Question about post-release

[Mid Favila]

Hey, all. I've been following the Pyra for quite a while now, and I'm eagerly awaiting the opportunity to purchase one. However, I can't find any information about purchasing a Pyra post-release; will they only be available in waves, will you be able to purchase them in the Dragonbox store, assemble them yourselves from parts, etc? Thanks.

 

[levi]

Fair question. To begin with it seems likely that they'll come out in waves; you'll be able to order one whenever you like, but it'll only get sent out after it's been built. But I'm pretty sure that, like everything else stocked in the Dragonbox shop, ED intends to have stock in his store cupboard that he can send out as requested, once he catches up with latent demand. I don't anticipate him trying to court scarcity to drive up demand the way certain other projects in this sphere have.

 

[Mid Favila]

Fair question. To begin with it seems likely that they'll come out in waves; you'll be able to order one whenever you like, but it'll only get sent out after it's been built. But I'm pretty sure that, like everything else stocked in the Dragonbox shop, ED intends to have stock in his store cupboard that he can send out as requested, once he catches up with latent demand. I don't anticipate him trying to court scarcity to drive up demand the way certain other projects in this sphere have.

Awesome, I'm glad to hear that. It'll be cool to get my hands on one of these, tinkering with the hardware is gonna be fun.

 

[elw3]

Catching up with the preorder queue may take a longer time tho.

 

[FBnil]

Nah, 500 units per batch, just 2 batches away...

oh, and welcome to the boards @Mid Favila

 

[levi]

Well, technically we're at three 500 batches at the moment, since preorder stats are at 1096 currently, unless ED can source 96 workable sets of part from the prototype parts or something.

If the Pyra has anything like the devtools and games releases trajectory that the Pandora had, that'll keep sales ticking over for a good few years to come, although given Ptitseb is still about and releases the majority of ports for the past good few years, I'd expect to have 90% or the good stuff from the Pandora's release history running on the Pyra after a couple of years, plus he's also been porting stuff to the Odroid platforms that he can try to bring as well.

 

[ClockworkCoder]

Should we encourage ptitSeb to adopt a Pyra Padawan?

Edit: note to self, never get key forum members' names wrong.

 

[levi]

A lot of ptitseb's stuff is up on his github. I note that Oolite isn't there, for example, but maybe that's a straightforward enough port he never bothered to publish it there.

There's still stuff he could explain perhaps about his development processes, but that's probably mostly contained in his code::blocks thread and the various assistance he's given others in porting games (which I think is in the game ports thread) already.

 

[spud42]

seeing as the Pyra is using a Debian distro and Oolite has a Linux version already there may not be much to do to get it running.

 

[levi]

That may be true, but as I recall ptitseb's version used gl4es to enable some of the effects to work on mobile processors, and was tuned for the controls of the pandora and it's general ability to display some of the more costly effects.

At least the rappberry pi people spotted the precursor to gl4es in 2013, but I don't know how much of that work ended up languishing in Raspbian and never made up back to the upstream project.

 

[spud42]

also the graphics and shaders in the latest version of oolite will be problematic for the Pyra... hadnt thought of that..

 

[levi]

Yes, although it did look very pretty on the Pandora, and should only be more capable on the Pyra (maybe able to run some of the bumpmapping that you could turn on or off on the Pandora, which I generally left off because it impacted the framerate too much for me).

 

[spud42]

http://aegidian.org/bb/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=4494&start=5490#p266366

check this out from the screenshots subforum . there has been a lot of work over the last year or so..

 

[levi]

Yeah, it's certainly capable of looking very impressive on PC even, and I love the look of that fer-de-lance on that first shot (less keen on the Cobra III paint job, but there you go). Given my benchmark for this is still probably ArcElite, the models on Pandora were already more complex than in that, so anything extra floats my boat.

 

[ToastBucket]

No one's been able to get the SGX up yet on the Letux kernel right?

 

[TrashyMG]

No one's been able to get the SGX up yet on the Letux kernel right?

I been out of the game on my devboard for a while, but It has worked with prior Letux kernels before with a bit of encouragement from Zmatt and aTc. However getting xorg to play friendly with the SGX and rotation at the same time is a small hurdle that needs to be addressed.

 

[ToastBucket]

I been out of the game on my devboard for a while, but It has worked with prior Letux kernels before with a bit of encouragement from Zmatt and aTc. However getting xorg to play friendly with the SGX and rotation at the same time is a small hurdle that needs to be addressed.

It worked on the OMAP5432? I see that there’s support on the OMAP4 but that’s a different GPU and those SGX are closed source and notoriously difficult to integrate.

 

[TrashyMG]

It worked on the OMAP5432? I see that there’s support on the OMAP4 but that’s a different GPU and those SGX are closed source and notoriously difficult to integrate.

I have owned an OMAP5432 Devboard since 2014, I've literally got it working on my own Devboard with the several Letux Kernel versions. The SGX kernel sources are open, Just some Binary Blobs you have to move into appropriate places.

Edit: Well there still a fairly big hurdle with 3D acceleration, there needs to be some serious development to make a method to allowing the SGX and the rotation to coexist properly.

 

[Silent-Hunter]

I have owned an OMAP5432 Devboard since 2014, I've literally got it working on my own Devboard with the several Letux Kernel versions. The SGX kernel sources are open, Just some Binary Blobs you have to move into appropriate places.

Edit: Well there still a fairly big hurdle with 3D acceleration, there needs to be some serious development to make a method to allowing the SGX and the rotation to coexist properly.

I hope we don't end up needing to go back to using the rotation chip.

 

[TrashyMG]

Well I should have stated, SGX and rotation with Xorg is more of the issue.