Zaurus Ports


Gruntfuggly

Mostly Harmless
Joined
Feb 2, 2004
Messages
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Location
Brighton, UK
Website
www.zaonce.com
After seeing the comment that the Zaurus is binary compatible with the GP32 (same processor I guess) I had a look through the archive to see if anything had been ported, but it doesn't look like it. There appear to be 3 versions of MAME and a version of UAE available for the Zaurus, so is there a reason why none of these have been ported? I appreciate that the processor is slightly faster on the Zaurus (200Mhz) but is there another reason?
 
the apps don't need to be ported, thats true (unless they are compiled with optimizations for the zaurus arm chip, which is not the common case (good news)); but the OS itself (Linux) has to be ported to GP32, and it is a work-in-progress, alpha, at the moment (not so good news...but may change in the future)

The hard specs may be a problem: not so slightly better processor, quite better (400MHz, not 200); 8 times GP32 RAM (zaurus has 64MB), and we lack a dedicated video card too... so apps may run, but may be sloooooow.
 
It's more than just having "the same processor" -- GameCubes and Macintoshes have the same CPU but you can't pop one game in the other with about ten lines of porting changes.

The problem with the Zaurus is that all of its apps are designed to run on top of Linux with a bunch of libraries installed -- perhaps if someone were to write a Qtopia wrapper for the GP32 and remap the interface (buttons, etc) so it would work properly on the GP32. I also don't know enough about the Zaurus to know if there is any custom hardware present -- which there may well be (in which case we definitely cannot just pop the binary on).

There's also a whole pile of issues with binary compatibility and library linking that linux itself brings up -- once Linux on the GP32 gets working a lot better we should probably look into a BSD-style "linux emulator" for running ARM packages.
 
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