Replacement Interface

[DaveC]

well it kind of makes me think of the minigames in mario party...ok sort of a bad analogy but there's another place where you find yourself needing to know the controls to a bunch of different games

of course as davec is saying there'd probably be enough power users who'd wanna disable it to save real estate.

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If used I like the idea of a hot button that brings up an overlay like a text box over the whole screen. When you hit the hot button the readme comes up, then hit it again to make it dissappear.

This way NO icon space is taken up plus you can see more text when you do call it up.

 

[Hanz™]

Maybe these extra features could be added as modules or something? So someone could do a lean install that will be faster and smaller and others that want all of the bells and whistles could do a full install?

I am pretty sure that I and everybody else has said that since right at the beginning. :rolleyes:

 

[Paradox]

yep..you cant really say much more than that, everyone seems to agree a modular / completely customizable / some kind of scripted interface is the best. wether GPH will do this for us, i doubt it.

 

[evol]

any devs looked att mmsv2 "mpeg menu system" it looks nice and can render to SDL or framebuffer (would'nt framebuffer be faster than SDL ?)

http://freshmeat.net/projects/mmsv2/

http://mms.sunsite.dk/

 

[PSyMastR]

How about the first 4 lines of a readme.txt are displayed transparantly over the bottom of the screen if the file exists in a dir?

This way a readme can contain a short summany in the first 4 lines, and it won't take up too much space, as usually the very bottom of the screen will be empty. Once the pointer is moved into the 'Main' files window the text can fade out.

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Instead of readme.txt, how about a text file with the same name as the .gpe file or whatever, as i have some directories with many only .gpe files and do not want to folderize them

 

[Epicenter]

Any replacement interface should really be lightweight, use a VERY small amount of RAM, and not over-use things like transparency or fading effects, zooming effects, drop shadowing, and other niceties (or at least allow them to be turned off) so the CPU's not working its ass off to render the menus and consequently hogging valuable battery time, IMHO. Speaking as a developer for the system, the more RAM isn't hogged by the OS, the better ...

 

[TKF15H]

Any replacement interface should really be lightweight, use a VERY small amount of RAM, and not over-use things like transparency or fading effects, zooming effects, drop shadowing, and other niceties (or at least allow them to be turned off) so the CPU's not working its ass off to render the menus and consequently hogging valuable battery time, IMHO. Speaking as a developer for the system, the more RAM isn't hogged by the OS, the better ...

So long as it doesn't need an overclock to do the fancy effects, the battery time is going to be the same. Also, since the GP2X wasn't designed for multi-tasking, the menu interface could hog all the RAM it wants as it's all going to be freed up when a game/app is launched anyway. IMHO: If it doesn't take too long to load up, it can take all the CPU/RAM resources it wants.

 

[Epicenter]

If it's dropped out of RAM when games run, then yes, that's fine. I do believe the battery life will be impacted if the menu runs the 920T at >60% rather than sitting at near-0% like it should be. Otherwise, there would be no battery life difference between sitting idle and playing movies or games.

 

[bacteria]

Is anyone working on this at the moment, and how successful are they progressing? Any pics of work in progress??

 

[racoon]

I do wonder as well if this project got dicontinued in favor for Qtopia (?). A proper GP2X interface would be a neat thing indeed.

 

[Aninhumer]

My idea would be DaveC's minimalist selector, but when you choose a game or something it would bring up a full screen of info, then you press the selection button again to start it, probably with an alternative button to start straight away.

 

[DaveC]

My idea would be DaveC's minimalist selector, but when you choose a game or something it would bring up a full screen of info, then you press the selection button again to start it, probably with an alternative button to start straight away.

​

If you did that the selection button should just load right away. How many times when you start the same app do you need a screen full of info about it? Your memory can't be that bad that you need it all of the time, so it is kind of dumb anyway. That would get annoying very quick. You would probably use this feature only one or two times after you installed it, then it would just become wasted space. It should be made optional so you don't have to have that info taking up card space or taking time to load into memory. The button to pull it up if you want should be the "alternate" less used button.

 

[Yono]

I do wonder as well if this project got dicontinued in favor for Qtopia (?). A proper GP2X interface would be a neat thing indeed.

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Qtopia is nice, but I don't believe that it will replace a good interface, because it isn't minimalisitic, like the interfaces suggested.

 

[pipa]

All I want from a launcher/interface is to be able to select Games and it shows me all games without navigating. Same with Movies, and Music, etc. XBMC does this by having a config file where you specify what dir your games are in , where you movies are, etc. By default, when you choose those, it looks there for them (but you can still navigate elsewhere).

By doing this, it would only take 2 "clicks" to do something instead of the NUMEROUS clicks it takes me now.

Example:
NOW: to play a movie: select Video-->choose SD Card-->choose movie dir-->select movie = 4 clicks
NEW WAY: select Video-->choose movie = 2 clicks (1 click to see all movies)

For me, the config file might be something like:
VIDEO=/movies
GAMES=/games
MUSIC=/music
PHOTOS=/pictures
EBOOK=/text

If there is no entry for an item, then it defaults to the way it does it now (lets you browse).

If someone can make this happen, I'm a happy camper (though I'm pretty happy now)

Brian

 

[Aninhumer]

If you did that the selection button should just load right away. How many times when you start the same app do you need a screen full of info about it? Your memory can't be that bad that you need it all of the time, so it is kind of dumb anyway. That would get annoying very quick. You would probably use this feature only one or two times after you installed it, then it would just become wasted space. It should be made optional so you don't have to have that info taking up card space or taking time to load into memory. The button to pull it up if you want should be the "alternate" less used button.

Erm, I agreed with you about not needing the info all the time, I meant the "Alternative button to be an answer to that, although I can see that after browsing the menu with one button, it makes more sense to startup with that button then vice versa.

 

[xafier]

So did anyone actually start any of these interfaces?

Personally I'm thinking simplistic, because were talking about a handheld console that doesn't particulally have an area of memory to store config files... ie the NAND isn't somewhere to constantly read/write config files and images...

My current idea, and something I may start work on is something along the lines of making it very easy to catagorize different binarys...

for example...

I will have 3 catagorys for applications...

.gpe = emulator
.gpg = game
.gpu = utility/application

I will then have a 4th section for Media which will store the Video, music, ebook etc... and then a 5th icon for system

inside system will be config all the details like IP, USB etc... setting clock speed? File Browser

I haven't totally planned it all out yet, but I think the idea of all these config files, XML, images for every application, readme's, info files, directory images... it just makes things too complex! I want sweet and simple, i want to put snes.gpe on my console and it be in Emulators! or calculator.gpu and it be in utility... or vektor.gpg and it be in games...