[lug] Interest in embedded systems/handhelds coding?

[Micah Dowty]

Well, PicoGUI is very scalable. Just to give you an idea of some of the 
extremes of hardware it runs on:

- uCsimm, with 16mhz Dragonball EZ processor. PicoGUI itself runs fine, 
but these don't handle anything multimedia-like
- Tuxscreen, with 640x480 8-bit display and fast (100-something mhz) 
ARM cpu
- desktop PC? (there has been some thought on using picogui for in-game 
UIs)
- VTech helio with 2MB of flash, 8MB of dram
- Agenda VR3 with 16MB of flash

Most new handhelds are actually quite overpowered, so recent hardware 
should run games fine.

C++ support is still a bit shaky or nonexistant on several platforms, 
hence PicoGUI being written only in C. I know at least a few PicoGUI 
apps are being written in C++, and uClibc is just now supporting C++. 
Right now the main thing picogui is lacking for good game support is a 
way to memory-map a bitmap or the framebuffer.

OpenGL support would be welcomed, and it would run on all the hardware 
that supports it and could be turned off at compile time for other 
hardware. I have even been thinking about an OpenGL video driver for 
PicoGUI that would provide backwards-compatible 2D functions, but have 
a hook so that applications and themes can send 3D data. PicoGUI themes 
could use 3D buttons :)

On 2002.02.05 22:33 D. Stimits wrote:
> Micah Dowty wrote:
> >
> > Hi Everybody,
> >
> > I was just curious if anyone from my local LUG would be interested
> in
> > helping out with a project I've been working on for a while. It's
> > PicoGUI, a graphical environment designed for handheld computers,
> > cellphones, and any other embedded system that needs a GUI.
> >
> > You can find more info at http://picogui.org, and there's an IRC
> > channel (#picogui) on irc.openprojects.net.
> >
> > --Micah
> > _______________________________________________
> > Web Page:  http://lug.boulder.co.us
> > Mailing List: http://lists.lug.boulder.co.us/mailman/listinfo/lug
> 
> I don't have any of the hardware/handheld stuff this would run on, but
> I
> am very curious about something. I have games on my mind, and I'm
> wondering what kind of hardware resources are typical on
> these...mainly
> program size, and C++ support. How hard would it be to port an Xlib
> app
> to this? Though it would be a bit absurd under low power systems, how
> hard would it be to port OpenGL/Mesa to it? How well do these
> handhelds
> do with small animations?
> 
> D. Stimits, stimits at idcomm.com
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