Java?


Generally speaking, IIRC there is a PND that provides the JRE, but you should avoid Java at all cost. The JRE is large and you'll most likely run into a lot of problems with low performance and running out of memory. The full-blown JRE designed for desktop machines is simply not a good fit for such small mobile devices, and such slim Java runtimes designed especially for that class of devices are likely to be incompatible with normal Java applications.


Of course you need to ensure that the application does not depend on any non-Java stuff that's not available, like OpenGL or some other libraries.
 
Here's Java


Just command line stuff though, I haven't gotten the web plugin (applets) working yet, that's the main reason it's still beta and not on the official download site. A number of useful Java programs have already been PNDed up so they run as easily as any other program on the Pandora.


And it's not so much that Minecraft uses OpenGL, it's that it uses the LWJGL library which is OpenGL at the moment. HOWEVER! LWJGL is currently working on OpenGLES bindings, so Minecraft may work (in some highly limited form) at some point in the future.
 
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I think the real problem (well, the OpenGL problem is real, but theoretically solvable), is that Minecraft is horribly inefficient. I can barely run it on my Athlon 64 laptop (yeah, it's old, but it has a 2 GHz CPU and 1GB of memory).
 
I think the real problem (well, the OpenGL problem is real, but theoretically solvable), is that Minecraft is horribly inefficient. I can barely run it on my Athlon 64 laptop (yeah, it's old, but it has a 2 GHz CPU and 1GB of memory).
Set the graphics to fast (as opposed to fancy, it's an option) and decrease the render distance to normal or even short, and you should see a huge speed boost. It's the blending that comes with fancy graphics mode that I've found eats the most CPU.
 
I think the real problem (well, the OpenGL problem is real, but theoretically solvable), is that Minecraft is horribly inefficient. I can barely run it on my Athlon 64 laptop (yeah, it's old, but it has a 2 GHz CPU and 1GB of memory).
Set the graphics to fast (as opposed to fancy, it's an option) and decrease the render distance to normal or even short, and you should see a huge speed boost. It's the blending that comes with fancy graphics mode that I've found eats the most CPU.
Yeah, this is the only way it's playable at all. It's still not as smooth as it is on my slightly more modern dual-core PC, though.
 
Yeah, this is the only way it's playable at all. It's still not as smooth as it is on my slightly more modern dual-core PC, though.
Dual core shouldn't make a difference as Minecraft is single threaded.


It's a strange thing then. I've heard people with 1.2Ghz machines say they have no problem with far rendering, and people with 2.4Ghz machines say it's painfully slow at short rendering. All I can say is "WTF Notch?"


I suspect the graphics card actually plays a lot into this. Perhaps your laptops built in GPU is exceptionally poor? I know that tended to be the case in years past, though I don't know if that is still true or if it was true two years ago.

What about a Java application... like Moneydance?
Being a standalone application (not browser applet based) that doesn't appear to use any non-standard components (like Minecraft does for OpenGL) it should run just fine.
 
Dual core shouldn't make a difference as Minecraft is single threaded.
I know, but I was searching for a way to express "several years newer and more powerful" in a couple of words. :unsure:

It's a strange thing then. I've heard people with 1.2Ghz machines say they have no problem with far rendering, and people with 2.4Ghz machines say it's painfully slow at short rendering. All I can say is "WTF Notch?"


I suspect the graphics card actually plays a lot into this. Perhaps your laptops built in GPU is exceptionally poor? I know that tended to be the case in years past, though I don't know if that is still true or if it was true two years ago.
Could be - the laptop is a Geforce 4 Go 440, and the desktop is an 8800 GTS.
 
It's something, that's for sure. Minecraft maxes out one of my cores just at idle (phenom ii 1090t), uses up 300mb+ of ram, and still can lag. It doesnt use up too much of my video card though, it still sits at idle speeds. Still, Its insanely inefficient. I highly doubt it will run on the pandora. Ever. Unless of course, we get the dsp and graphics working and multithread it. I don't even know.
 
Notch mentioned a possible Pandora port of Minecraft. Also, it's the open source graphics drivers. Minecraft ran great on my laptop, until I switched to Fedora, which refuses to work with Compiz AND closed source graphics drivers. Compiz only likes the open ones, which hate minecraft.


P.S. What the heck is OpenGL ES?
 
P.S. What the heck is OpenGL ES?
subset of full opengl, it's what embedded things like the pandora or modern phones use
Can't I install regular OpenGL on it? I mean, my old laptop ran OpenGL, and it had half the CPU power of the Pandora.
it's all dependant on the graphics chip, while a modern graphics card for your desktop/laptop might support opengl, the graphics chip in the omap doesn't


(though actually the hardware does, but TI haven't made a full opengl driver for it, firstly because it's an embedded soc targetted at phones etc, and secondly because they're lazy i guess, if someone crazy enough wanted to they could probably write a driver, but we're talking very crazy with a lot of indepth knowledge of the chip etc)


quite a lot of opengl code can run on the pandora though, by using nanogl/the gl-wes wrapper, which just uses the glES functions to implement the full opengl ones (display lists are a problem though :p )
 
(though actually the hardware does, but TI haven't made a full opengl driver for it, firstly because it's an embedded soc targetted at phones etc, and secondly because they're lazy i guess, if someone crazy enough wanted to they could probably write a driver, but we're talking very crazy with a lot of indepth knowledge of the chip etc)
For TI to make a fully OpenGL compliant driver, they'd need to pay extra licensing to get the information about the SGX. They chose not to pay that fee, so they don't get the spec sheets they need to write the driver.
 
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