How To Port?

[Palomides]

I´ve been reading around these forums for a few days, and am therefore quite excited about the Pandora. Hence, I´d love to contribute however I can, and porting software seems to be something useful that needs doing. As a person with limited programming experience, could I get any advice about beginning on the Pandora, especially with context to porting? Techniques, common issues and solutions, quirks, etc.

The wiki seems rather unhelpful or incomplete, and the forums are a bit of a maze :\

Please don´t bash the noob too excessively.

 

[senquack]

Porting stuff is a great way to get into programming if you are new to it. It's much easier to learn a language when you're swimming in a valid program already, just placing and modifying bits of code here and there. Forget how to do a switch/case statement in C? You probably just need to scroll a few pages and one' there for reference.

There's really not too many issues that haven't been mentioned in the forums already. When doing a search, use google and put "site:gp32x.de" in your search string. Voila, a forum search feature that actually works!

Very very rarely you might run into compiler issues when running C code on an ARM CPU (alignment stuff). You'll probably also need to decrease the buffer size for audio mixing in programs you port to slower systems (but not necessarily for the Pandora)

 

[Kings]

http://handhelds.org/minihowto/porting-software.html

Some handy things to know about porting to ARM.

 

[.Gogeta§§J4BR.]

Porting stuff is a great way to get into programming if you are new to it. It's much easier to learn a language when you're swimming in a valid program already, just placing and modifying bits of code here and there. Forget how to do a switch/case statement in C? You probably just need to scroll a few pages and one' there for reference.

Looking at other people's work is important, but I wouldn't say porting is the best thing for a programming beginner.
Learning by yourself with the help of a tutorial and other people's code, well, that is a much more didactic way of learning programming.

 

[sindbad]

First check that all dependencies are available for linux and ARM processors. If yes to both, try compiling, fixing any errors. If no, you have more work to do.

It can be trivial or obscenely hard, depending on what exactly you want to port.

 

[fiveseven]

Any suggestions on something that should be easy to port? I'm looking to start off slow as my programming skills are very, very rusty.

 

[cbox]

Any suggestions on something that should be easy to port? I'm looking to start off slow as my programming skills are very, very rusty.

You'll probably want to start with something basic like maybe a chess or card game program, when I did my first games they were trivia games and text adventure games, stuff like that is also pretty easy to mess with if it doesn't have complex 3d graphics and what not.