_mixer source, mteira did every SDL part (even if i had my own version at home) and i believe he only compiled the original one nothing else.

The thing he did patches is the main SDL, he did fix some stuff like a crach bug, added supported devices and added a couples of patches. I know he tried the ENABLE_FB in SDL too, but i think you get rotation problem when you do that.

I have been thinking about how to speed up a normal ROM with these vector floating point for a while. At the beginning of the year. I did a rom with Qtopia 1.7 on it, it was REALLY BUGGY, nothing was working well, but after a long time i got it to boot (was slow and ts was lost). So recently i was thinking maybe i should put more effort toward that and compile qtopia with VFP, we could have a Qtopia ROM with speed (no Sharp DTM stuff thought, but kdepim is there). I forgot if source of qtopia 1.54 from sharp was avalaible to recompile, but then it would probably lose all compatibility with the current ROMs, so we would had to have a tons of ipk compiled for it. Its probably easier to just switch to OZ/OPIE, thats would kinda give the same thing since you lose backward compatibility because of VFP I guess.

Ok, I think im getting off topic of your post  I have a deeper look tonight at home. Im at work im limited in my move =P