PND Support?

[FuzzyLizard530]

I've been dredging the forums for weeks trying to find something, but to no [clear] avail. Basically, I'm trying to find out whether the Pyra will support the .PND files from the Pandora. I'm planning to drop money on a Pyra first chance I get, and just want to know.

[Apologies if I'm in the wrong sub-forum!]

 

[TrashyMG]

I've been dredging the forums for weeks trying to find something, but to no [clear] avail. Basically, I'm trying to find out whether the Pyra will support the .PND files from the Pandora. I'm planning to drop money on a Pyra first chance I get, and just want to know.

[Apologies if I'm in the wrong sub-forum!]

Maybe eventually there will be a compatibility layer like Ginge was on the Pandora to play GP32X and Wiz games. But there are some challenges like libraries being different and differences in how the hardware handles thing like the framebuffer and what not. Most of the software on the Pandora is open source and can just be compiled to run on the Pyra, many of the applications can just be downloaded from the standard debian repository. So running the PND versions will be kind of pointless. The Pyra has a new more friendly to develop on .dbp packaging format Slaeshjag has been working on too. I think ports will come fairly quickly once units get out there, but out of gate it may take time to get the library of software to the Pandora levels.

 

[___]

I am pretty sure that all great pandora software that will no be available through the debian repositories will be ported quickly enough, if not even before the official release. As far as I know starcraft has already been successfully ported for example. ptitSeb also won't stop his porting rampage any time soon and that will hopefully continue with the pyra. Yes, he is a great man indeed

EDIT: Forgot that I should explain why I mentioned starcraft. It's a super complicated port. It uses a heavily optimized wine version and some sort of what I can only imagine to be amazing sorcery notaz applied here to reverse engineer a bunch of binaries to work on the pandoras cpu. So that means, that pandora and pyra are pretty close together, porting the pandora starcraft to another platform would've been a lot more troublesome I believe.

 

[TrashyMG]

As far as I know starcraft has already been successfully ported for example.

Yeah @notaz already ported armhf executables for Diablo 1/2 and Starcraft, these still require WINE compiled to ARM to handle the Windows portions of the game. I got that working on the OMAP5 devboard, however these ports need some kind Framebuffer scaling done to make them fit the screen. I can get them to fill the screen by using a modesetting Xorg driver to output native resolution to the monitor, but that won't work on an LCD setup, that driver is also a bit slow when using the desktop. So some work will need to be done to get them perfect for the Pyra.

 

[___]

well obviously. the hardware and OS are still in prototype state. But it's still awesome that you got it going and for a heavily optimized custom hack specifically made for pandora, I reckon the port was pretty straight forward. I would have expected it to be a lot more work. But then again I am a layman and can barely port stuff that requires more work than changing a couple of variables in the code ^^. I doubt I would have been able to port starcraft or diablo 1/2.

 

[TrashyMG]

I would have expected it to be a lot more work.

His ports just work really. What was difficult was getting WINE patched with a bit of hacky fixes and compiled properly was the biggest amount of work.