For a long time, most developers could not make good use of DSP comprised in the OMAP architecture of the Pandora SoC. Sure, there was TI’s dispbridge driver in the Pandora firmware for a long time, and a few developers like MH-T or Hdonk tried to make use of it – but the key issue was always linked with the latency to call the DSP or high CPU usage. Then BSP came with his deep knowledge of the architecture, and was able to package a kernel driver, a DSP component and an ARM library to make better use of it. Unfortunately, while the DSP can certainly help to relieve your CPU of certain tasks , it requires to re-factor your code and separate it into parallel processes to be used in concurrence with the main program thread. With the exception of a few demos by BSP, MH-T and Hdonk, no one had yet fully completed that kind of work. Notaz’s latest PCSXReARMed build now makes full use of that architecture.
Month: January 2015
C4A Compo Weekly News Jan 29, 2015
We are almost at the end of the month. Only 3 days left to make a difference in the compo. Let’s see what has changed since last week’s update…
C4A Compo Weekly News Jan 22, 2015
It’s not the most active month ever but there’s been a fierce competition going on for Metro Cross at least, with significant changes in the top positions. But you know, when there’s space, it means the market is ripe for disruption and I would not surprised if we see some new comers jumping in at the last minute before the end of the month…
How TinyGLES made Uplink possible on Open Pandora
A couple of months back, Lunixbochs released a new port for the Pandora, Uplink – the original game from Introversion Software, a British indie developer (current working on Prison Architect, you may have seen it on Steam). The Uplink port was not a simple feat. This is a full featured PC game that was never made to run on mobile devices. While it may not look visually stunning, performance wise it proved to be challenging port, and Lunixbochs came with an interesting solution to the performance issue, by creating TinyGLES.
Monthly Software News Dec. 15th 2014 to Jan. 14th 2014
Ola! I decided I may as well call this the Monthly Software news since I have not published an update for a month already ! While I was enjoying some holidays for a couple of weeks, folks were apparently active and released a ton of stuff when I was not looking. Darn!
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PCSXReARMed Now With DSP Support!
Remember. A couple of weeks back, just before we were about to close 2014, I was lamenting the fact that while we had a bunch of great developments in 2014, there were a few disappointments, and among them was the lack of DSP usage. Bsp had brought the DSP function to life through his work, Notaz had included it in the firmware for everyone to use, and then… Poof. Nothing happened. Until yesterday. Notaz has just released a new version of his PS1 Emulator, now using the DSP.
C4A Compo Weekly News Jan 13, 2015
Looks like everyone is back from vacation and hard at work beating highscores on C4A… Let’s see how you guys did at Trosh, Metro Cross and Titanion over the past 10 days…
Syncthing, the New Contender To Sync Folders
Dropbox is not alone anymore to offer services related to syncing files and folders between computers. I had already covered BitTorrentSync a while ago, which was a good alternative as well for the Pandora since ARM builds were available. But both Dropbox and BitTorrentSync suffer from the same problem: they are not Open Source and therefore their security remains opaque to say the least. SyncThing is however Free Software, and simple to use as well. Let’s see how to get it working on Pandora.
C4A Compo December Results, and January Compo
Happy New Year everyone! It’s going to be another great year for the Pandora (and hopefully the Pyra) and for C4A compos! In the meantime, let’s have a look at how 2014 ended in the last compo… and who won!