Development Bounties

[zevdawg]

Best to optimize the OS, system drivers etc. if they still need optimizations. That's probably been mentioned already (haven't had time to read all 13 pages of this thread but a couple people touched the subject already as I've seen).

It'd be cool to hook up a dance mat to the Pandora to play some DDR variant or another (or perhaps someone will be brilliant enough to create their own Guitar Hero/Rock Band spinoff, that'd be sweet). I want to see someone develop a game as such, wherein if I miss notes (DDR) I get a "Boo" from the crowd, and if I strike a kickarse riff (GH) in a song I want to hear the crowd cheering... and no blank background! Animations people makes the game that much more -- involved, and include 2Player or online (cause it's no fun jammin' or dancing like an idiot alone).

 

[MDave]

I don't get some of these requests:

Isn't the hardware acceleration already working? We have Open GL ES, and Open GL wrappers.

Flash I can understand, but all this 'hardware and video acceleration' stuff leaves me stumped. Am I missing something?

I'm talking about opening the source code for the drivers, because it seems that the current drivers are the bottleneck in mupen64plus. That means it's not optimized, and would benefit everything that uses the 3D hardware. WiFi drivers I think are closed too?

Really? How?

I thought it was the recompilation engine etc. that would be the bottleneck? It's hardly rendering more than Quake3 surely?

Ari64 said in one of the mupen64 threads, that the dynamic recompiler emulates ALL n64 games at 100% speed without video or sound, and Adventus (or JayRayFox? ) said it feels like the graphics driver is a bottleneck in some way or another. Either read up on those posts, or wait till they answer :lol:

 

[JayFoxRox]

I don't get some of these requests:

Isn't the hardware acceleration already working? We have Open GL ES, and Open GL wrappers.

Flash I can understand, but all this 'hardware and video acceleration' stuff leaves me stumped. Am I missing something?

I'm talking about opening the source code for the drivers, because it seems that the current drivers are the bottleneck in mupen64plus. That means it's not optimized, and would benefit everything that uses the 3D hardware. WiFi drivers I think are closed too?

Really? How?

I thought it was the recompilation engine etc. that would be the bottleneck? It's hardly rendering more than Quake3 surely?

Ari64 said in one of the mupen64 threads, that the dynamic recompiler emulates ALL n64 games at 100% speed without video or sound, and Adventus (or JayFoxRox*? ) said it feels like the graphics driver is a bottleneck in some way or another. Either read up on those posts, or wait till they answer :lol:

*Fixed that for you

He said it. If I get my Pandora I'll also have a look at the graphics plugin (even tho I don't have any knowledge about the N64 graphics hw)

 

[Usoppe]

I think people should be rewared somehow, depending on their work - not important how complex it is/was, more important if people find it "re-useful" and how "important" the software is for them: How often people use the software? How much do they like it? Etc. Making polls about that and judge the reward upon it. Every software can be rewared, even if its just 20 Dollars

Yes, grey areas are software ports. Not easy to judge here, there you can perhaps bring the factor "complexity".

 

[Dead1nside]

*slaps head* There's been a number of occasions where ^^ like above, notable community developers are yet to receive their Pandora. I'd rather see the dev fund be used, in part, to send Pandora on their way to these productive people.

 

[MonkeyChops]

mame4all and gngeo is all i want i'd donate for those

pickle.gp2x.de/gngeo-pnd.zip

Awesome! Ask and you shall receive! Thanks Pickle, you da man! Guess I know what I'll be doing tonight

Have fun

not working for me. unzips with a bunch of files and directories and no pnd. It looks like its the gp2x version. are you going to open a topic in beta testing for gngeo?

 

[SomeGuy99]

mame4all and gngeo is all i want i'd donate for those

pickle.gp2x.de/gngeo-pnd.zip

Awesome! Ask and you shall receive! Thanks Pickle, you da man! Guess I know what I'll be doing tonight

Have fun

not working for me. unzips with a bunch of files and directories and no pnd. It looks like its the gp2x version. are you going to open a topic in beta testing for gngeo?

http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/54631-working-port-of-gngeo/

 

[ari64]

Also, geez, one year. Time sure flies >_>

When I first published my ARM port of mupen64plus about 10 months ago, most of the 64-bit instructions were missing and there was very minimal TLB support. It was just enough to run Mario, Zelda, and a few other games, but it proved that N64 emulation on the Pandora was possible.

Ari64 said in one of the mupen64 threads, that the dynamic recompiler emulates ALL n64 games at 100% speed without video or sound, and Adventus (or JayRayFox? ) said it feels like the graphics driver is a bottleneck in some way or another. Either read up on those posts, or wait till they answer :lol:

When running N64 games without audio or graphics rendering, the CPU usage is usually around 50-60%. A few games have a higher CPU requirement, mostly due to pagefaults and thrashing.

The graphics are the bottleneck, in the sense that it's often not possible to render all the frames without slowing down, so to make it run at a playable speed we need to skip some frames.

It would be helpful if someone reverse engineers the SGX and documents it better, so we'd have some idea of what it's spending most of its time doing.

 

[mali]

It would be helpful if someone reverse engineers the SGX and documents it better, so we'd have some idea of what it's spending most of its time doing.

maciek_urbanski's last login was on Jul 03 2009
I don't know how much he found out, but he was working on it for a while at least. Maybe you should contact him, dunno.

