Why Does Development Appear So Limited?

[quadomatic]

It seems like plenty of people have been buying Dingoo A320s lately, but not much interesting stuff seems to have come about in terms of development, aside from the linux breakthroughs (which have all been by one very awesome person).

Is it because the Dingoo console's hardware documentation isn't there, and isn't open for development of new applications? Is that why it's so important to get linux working on it?

Just trying to understand

Thanks

 

[quartercast]

I think people here are excited about their new Wizzes. As far as dingo development is progressing, most of it seems to be going on at the freeforum and behind the scenes.

 

[mindlord]

I think it also has to do with the lack of an SDK, or any means to hit the hardware in the same way the Dingoo manufacturers have. Once a nice, tight, linux install is made widely available and a cross compiling toolchain is out there, much ado will be made over the Dingoo.

 

[Firefox]

There's been an SDK since the start, though it took a few weeks for the community to get to grips with it.

Programming on the Dingoo isn't removed from the hardware, you can draw straight onto the framebuffer and read button states directly if you want. There's a comprehensive games framework included with the SDK too, if you're into that sort of thing.

I think programming under Linux will be much more removed from the hardware because of Linux's virtual addressing. Then you have to start mapping things into your task space using /dev/mem and so on.

 

[quadomatic]

So, right now programming on Dingoo is difficult because it's more directly related to the hardware. With linux, you can write programs to use various libraries and linux and the kernel will worry about interfacing with the hardware, right?

btw firefox, are you planning to port T2K to the dingoo?

 

[Firefox]

I ported T2K about a month ago, but it doesn't work yet. I haven't had time to debug it yet.

 

[Consequence_9]

I honestly think that many devs are holding their breath & waiting for that one breakthrough with Linux that doesn't seem too far off. Once a proper uclib toolchain is available & Linux dual-booting occurs things will really start moving along. The problem is right now that because we're on the cusp of this many devs don't want to put a whole lot of effort into something that might not be compatible or would require even more extranious effort to rewrite.

 

[Stuckie]

I'm working on something
I'm porting my engine over ( SGZEngine.. yes, I know it's supposed to have been out last year, I only just got internet access back! and have been busy at work ) though it's going a bit slower than I'd have liked.
Once I get it to display stuff on screen though, I might do another round of releases as it's now running on quite a number of platforms.
Due to a severe restructure of the code, adding new platforms is insanely easy.

As a quick overview, it's an engine designed for prototyping games/apps via Lua. It acts as a giant Virtual Machine/Sandbox and abstracts hardware and API access so that whatever you write in it's extended Lua *should* just work on any other platform the engine is ported to. There are some little bits you need to deal with ( mostly resolution/button configs on the handhelds ) but in general, it should go over without much incident.