Release SuperZaxxon - Beta 1.1 released

[Nickie]

Just try PNDs without accelerated notaz SDL and report any bugs


That would help a lot

how to know wich are using the said SDL then?

 

[EvilDragon]

Just try PNDs without accelerated notaz SDL and report any bugs


That would help a lot

how to know wich are using the said SDL then?

In old FW, enable the blurry filter when scaling (you can do this in LCD Settings)


If you run them and they scale with a blur, then it's using it.


Also, most of the recently released or updates emulators / games are using the accelerated scaler, stuff before November 2011 usually doesn't.

 

[CAZMIESTER]

Just try PNDs without accelerated notaz SDL and report any bugs


That would help a lot

how to know wich are using the said SDL then?

In old FW, enable the blurry filter when scaling (you can do this in LCD Settings)


If you run them and they scale with a blur, then it's using it.


Also, most of the recently released or updates emulators / games are using the accelerated scaler, stuff before November 2011 usually doesn't.

Finding if i run an emulator its disabling the touch screen sometimes a reset puts it back to normal good update.

 

[Link]

Some crazy things happened on the plane. Not sure why my Codec pack installation disappears, no MPlayer, so when I reinstalled it to watch a movie .PNDs would no longer open, none of them. Tried dropping the battery out for ten minutes, booted with dead nubs...? Now when booting into old kernel, unit just hangs at the last part of the bar at the Zaxxon 1.5 splash screen. I was using the TV-Out before some of this, and was playing around with Forget Me Not while the unit had the lid closed, things slowed down, but the game worked slowly. After that is when I couldn't open .PNDs, tried reinstalling Codec pack, no MPlayer shows up. I'll try and get some error logs when I get home.


Good thing I had a backup Pandora with me, funny thing is this is a German unit, and I couldn't get TV Out to work on the screen I was using with a unit from 2010 with the same cable through composite.


Anyone have an idea of what's happening here? Seems like some instability somewhere.

 

[MarioPandio]

I had a very similar experience upon a trip to France. The night before, the Pandora was perfect. At the airport I reclined to a bar to relax until the flight and got the Pandora out, only to discover that nothing was working as normal and rather than sitting back to chill with a brew, I was now battling weird Pandora behaviour. In France I found my mi-fi needed hacked to roam properly (my foresight at fault there) and that my hosts wi-fi connection was mac encrypted afterall, despite their assurances it wasn't, resulting in zero net access for several days of the trip. It was a bitch. What was wrong? No idea and when I got back to England it behaved perfectly again. There'll be some rose tinted glasses on that recollection but it wasn't all bad. I had good food, vino and company and the Pandora managed to blast lots of tunes via bluetooth to speakers in the spring evenings and it was a good trip afterall. You've just had quite the Pandora adventure, soon to boost the OP endeavour via ithic.com. So perhaps its all good anyway.


I've had the issue of the hang during loading the splash screens bar several times (most recently following a failed CPS3 game in FBACapex causing a black screen) and if your booting from SD, I would delete and make new boot.txt or autoboot.txt files, as I think something gets corrupted on them somehow. It's similar to the hang caused by earlier manual removal of the screenblanking fix. If its the nand install, I find its perhaps reflash time. Strangely sometimes it can be a crash in an SD install that wipes out the nand install, or at least on a few occasions for me. Good back ups (like a full SD card image on a portable HDD, or an image of one plus its restoring software if you've access to a desktop) and a spare SD card carrying a reflash, g-parted, SD Installer and various hotfixes, seems the way to not get caught out by such an unforeseen occurance when travelling anywhere for a duration.

 

[Link]

any error messages? i couldn't get PNDs running after having a sd card mounted as read only

udevd[77]: inotify_add_watch(6 (null), 10) failed: Bad address

INIT: Entering runlevel: 5

Starting system message bus: dbus.

Starting Hardware abstraction layer held

Configuring leds:

  pandora::bluetooth: bluetooth

  pandora::charger: tw14030_bci_battery_charging

  pandora::keypad_bl: none

modem-manager: (tty/ttyS3): port's parent platform driver is not whitelisted

Trying to do a reflash from my SD cards, holding R and power on startup, and it won't even give me that option.

 

[doragasu]

Has anybody done something useful with the DSP? (like for example video/audio decoding)

 

[Darkknight512]

Has anybody done something useful with the DSP? (like for example video/audio decoding)

There is a thread on the forum with some people running experiments with video and audio decoding and it looks pretty successful so far.

 

[doragasu]

Great news! Do you have a link to that thread? The only ones I can find using search are this and this and in none of them success is reported with codec stuff.

 

[Neelix]

Great news! Do you have a link to that thread? The only ones I can find using search are this and this and in none of them success is reported with codec stuff.