 

[chame]

I almost forgot...

http://wiki.winehq.org/AndreHentschel is making a wine-ARM, using the already discussed here qemu-wine strategy

wine for pandora (and other arm devices) is a kick ass feature B)

 

[OrR]

Buying an emulator seems wrong. It's bad enough using a ROM you have no licence for but to profit from emulating a machine is more dodgy.

Actually, it is much less dodgy IMO because it's legal in sane countries (which might not include the USA). There is nothing wrong with getting software from other machines to run on yours and you can make profit with that feature, as well. Obtaining the licenses for the software is then a responsibility of the user.

 

[skeezix]

Emulation never ever has been illegal, anywhere. (it's rom piracy that is usually illegal and note that is a complex area per country.)

Jeff

 

[Nupfi]

Except for all the "main" emulators I'm mostly looking forward to easyrpg and gemrb, because no other handheld can properly "emulate" these things.
Oh, and a good Gameboy Color Emulator would be also nice. (Just discovered the old Links's Awakening again and of course - Dragon Warrior Monsters)

 

[VRAndy]

We need the DSP (which is already working, reportedly, in the next kernel update) in order to decode h264 video larger than 480p. I think it may even be struggling with 480p.

Isn't that higher than the Pandora can render? I thought the screen was widescreen SD? You guys want to watch hi def video on a handheld... in SD resolution? Cool.[/quote]

Standard definition is 480 lines.
480p is 480 lines.
Pandora's display is 480 lines.


I think you're confused. 480p is not HiDef. Never has been. 480p is progressive scan standard definition.

 

[SomeGuy99]

Isn't that higher than the Pandora can render? I thought the screen was widescreen SD? You guys want to watch hi def video on a handheld... in SD resolution? Cool.

Standard definition is 480 lines.
480p is 480 lines.
Pandora's display is 480 lines.


I think you're confused. 480p is not HiDef. Never has been. 480p is progressive scan standard definition.

Yes. He said larger than 480. You misread me a little, but I forgive you.

 

[rv6502]

I meant it would be good if the bounty hunters that were going after a bounty were listed so other devs could communicate and collaborate toward a common goal and then I guess split the bounty 50/50 or 33/33/33 or whatever.

ah yes, because nothing motivates someone to work than having their pay cut down to 33%
:blink:

well obviously if someone wanted the whole bounty to themselves they wouldn't work with other devs. But if others worked together and beat you to the bounty then you'd be getting 100% of nothing instead of 33% of something with a lot of wasted time and effort on your part. It was just an idea, devs working together is apparently not worth it to you. You being a dev and me not, you'd know better.

usually those bounties are already so ridiculously small that its not worth the time spent on it money wise, they're below minimum wages so money's not the motivator.

and working on 1 single problem can't be split up between devs because if for example you're going to re-factor an audio driver for better timing and performance, explaining it and coordinating multiple devs will take more time than actually doing it alone.

then if there's no bounty lock (you're guaranteed the bounty if you complete within X days) there's always the very good chance someone will do a quick half-assed hack job faster than you and get the bounty first even tho your code would have been more maintainable, stable and with better performance.

so those bounties in first-to-get-it-done style encourage half-assed jobs.

and even if you finish the better version, since they already got a "working one" the maintainers wont bother to spend time integrating the patch for the better version.

the video someone posted supports what I'm saying here.
and someone else also had the good argument that some of the bounties have vague ridiculous conditions.

might not be the case for Pandora, but the Linux-stuff bounties I have seen have those problems.

 

[fusion_power]

It would be helpful if someone reverse engineers the SGX and documents it better, so we'd have some idea of what it's spending most of its time doing.

Using every register to calculate beautiful 3D graphics for us I guess. If you don't know what SGX does all the time, who else should know? (Well TI and their drivers do, I hope ) h34r:
I just ask because it sounds like the SGX isn't fully discovered. ^^""


@Bounties:
If 2 people each come with a solution for a problem nearly at the same time, do booth get the money or only the first one or the one who solved it better?

 

[rv6502]

@Bounties:
If 2 people each come with a solution for a problem nearly at the same time, do booth get the money or only the first one or the one who solved it better?

that's the thing.
if the money is there to be the motivator, the very real possibility of not getting it becomes a demotivator.

if its to be a thank-you thing, might as well just setup a paypal account or http://flattr.com/ account.

there's something that does not work with the bounty thing.

 

[rv6502]

Emulation never ever has been illegal, anywhere. (it's rom piracy that is usually illegal and note that is a complex area per country.)

Jeff

the DMCA made removing encryption illegal, if the legal copy of the rom or disk is encrypted (even a ROT-13 retarded encryption), you're not allowed to decrypt it.

but you're right for non-encrypted machines, as long as it does not involve patent-protected software technologies.

 

[Exophase]

the DMCA made removing encryption illegal, if the legal copy of the rom or disk is encrypted (even a ROT-13 retarded encryption), you're not allowed to decrypt it.

but you're right for non-encrypted machines, as long as it does not involve patent-protected software technologies.

What does "removing encryption" mean though? Doesn't the device which runs it remove the encryption?