GP32 Gp2x Video Ram?

[Nmn]

I need help. I dont know if completely possible, but i want to subsitude nand empty space, sd card space... or anything at all, for video ram(or make it faster in a loop.)

I think, that with help, the gp2x can be sped up alot.


My knowledge about the speed is that missing video ram makes the graphics hardware reley on the cpu ram instead...


Can this be fixed, am i right, and how the fuck can i set up a windows enviroment for developing?

thx in advance.

 

[Dark_TB]

I don't know much about that stuff either. But the ram is just used to hold information that can be fast accessed.
And I don't think anything can be as fast as the real ram in gp2x... It would be stupid to use the nand or a SD card.
Making the other CPU do other tasks like audio or video part, is almost the same thing?
It takes the load of the first CPU (like a video card) and stil uses fast memery. (ram)

 

[aapje89]

you seriously want to do this? :huh:
I don't think it will gain you anything...

edit: btw. this is the gp32 developers corner

 

[Radek]

I need help. I dont know if completely possible, but i want to subsitude nand empty space, sd card space... or anything at all, for video ram(or make it faster in a loop.)

I think, that with help, the gp2x can be sped up alot.


My knowledge about the speed is that missing video ram makes the graphics hardware reley on the cpu ram instead...

You are right in that the dedicated memory bus for graphics is better perfomance wise than shared memory design like the gp2x. But what you are proposing here is insane... you will not get better than perhaps 10MB/s from flash memory and knowing that flash has finite number of writes and videoram needs lots of changes... Putting it simple - it would not work nor give anything... it would rather degrade perfomance severly as comparable the memory bandwitch of the gp2x is 250-500MB/s (depending on bus witdh - it can be 16 or 32 bits - I don't know for sure).

Then the gp2x's cpus have caches so they don't need too much bandwitch. There is a demo showing 8 planes smooth parallax scrolling done using just bitmap blitting (a brute force method). I wouldn't say that lack of bandwitch would be making any problems in gp2x.

Can this be fixed, am i right, and how the fuck can i set up a windows enviroment for developing?

I suggest developing aplication natively (using SDL) but having in the mind limits of gp2x's hardware. Then when it is ready for testing crosscompile to gp2x.

 

[Nmn]

Sorry for wasting your time guys...

*sigh* I like 3D, atleast(with Double Size on) the quake engine runs fullspeed(with a few exceptions. I always thought quake used alot of sprites til i bought the pc version...)

 

[Radek]

Sorry for wasting your time guys...

I like to answer questions (and others too) so no wasting anyones' time here.

*sigh* I like 3D, atleast(with Double Size on) the quake engine runs fullspeed(with a few exceptions. I always thought quake used alot of sprites til i bought the pc version...)

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Quake's perfomance depends mostly on available cpu's cycles. This is more so in case of gp2x because it's lacking a FPU and Quake depends strongly on floatpoint math. This is why it was running pretty good on my old Pentium 90MHz but not that fast on the 200MHz Arm9 cpu.

If only there was FPU in the gp2x then it'd be another class of game. But things aren't that bad - with clockrates of +266MHz and second core there are possibilities of decent 3d games of any sort. Just harder to do.

 

[unlucky]

i think overclocking to 250mhz makes gp2x quake very playable