Gilrad said:
This discussion has got me wondering, though... Once a jailbroken/hacked closed hardware system is broken into, how easy or capable is homebrew development compared to open systems?
Depends on what you're trying. If you're gunning for things like OpenGL, etc. you can forget being able to do them on any of the hardware you jailbreak. There's other things. In the end, if you're going to homebrew for homebrew's sake (instead of doing the gamedev equivalent of climbing Mt. Everest- because you can...
) then it's going to largely always be easier on the open system. The tools are completely in place. The hardware doesn't fight you like the Wii, PS3, and X-Box 360 does. Just because they bring out a "more powerful" unit (Keep in mind, they're going to have to field significantly more GPU, DSP, and/or CPU to do so- something that's not available for many months yet to come- and doing one in the same class won't buy them anything other than AAA titles on their platform.)
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Like, assume that for some reason or another Sony decided their next handheld should have a touchscreen, keypad, and a usb port. For sake of argument, everything under the hood is pretty close to the current PSP, only with much more power.
It would be more difficult because you'd have to build the infrastructure the people working on the OS pieces are doing to make it viable to do anything on.
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How could such a thing compare to the Pandora? Once its running custom firmware, what things could the Pandora do that the theoretical PSP2 couldn't? Would it be possible to see a functional linux distro on it? Functioning USB devices? How about utilization of its power? Would homebrew devs be able to utilize as much of the theoretical PSP2's power as commercial devs?
If you're talking about something in the class of what we're doing here, you will NOT be doing close system homebrew work unless you're working on firmware pieces. Moreover, you'd have to come up with a BSP like ours to actually DRIVE most of that hardware.
Shadow of Chaos said:
Now that i come to think of it, if they chose a faster processor say clocked to 900mhz by default.. although decreasing battery life, it could overclock past 1ghz and letting dreamcast emulation pretty much fully playable.
That or 2 versions of the pandora, one with the 600 mhz cpu and another with 600+
You won't need to do anything "fancy" like an alternate firmware or a new version of the machine. You can change the clock speed on the fly.
I'm going to be blunt, here, though. For pretty much all of the stuff we're going to see on the Pandora, we're not going to need more than 550-600MHz. We're already so far above anything else in the handheld space with the stock settings, that I can't see WHY someone, past a "because I can", would need or want the extra speed. Code within what you've got as stock if you can at all help it. the extra 300MHz actually only buys about a 40-50% boost in speed anyhow. I have to wonder what in the heck you're trying to do to need more than roughly a Piii 600 in the palm of your hand for games.
