Supper Zaxxon on Raspberry Pi ?

[ekianjo]

A stupid question, maybe, but would it be possible to compile a Super Zaxxon distribution for the Raspberry Pi ?


There's a lot of things in common in the hardware, and can boot directly from a SD Card...


The reason why I am asking is, if you can leverage the existing Raspberry Pi user base to use Super Zaxxon on top of their other distributions, you may generate more interest for Pandora and more software could be created to be shared on both systems.


Net, everyone wins.


I am unaware of how technically difficult this would be, but I was just thinking this could be interesting at several levels. Feel free to comment.

 

[TrashyMG]

Well Super Zaxxon is just based off Angstrom which can be built for Raspberry Pi and the PND system could be migrated to it..


But my guess a good majority off Pandora apps will not work properly. The Raspberry Pi doesn't have NEON SIMD support and a good majority of Pandora applications are compiled to take advantage of NEON SIMD engine. That is the biggest hurdle I see.. but I'm sure there are others and more experienced developers may know more.


So I can see an OS similar to ours on the Pi, The apps just may not work.

 

[mcobit]

Yes, getting the OS running might be easy. But as Trashy said, the apps won't work.

 

[laurencevde]

That, and the Raspberry's CPU is an arm11, and as such, not fully binary-compatible with the Pandora's apps (though the Pandora should be able to run raspberry-binaries, but those'll be slower than when compiled for the Pandora).


Oh, and there's a significant performance-difference between the 2 devices...

 

[elwing]

That, and the Raspberry's CPU is an arm11, and as such, not fully binary-compatible with the Pandora's apps (though the Pandora should be able to run raspberry-binaries, but those'll be slower than when compiled for the Pandora).
Oh, and there's a significant performance-difference between the 2 devices...

/end of quote

definitely, the pandora is quite more powerful but the raspi dsp seems rather great when it come to video decoding. better from what I recall hearing of on the pandora

edit: damn theses broken quotes are annyoing... I hope we don't have all this problem only to add the +1 "feature"

 

[ekianjo]

Yeah the Raspberry Pi video is better supported and probably more powerful that what you can get on the Pandora currently for video decoding. As for 3d rendering, I am not sure how they would compare, yet. (I have both)

 

[PokeParadox]

I think the Pi GPU is better than ours... I have no substantial evidence for thois, however.

 

[slaeshjag]

I'm pretty sure it is. The rPI SoC is a beefy GPU with a CPU taped on as an afterthought, it feels to me x)

 

[elwing]

no idea of the GPU, but I've seen raspi decode H264 HD video without a sweat when last I heard the limit was more or less arround 720p on the pandora depending on the codec used