I believe this is the thread Darkknight512 was referring to.


- Neelix

 

[Mr_Loon]

Decided to try out SuperZaxxon 1.1 Beta and generally it seems highly impressive, the way touch screen input is dealt with has seen some major improvements.


However on 2 occasions the touch screen has just stopped registering input, once in general desktop use and once whilst using SNES9X4P.


A reboot returned touch screen behaviour to normal.

 

[Ian J]

I'm on Hotfix Beta 1 and a Linux noob, would I be better off waiting for a more stable version?


If I try it and things go bad can I reflash to the version I'm on now?

 

[renegadechic]

I'm on Hotfix Beta 1 and a Linux noob, would I be better off waiting for a more stable version?


If I try it and things go bad can I reflash to the version I'm on now?

Reflashing isn't a problem right now and it sounds like the latest build allows you to use both the most recent Zaxxon hotfix and have an optional boot for SuperZaxxon. Its worth updating to the latest hotfix anyway.


In terms of stability, there is probably gonna be a decent period of time where pnds that worked on the last kernel don't yet work on the latest one. You will end up finding a decrease in compatibility which is likely more frustrating than the addition of all the new features.


Personally, I am sticking to the latest Zaxxon hotfix and letting the more competent guys test out the new version!

 

[Mr_Loon]

From my understanding Super Zaxxon 1.1 is the most recent hotfix, there is an additional option to boot with the experimental kernel.


@ Ian J : you can always reflash to an earlier firmware as long as you are prepared to do a full reflash i.e. delete everything on the nand and start again.

 

[ZXDunny]

From my understanding Super Zaxxon 1.1 is the most recent hotfix, there is an additional option to boot with the experimental kernel.

Yes, that's what Notaz told me - but the non-experimental firmware (blue bootscreen) is very unstable here, whereas HF7b1 is fine. I'm not convinced that the latest hotfix included in super-zaxxon hasn't been infected with the experimental stuff.


D.

 

[notaz]

Yes, that's what Notaz told me - but the non-experimental firmware (blue bootscreen) is very unstable here, whereas HF7b1 is fine. I'm not convinced that the latest hotfix included in super-zaxxon hasn't been infected with the experimental stuff.

"unstable" doesn't really say much what your problem with it is. You said you got weird readings from battery gauge, but software has no control of it. It more looks like what you had there was not related to the hotfix version at all, most likely drained battery with stuck xfce meter thing.

 

[sparkymark79]

So I have upgraded to Super Zaxxon using the original kernel. I'm seeing some issues with minimenu. Icons aren't displaying. When changing categories for icons they are not displaying in their new category. Unmounting and remounting the SD cards fixes the issues but it keeps returning. It's almost as though it is reversed. With the sd card ejected i can see all my emulators and games (not that they load), but when pushed in, I can only see the stuff on the nand???


Also when shutting down I am seeing verbose output of some linux text I don't understand which wasn't showing before.

 

[ZXDunny]

Yes, that's what Notaz told me - but the non-experimental firmware (blue bootscreen) is very unstable here, whereas HF7b1 is fine. I'm not convinced that the latest hotfix included in super-zaxxon hasn't been infected with the experimental stuff.

"unstable" doesn't really say much what your problem with it is. You said you got weird readings from battery gauge, but software has no control of it. It more looks like what you had there was not related to the hotfix version at all, most likely drained battery with stuck xfce meter thing.

Sorry, I thought I've been quite clear in previous posts - things like settings getting lost (nubs etc), icons on the "taskbar" going missing, and of course the inability of either kernels to overclock - yes, booting with the blue screen (old kernel) gives me errors if I try to overclock. All stuff that doesn't happen in HF7b1, which I'm running right now.


D.

 

[notaz]

FIrst 2 never happen here, could you please elaborate what you did to get that to happen?


Last one is caused by booting experimental kernel, removing battery for 5 minutes and booting old kernel has the same effect as removing battery AND reflashing old HF (i.e. what you did).

 

[ZXDunny]

FIrst 2 never happen here, could you please elaborate what you did to get that to happen?


Last one is caused by booting experimental kernel, removing battery for 5 minutes and booting old kernel has the same effect as removing battery AND reflashing old HF (i.e. what you did).

1. Nubs settings getting lost - enter the nub settings dialog, set left nub as buttons, right nub as mousemovement. Test. Reboot. Settings lost, back to default behaviour. Happened many, many times (every time I rebooted, which was often).


2. Battery meter would go missing returning from any SDL full-screen app, occasionally the wifi icon also. Not a problem, as I remove them all anyway, but again very consistent behaviour.


3. Unable to overclock in older kernel - I expected not to be able to do it in the experimental kernel, but the original kernel also refused to allow me to overclock.


Hence, back to HF7b1, which works like a champ


D.