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Pandora: Easy as pie to port to (ie: Linux to Linux port)
Wed, 03 Dec 2008

Was chatting with cpasjuste in IRC and he'd noted that before he even received his pandora devkit, he'd done a few 'quick ports.'; ie: Just getting them to compile in the tool chain we're all switching to for the device. I offered to give them a run so he wouldn't have to wait until tomorrow to find out if they worked and to our surprise.. they did! (You would think a run before even testing it once would fail...)

So I've already ported OutcaST (gp2x version that uses SDL that I was doing Wiz speed testing with) to the pandora last night (a quick port!), and now cpasjuste has ported Hatari (another ST emu), HUGO (TG-16 emu) and SMS (Sega Mastersystem emu.) His Hatari worked pretty well out of the box (including sound!), and the SMS as well pretty good; HUGO had some minor oddities easy to fix when he gets his dev board. FWIW, a USB mouse plugged into the Pandora worked on the GEM desktop, too, right out of the box. How hot is that?

I've got performance numbers for my OutcaST but I'm not sure I want to post here about them yet. Suffice to say that the pandora _blows the hell_ out of other handhelds; same clock, same naive port, same unoptimized SDL used for the display backend, so on and so forth (I have details in a private thread.) Much more blown away than I thought, too.. so the Pandora is both easy to port to, and frighteningly fast!

Cheers cpasjuste for your quick work, and to notaz for the pandora kernel and SDL ports!

Some quick shoddy pics (Sorry!):

OutcaST running, displaying the GEM Desktop

Hatari, in A_133 Automation loader for Xenon 2

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