some quick development questions and advice


SNESFAN

Retro game fanatic
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quick and somewhat minor development question I want to rebuid some emulator front ends already available and possibly even more in the future. First thing I want to do at a minimum is reskin picklauncher for the specific systems already available. I do like the snes and gnuboy skins, so I may go with that theme for other systems.


questions..


how do I unpack a already packed .pnd file I seen some documentation on how to pack with a script, but even the location of that seems to elude me at the moment. If someone could link to where that's at if they remember along with how to unpack would be helpful.


what i'm really really after...


Also since I haven't seen it done it's probally going to be a royal pain in the ass to do, but since the source code is available for (presumeably all) current emulators on the pandora that you could in theory go in and change the in app menu. Given the options and structure will be different. I was thinking as a more advanced project would be to replace it with what is in pcsx. I understand it would take some serious digging around in the code to find out what each option is currently doing in the existing emulator and then also finding out how it's linked in pcsx's menu then relinking the functions.


even more after that...


endstate after that is I want to rebuild a even more minimalistic minimenu for a custom flashable OS of sorts. Just a simple possibly flashy front end menu to choose between emulators similar to psp's xmb, but not so copywrite infringing. Include all the rebuilt emulators in the image on the nand and update the OS as newer versions of emulators come out.


I know it's pretty ambitious endstate project i know... However... it's what I want to do, it's what I do for my android OS roms, but I have much more experience with android than i do straight linux... so if anyone has any words of wisdom, feel free to share.. thanks!
 
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Keep in mind my launcher is really a executes the application like you would on the command line. So if the app doesn't support command line flags then theres not much use. So not every app could make sense to use it with.


Skinning it pretty straightforward, just supply the images and your done.
 
i did some picklelaucher skins for the caanoo so I have some experience with how it works etc, and it's limitations. That's why in the future I want to move to something like the frontend of pcsx, but your picklelaucher is a good start for getting my hands wet :) thanks!
 
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i did some picklelaucher skins for the caanoo so I have some experience with how it works etc, and it's limitations.

ah ok, as for limitations if there is something you wish it did just mention it and at some point I will go back and add any reasonable feature requests
 
no, it's a pretty solid laucher for working directories, file type filters, flags etc


the limitations is what you mention like not being able to do stuff like button config for emualtors, saveing/loading savestates etc, stuff you can't do from command line if the emulator doesn't support it


button config is something else I want to unify, the space=menu in all apps that don't specifically use the keyboard for in app controls like scummvm etc just stuff like that


EDIT:


cool, got a good idea of how most of these emulators and .pnd files in general are structured... sadly most of the emulators I went in and did superficial updates to (icons, titles, screen shots, etc) they were not just point click rebrands, shouldn't be too hard to get them all streamlined for this tool however. Looks like just some heavy PXML editing is in order for some.


did run into a problem with VBA (best Gameboy alternative until gnuboy is fixed for zaxxon 1.5) *see below* I can't seem to extract with that tool. The ones so far I was able to get in there and rebrand and mess with were snes9x4p, picodrive, pcsx, gpsp, mupen, & gnuboy. These are the ones I'll probably be starting off with.


skinning picklelaucher on the pandora doesn't seem much different than the caanoo, looks like some things have been added since the last time I was in there dorking around with it.


EDIT2: fixed the fullscreen problem with gnuboy by using notaz's updated sdl, also removed the scaling menu at the beginning, repacked, working well


uploaded if anyone else wants it because the current one is broken, it's just a rebrand/mod all credits go to original author, didn't really do much else to it yet
 
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next up on my hit list is a nes emulator... ran into some problems


is there a native port of a nes emulator anywhere? I have been having a hell of a time trying to fix the scaling on gpfce, full screen is just not working, and anything smaller is just not happening. I am able to force feed it rom variables with command line so picklelauncher is working but everytime I do I'm seeing horrible lag spikes... think it has something to do with ginge


while looking for an alternative for gpfce I found fceux sdl which would work well with notaz's sdl, but but it needs scons to build, which needs python to make that... and I couldn't get python to make on the pandora. Think I need a open embeded port of python... or something... tons of errors when building from source.


I am a pretty novice coder (mainly just copy paster and small mods to existing code) I have no freaking idea how to cross compile so I was really hoping I could compile that natively but I can't.


so I have more questions


1) can someone point me in the direction of python that will run on our pandora?


2) can someone show me a idiots guide to cross compiling? my knowledge is just above configure and make ;) so it needs to start off pretty basic.


3) if it would be simplier can someone just build that binary for me?


http://www.fceux.com/web/download.html


thanks agian for your guy's help, learning a bunch about native linux
 
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Just to let you know your repacked Gnuboy pnd is working as intended, with touchscreen, audio and GFX (on HF4 and SZb2 old kernel) and indeed the old one now appears to be broken, as you say ( which I hadn't noticed before, yet now it will run only in a postage stamp window in fullscreen, or hard lock the Pandora in other scaling options for some reason).


There's no scaling options with your pnd (as you mentioned) but if stretched fullscreen is your thing (you need .106 for that, "You need .106 for that"...said Polly) then your good to go :)


007, Alice in Wonderland, AvP, Barbie : Game Girl etc have never looked or sounded so good.


However my American Jesus (PD) rom is dying after the dedicated solo all by VK screen. No buttons seem to revive this situation.


I hereby decree that the original gameboy (or gbc) was a far better handheld to play innumerably more titles than I have downloaded illegally upon this box of filth and that the Pandora project is of pure wickedness and all Devel's that play upon its charms are but heathens for the wicker basket!


Any suggestions, or do you need a fresh attempt at repackaging a divine interpretation? Or was it my Rom?
 
thanks for your feedback, not sure about that rom, does it work on the old version? I don't see how anything I did could have broken it unless there's a bug in notaz's sdl? It's either a limitation in the emulator it's self or possibly the rom. When I'm done with these I'll make them scaleable in app in a unified way. If I can get them full screen stretch, scaling them down (to a native resolution 2x2 etc) won't be an issue I don't think.


the reason I want to use the sdl for the rest of these emulators if possible (besides it being a good standard) is because I already know how to scale it down using notaz's highly fine documentation, stupid simple to plug in the resolution presets and it takes care of the rest. it's really easy to script out or as I want to do make a unified front end. Looking at the orignal gnuboy looks like he was scaling it twice, once in sdl and the other in when loading the application maybe it was working on the older version of sdl which is not included with the OS, if that's the case I could either remove the envrionmental variable out of the script for the built in one and make it use the one that's included (this probally would have fixed it also) or just remove the file all together because it's included with the OS save about a meg I think.


I also want to look more into the sdl key bindings also because right now in gnuboy (q quits, s saves state, l loads state) and there is no in-app menu which is actually better because it's more modular that way.(thinking agian about my endstate) but I want to try and get something like this


within game


space = invoke menu


pandora button (1 sec press) = graceful quit


pandora button (3 sec press) = force close


1-0 = choose state slot


s = save state


l = load state


del = fast forward


f = display fps


r = cycle through resolution presets


within menu


B action = execute/choose


X action = back/up 1 level


R trigger = pg down


L trigger = gp up
 
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An extra tip on opening PNDs: You should also grab the latest 7zip beta which has squashfs support. Associate .pnd files with it, and you can just double click PNDs to open them. It only reads and extracts them though, so you still need PNDTools to make changes.
 
If you want to get into crosscompiling for Pandora, I suggest you better read the threads about the toolchains. They come with tutorials :)
 
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