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On Sat, 2005-12-31 at 19:51 +0000, George Foot wrote:
> Hi guys,
Hi, great to see a life sign of one of the founding fathers of
Allegro :)
> I don't know if you've heard of the GP2X - it's a handheld game/media
> player, which is open to homebrew development. http://www.gbax.co.uk/
>
> I got one a few weeks ago, and patched Allegro 4.2.0 to work on it. The
> interim result is here, if anyone is interested:
>
> http://www.glost.eclipse.co.uk/gfoot/gp2x/allegro/
The link doesn't work here..
> There's not a lot of interest though, unless you actually own one of
> these things. :)
>
> It's impressive how easy it was to build Allegro on non-Intel
> architecture - a testament to the porting work that's already been done.
> :) Most of the work in targetting the GP2X was altering the configure
> script to better support cross-compiling, and writing device-specific
> drivers.
>
> The non-Intel drawing primitives are *really* slow though - it looks
> like they're writing single pixels, rather than doing block writes,
> which is obviously rather slow. A loop of memcpy calls outpaces blit by
> an order of magnitude. I seem to remember something about some
> architectures needing to store one pixel per word, or something? Maybe
> it would be good to have some way to use more optimal routines on nice
> architectures that don't have such restrictions.
>
> I wasn't really anticipating these patches being rolled back into the
> main Allegro distribution - a lot of the changes are nasty hacks, like
> hijacking the Linux system driver rather than writing my own. Some
> things could be useful though - I extended the joystick support in the
> GUI to also work in menus, and added a tab button - but the code isn't
> clean, I really just wanted to get more examples and the demo game
> working. :)
>
Hm, I don't know anything about GP2X myself - but I guess, it could make
sense putting this into a separate SVN branch, just to have the code
accessible to everyone who might want it.
--
Elias Pschernig