Developer Info


Ed Welch

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Sep 14, 2009
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I am considering porting my game to the pandora platform, but I have some doubts.
Is there an emulator and SDK available for the Pandora?
I looked at the wiki, but only gives information on general ARM tools, no tools specific for the Pandora.
Also missing is information on the API for controlling the touch screen and keyboard.
 
Speaking unofficially; the unit is not released, so formalized info is sometimes scarce.

No emulator is needed per se (though coudl be handy, it is unlikely in practice.) Just install your favourite Linux distro and go from there (or set up a VM with an angstrom derived installation to be closer, still.) Most games will porbably be SDL or X11/etc based since that gives you a very high compatibility across distributions. (Of course, you can read the GPIOs diredct or go to the metal if you like, but this stuff isn't heavily publicly documented yet.) More to point.. if you coded to the specific hw and have no device, its not really useful for testing :)

So for now, abstract your input handling and wrap it around SDL or whatever you use for your native Linux install, and then for shipping Panda's swap in or #ifdef in the appropriate code; we'll probably have libraries for everything you need.

(ie: We're generally going to support straight to hardware, SDL and X11 as interfaces to input, output, etc.)

There shoudl be a link to the pandora GIT where you can obtain the kernel source and various sources we're working on.

The touchscreen should be typical .. take a look for tslib and such, like other Linux distros.

jeff
 
Ok, thanks for the info, Jeff.
Maybe, if I just made a Linux build it would be best? Then I can just add in the Pandora specific stuff later when Pandora is finished.
I don't use SDL, just c++, stl, openal and opengl es (using powervr emulator). Methinks powervr SDK is using X window manager on Linux.
 
It should be safe to write your opengl/es code and consider it relatively easy to port to Pandora; Again almighty Pickle has done some ports here (or was it cpasjuste?), so there might be some existing code around that demonstrates opengl/es.

jeff
 
Here's a couple of links that should be useful

http://mydedibox.fr/_stuff/pandora/ - has a script that will download and install the relevant compilers to let you build arm code from an x86 linux box

http://github.com/Cpasjuste - CPasjuste's git hub - lots of useful example code there.


As long as you're not using anything particularly platform specific (e.g. relying on win32 calls), it should be fairly straightforward to port stuff to linux - the gles stuff should work fine on the pandora
 
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