Pandora Plays Wiz Games?

[Shock-Socks]

currently, i don't think that the pandora can play wiz games and homebrew right off the bat, but will this ever be possible, has this been discussed? etc

i imagine that it would be fairly easy to port wiz homebrew or creat an emu for it.

 

[Pleng]

Porting should be easy enough. A traditional emulator would be difficult to code.

However they both have the same CPU type and are both Linux based, so I'm not sure if some kind of compatibility layer could be made..?

 

[benjymous]

Same family of CPU, but otherwise a very different architecture, especially the GPU.

Stuff that's written to use GLES could potentially be made to target the Pandora's GPU instead, but it'd be *far* simpler just to recompile the said app (assuming its source is available)

 

[Eight Bit]

Pandora>Wiz right?

 

[borgqueenx]

this is good news. it means the pandora will have everything from the wiz? (if someone re-compiled it)

 

[dflemstr]

"news"?
Also, yes, the Pandora is vastly superior to the Wiz in every way (explicit flamebait )

 

[BaDToaD]

The Wiz has a larger current userbase

 

[skeezix]

Some bins might be purely compatible; its not hard to build an app using open2x toolchain that runs on both wiz and panda, but the caveat being .. if one is 320x240 and the other is more than twice that, it might look all to hell And controls may not map unless the devver is careful etc.

But that said ..

1) A _direct_ naive port is not hard to do; given source, a basic port is a piece of cake
2) A updated port is as much work as the devver wants to put in; this is why there is MAME4ALL for gp2x etc .. a pure naive MAME port is nearly unworkable, but with Franxis hard work, you can see how brilliant it can be
3) A pure binary compatibility can work, but it may not be pleasant; on the other hand, it might well be. A very well behaved SDL app that asks the system for how big to make a window etc will work reasonably well on both, but it more depends on inputs.

jeff

 

[Exophase]

Some bins might be purely compatible; its not hard to build an app using open2x toolchain that runs on both wiz and panda, but the caveat being .. if one is 320x240 and the other is more than twice that, it might look all to hell And controls may not map unless the devver is careful etc.

The crippled SDL performance on Wiz has made this pretty unattractive.. I don't know what percentage of apps use it but at least some number is statically linking against something hitting the hardware directly.

Last I was aware audio on Wiz SDL also had problems, hence why Temper is using OSS directly. Would work on Pandora if there was OSS support. I think this is something that should definitely be moved towards, actually; I really don't see any benefit in sticking with ALSA and I think PulseAudio is the worst direction Pandora's sound can take. That's all for another time and another thread though.

 

[renwils]

Just from a user-level perspective, pulseaudio has caused more headaches for me than I can count. Second only to network manager, but I use wicd now.

 

[Exophase]

Just from a user-level perspective, pulseaudio has caused more headaches for me than I can count. Second only to network manager, but I use wicd now.

I felt like giving PulseAudio another shot on my recent complete reinstall of Ubuntu (9.10). It was a disaster. Latency was terrible, lots, dare I say most programs stuttered like crazy, in particular flash in Firefox. It also ate CPU like no tomorrow. Ate lots on my netbook too. Interestingly, my netbook seems to have had OSS from the start (Eeesy Peasy Ubuntu), although it could be an ALSA layer I guess.

Fortunately there's now an official entry on the Ubuntu wiki for migrating to OSS. It's gotten that bad. It's only a matter of time before all of the major distributions start offering it as a package option, then start defaulting to it entirely.

Even if PulseAudio actually worked like it was supposed to any acceptable percentage of the time it's still too heavy weight for Pandora.

From a programming point of view ALSA is a total mess compared to OSS, which is a simple character device/ioctl interface (yeah yeah, ioctl is evil, whatever). Kind of moot since it's abstracted by the API, but on the other hand it sucks having to bring in a big library just for sound when you just need a streaming source, and you can write OSS code quickly.

On topic: a Wiz layer for Pandora would be hard but not strictly impossible, given that even the hardware interface for Wiz is generally pretty lightweight once it's setup, mainly the heavy work just consists of dumping things in buffers. So an mmap based abstraction to provide enough Wiz hardware could probably do the trick. OABI compatibility might be a problem. If it's at all possible I'd love to see someone try, it'd be a cool project and might be a way to get at some things that won't end up open source, like the commercial games.