Play Basic For Gp2x


Joined
Sep 14, 2005
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458
Location
Sweden
Website
www.digitalawakening.net
I've talked to Underware Design about making Play Basic (2D dev software) to work with GP2X and this is the answer I got:

"Yes, we've been looking at GP2X (and few other toys) for a while now. Since PB is Virtual Machine based, it would be possible to build cross platform VM's in the (not too distant) future. While that's impracticable at this very moment (due to a lack modularity). ideally it would allow windows users/developers to write one source applications that can be compiled to multiple targets. Obviously providing VM for said platform exists .

Alternatively another solution for producing native binaries, could be write a PB byte code to C processor (module). So compiled PB code could be translated from VM code into C source. While that requires either the runtime command set libraries be open source, or the user base produce able to produce compatible libraries. Either way it'd be theoretically possible to generate native code any require target. But messy !

Anyway, the required changes won't be available in PB till the end of this year at least. Once we have new VM built, it'll open up a lot new avenues for PB. From cross platform, PBFX and course PB3D."

Here's a link to Play Basic's website: http://underwaredesign.com/prod_detail.php?id=42
 
Play Basic would be great for me, i could actually do something with it!
 
It sounds like it is compiled into p-code, which is somewhere between source code and native bytecode. It requires a virtual machine to run, which takes the compiled p-code and runs it on the machine.
 
Java has a JIT(Just in Time) compiler. It looks like this is purely interpreted (10-100x slower), but only on the parts written in BASIC, the rest of the engine would (presumably) be fine, so you wouldn't really notice the hit.
 
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