Mame 106 Any Thoughts?


torpor said:
Surely there's Mac OS X devs out there wanting a Panda toolchain?

MacOSX (+Linux) dev here .. I don't want an OSX-native toolchain. I want a Pandora-native toolchain! :)
I would like to have both, please :p
 
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Building _on_ pandora is certainly doable (I mean really, you canclock it to 900, and we all coded back in the dark days of 3mhz and 8mhz, so no problem right? :) USe a usb keyboard, or transfer files to it, and you can build there. Its just crazy talk though ;)

I carry around a VM with my ARM toolchains in it, works a treat ;) Crsscompiling is so easy and fast to set up its really the way to go :)

jeff
 
I too would like to do my developing straight on the Pandora. I bought a USB keyboard, and powered USB hard-drive for swap, just for that purpose.
 
mindlord -- USB keyboards tend to need the hub (since they tend to be USB1), but work pretty well; I compile right on SD, which can be .. sow or fast, depending on the project size. The biggest impediment for me was .. if you're going to have a usbkeyboard and hub around, its a lot of goofying around, and realistically we all have PCs everywhere instead, so its not treally much use.. excepting 1) you're going on a trip, and a folding keyboard is much smaller than afull laptop, or 2) you just want to do it. And well (2) is as good a reason for anything, right? :)

Building a cross compiler, then building a cross-compiled compiler for pandora, is sort of a pita, but not too hard; works quite well :)

(Typing "{" alot makes oyu want to use usb keyboard for sure :)

I've got a few old PAlm OS keyboards with infrared for comms, if only an easy way to hook them up..); I might even have a bluetooth keyboard around though, so that ought to work well, and old Palm bluetooth keyboards fold up tiny (size of the pandora), and shoudl be cheap now .. hmm, maybe thats a good way to go.

jeff
 
skeezix said:
I carry around a VM with my ARM toolchains in it, works a treat ;) Crsscompiling is so easy and fast to set up its really the way to go :)

jeff

easy to share, or write a guide on how to setup?

Would be v helpful...
 
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OK, just uploaded a new PND here:

http://dl.openhandhelds.org/cgi-bin/pandora.cgi?0,0,0,0,73,79

Same executable, but config/keymap settings should be saved on exit now. The startup script is a little smarter, too. You will be asked which video mode you'd like to use: normal, 2x scale or 2x with rotation (left or right). If MAME can't run the game for whatever reason, the output of the pndrun log is displayed.
 
SteveM said:
Same executable, but config/keymap settings should be saved on exit now.

Excellent, thanks!

I don't suppose you know why the save game option doesn't work?
 
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skeezix said:
mindlord -- USB keyboards tend to need the hub (since they tend to be USB1), but work pretty well; I compile right on SD, which can be .. sow or fast, depending on the project size. The biggest impediment for me was .. if you're going to have a usbkeyboard and hub around, its a lot of goofying around, and realistically we all have PCs everywhere instead, so its not treally much use.. excepting 1) you're going on a trip, and a folding keyboard is much smaller than afull laptop, or 2) you just want to do it. And well (2) is as good a reason for anything, right? :)
I totally get that it's goofy, awkward, and all sorts of wierd. It is something that I really do want to be able to do. If for no other reason that to hop in bed and code while the wife plays her Facebook games on her netbook. Instead of being cooped up in my nest. Suddenly coding time becomes quality time. I know get a fraking laptop, problem solved. :p

I'm really eccentric, and I never know when inspration will hit. It would be nice to know that I could plop down at the local coffee shop, pull a usb keyboard and one USB cable out of my backpack and try something out. Since y'know I always have my backpack, and I have my harddrive, hub, and batterypack all plugged up an ready to go inside my backpack anyways.
 
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Sarlix said:
I don't suppose you know why the save game option doesn't work?
I didn't try, but there's a chance that may work too with the new version. MAME saves all its stuff in a bunch of directories which were missing from the original PND. These should all appear in appdata now though, so it might just work.
 
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Done it before, lost in the forums :) I should write up a blog entry or wiki entry.

The "5 minute approach" is easy to describe at mid-level. The buildining your own cross compiler approach takes much longer of course.

Anyway, the fastest way is..

okay, wrote it up quick on my blog:
http://www.rjmitchell.ca/~jeff/blog2009/2010/06/02/getting-up-and-going-with-a-crosscompiler-for-pandora-arm-in-5-minutes/

If you want, I can break it down step by step with samples and screenshots, or even buld a full cross compiler from source.

jeff
 
I would also like a Pandora-native development environment. Because I'm weird.
 
I should post a how-to to build a cross-compiler, that you then use to build a compiler native to pandora; its a few steps, takes awhile, but its pretty damned cool :)

jeff
 
SteveM said:
Sarlix said:
I don't suppose you know why the save game option doesn't work?
I didn't try, but there's a chance that may work too with the new version. MAME saves all its stuff in a bunch of directories which were missing from the original PND. These should all appear in appdata now though, so it might just work.


Yeah it seems to work now! :D
 
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skeezix said:
okay, wrote it up quick on my blog:
Dude, if you don't get that on the Wiki, you lose all rights to complain about me not putting my PNDs on the file archive ;-P
 
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Nice, keyb mappings are saving, and I like the pnd sh-script changes. Nice :)

jeff

EDIT: Steve -- let me know if its halfway accurate or useful, and I'll post it to the wiki. I wrote it quick, so might be all crap :)
 
skeezix said:
Nice, keyb mappings are saving, and I like the pnd sh-script changes. Nice :)
Yeah, a bit long-winded to start stuff up, but there's no easy way to improve that with just zenity. BTW, maybe the message displayed when a PND won't run should become a standard feature? Seems a lot easier, especially for inexperienced users, as the error messages are right there and doesn't need digging up. Silent failure is kind of useless, IMHO.
 
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In case anyone is unsure about how aspect ratio affects how a game looks, MAME currently (dunno about v106) has a setting called "Enforce aspect ratio". I have this selected, so when I play something like Street Fighter II on my widescreen monitor I have black bars on either side, but the image is dispayed correctly i.e. not stretched. If I play without "Enforce aspect ratio", the entire screen is used to display the image, but all the characters look short and fat.

I was unable to find MAME comparison screenshots showing the difference between the two, but I did manage to find some from Full Throttle:

http://aarongiles.com/scumm/aspect.html

Hope this is useful.
 
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