GP2X What Development Kits Should I Use?

[delrina]

Hi,

I am newbie to GP2X. I want to learn to program game on GP2X. There are several tool chains and development kits available. If anybody has experience working with these tools please give me some advice:
1- Games Park Holding Official Development Kit. It have Dev C++ IDE but i heard that it uses old version of Linux kernel.

2- devkitGP2X there is no IDE, the compile file is very big. I compile the demo.c it outputs demo.gpe 648kb. I guess that devkitGP2X uses static linking.

3- Open2X

4- ...

Which tool is easy to use for developer who has Windows XP OS?
Which tool is most popular among GP2X developer? and have many example source code?

Thanks.

 

[Squidge]

5) None of the above

Although if I hadn't of built my own dev environment, I would be using 2. The executables are big because of static linking, and that is necessary because it's a newer version of GCC than provided by GPH. Better compiler, better optimisation, more features/etc.

The GPH provided compiler produces smaller executables because the libs are already present on the GP2X for that version of the compiler (GCC 2.95).

If you decide to go along the route of 2) you can use Rlyeh's SDK which is pretty damn good in my opinion, and comes with lots of examples.

However, you might prefer SDL, then your program can run on GP2X, Windows and Linux with minimal modification.

 

[GP2X_Coder]

Hi,

I am newbie to GP2X. I want to learn to program game on GP2X. There are several tool chains and development kits available. If anybody has experience working with these tools please give me some advice:
1- Games Park Holding Official Development Kit. It have Dev C++ IDE but i heard that it uses old version of Linux kernel.

2- devkitGP2X there is no IDE, the compile file is very big. I compile the demo.c it outputs demo.gpe 648kb. I guess that devkitGP2X uses static linking.

3- Open2X

4- ...

Which tool is easy to use for developer who has Windows XP OS?
Which tool is most popular among GP2X developer? and have many example source code?

Thanks.

If you are just starting out and want to get set up quickly just use the Official SDK it works great just unzip and you are done. I have tried pretty much all of the tool chains out there and this one is pretty stable.

 

[delrina]

Hi GP2X_Coder,

Can you give a link to some simple samples of GP2X SDK so I can compile in Dev C++. I downloaded source code of some games which include *.dev file. However when I compiled using Dev C++ and GP2X SDK of GPH, error happened. "mikmod.h is missing..."

 

[Orkie]

Although if I hadn't of built my own dev environment, I would be using 2. The executables are big because of static linking, and that is necessary because it's a newer version of GCC than provided by GPH. Better compiler, better optimisation, more features/etc.

The GPH provided compiler produces smaller executables because the libs are already present on the GP2X for that version of the compiler (GCC 2.95).

I'm fairly certain the glibc version is the problem - not gcc. I'll try some old dynamically linked programs on a glibc 2.3.5 firmware and see.

 

[yaustar]

I would say 2 and setup an IDE to use DevkitGP2X with it.
http://wiki.gp2x.org/wiki/Using_CodeBlocks

If you have problems with setting that up, then 1 is the next 'best' thing.

 

[ldesnogu]

The GPH provided compiler produces smaller executables because the libs are already present on the GP2X for that version of the compiler (GCC 2.95).

Hum, the GPH compiler comes with 2 toolchains (at least the one for Linux, that you have to compile yourself):
- gcc-3.4.6-glibc-2.2.5
- gcc-4.0.3-glibc-2.3.6
The second one is to be used with -static flag.

On the other hand, to compile the kernel I use the 2.95.3 by Neophob.

 

[Squidge]

The GPH provided compiler produces smaller executables because the libs are already present on the GP2X for that version of the compiler (GCC 2.95).

I'm fairly certain the glibc version is the problem - not gcc. I'll try some old dynamically linked programs on a glibc 2.3.5 firmware and see.

That what I meant, the version of GCC GPH used (2.95) uses a different glibc version than the newer version (4.0.3) so are incompatible. Therefore the old one will work fine as the libs are already present, and the new one requires a static build.

 

[DJWillis]

The GPH provided compiler produces smaller executables because the libs are already present on the GP2X for that version of the compiler (GCC 2.95).

Hum, the GPH compiler comes with 2 toolchains (at least the one for Linux, that you have to compile yourself):
- gcc-3.4.6-glibc-2.2.5
- gcc-4.0.3-glibc-2.3.6
The second one is to be used with -static flag.

On the other hand, to compile the kernel I use the 2.95.3 by Neophob.

That is the new compiler GPH released. Squidge was talking about the old one. This new tool-chain is based on the CrossTool build scripts that Open2x used from day one IIRC.

The 3.4.6 chain will build the kernel if you make one tiny patch to the kernel source (I have it noted somewhere, it's in the Open2x kernels). I don't know if GPH have made the patch to there main kernel yet (been busy so I am a little out of sorts on recent developments).