Hi everyone !
I'm Mollusk, the one behind PAlib (some love it, some hate it, not the question ^^). I have been following the GP2X scene for a while. I had considered buying one, then decided to wait for the touchscreen version, and then saw the whole Craiginator hype building up and decided to wait for that one
Anyways, I have been concentrating on PocketPC lately, doing a custom lib (XFlib) which is similar to PAlib to allow easy NDS game porting to PocketPC. My original plan was to port it to GP2X (with touchscreen), but I guessed Pandora would be a much much better option.
The thing is, Pandora will already have OpenGL and SDL, so would a new games lib be usefull or not ? It wouldn't be the most powerful library around (currently runs 100% software, but runs great on 200Mhz processors, and could be easily adapted to use Pandora's hardware), but could potentially bring more people to try out Pandora dev.... Plus, it would just need minor changes and recompiling to work natively for windows/linux/MacOS (just got lazy, I use Microsoft's PocketPC emulator for testing...), so that could allow people to dev on PC and have it recompiled for Pandora, too...
The library and the games I made using it can be viewed (not much documentation yet, I have had exams for the past month :s) on xflib.net. It is mature enough to do some nice stuff, 2 of the games have even gone commercial (Skinz Sudoku and TangledBugs), and I'm getting really good feedback
In the end, the main problem (well, not really a problem) is that OpenGL and SDL are already available for the Pandora, and are standards, while XFlib isn't (and probably will never be) a standard ^^ So all in all, it might just be useless for most people.
Just wanted to get a quick feedback on the idea and see how people reacted to it. Even if you aren't interested, I'll probably get a Pandora anyways when it comes out and port XFlib to get my games running ^^ As it's 100% software for now, I just need to output the framebuffer in a window (or in fullscreen) to have it work (and map keys/touchscreen).
Thanks for reading my post, long live PANDORA !
Mollusk
I'm Mollusk, the one behind PAlib (some love it, some hate it, not the question ^^). I have been following the GP2X scene for a while. I had considered buying one, then decided to wait for the touchscreen version, and then saw the whole Craiginator hype building up and decided to wait for that one
Anyways, I have been concentrating on PocketPC lately, doing a custom lib (XFlib) which is similar to PAlib to allow easy NDS game porting to PocketPC. My original plan was to port it to GP2X (with touchscreen), but I guessed Pandora would be a much much better option.
The thing is, Pandora will already have OpenGL and SDL, so would a new games lib be usefull or not ? It wouldn't be the most powerful library around (currently runs 100% software, but runs great on 200Mhz processors, and could be easily adapted to use Pandora's hardware), but could potentially bring more people to try out Pandora dev.... Plus, it would just need minor changes and recompiling to work natively for windows/linux/MacOS (just got lazy, I use Microsoft's PocketPC emulator for testing...), so that could allow people to dev on PC and have it recompiled for Pandora, too...
The library and the games I made using it can be viewed (not much documentation yet, I have had exams for the past month :s) on xflib.net. It is mature enough to do some nice stuff, 2 of the games have even gone commercial (Skinz Sudoku and TangledBugs), and I'm getting really good feedback
In the end, the main problem (well, not really a problem) is that OpenGL and SDL are already available for the Pandora, and are standards, while XFlib isn't (and probably will never be) a standard ^^ So all in all, it might just be useless for most people.
Just wanted to get a quick feedback on the idea and see how people reacted to it. Even if you aren't interested, I'll probably get a Pandora anyways when it comes out and port XFlib to get my games running ^^ As it's 100% software for now, I just need to output the framebuffer in a window (or in fullscreen) to have it work
(and map keys/touchscreen).Thanks for reading my post, long live PANDORA !
Mollusk
