Quake1/2/3 on Pandora/Wiz

[Pickle]

Hi all, i like to lurk around on phoronix, but i would like to come out of the depths to let you know about some recent progress made with the linux handhelds pandora and wiz.

Recently we been able to harness the SGX (opengles 2.0) chip on the OMAP soc and run all 3 quake engines. This was done using a software library called nanoGL. This ia a opengl to opengles wrapper. So the opengl API that quake uses is emulated through this library. Common API calls are simply passed through to the opengles driver. NanoGL was written by Olli Hinkka for symbian based phones: http://koti.mbnet.fi/hinkka/index.html

The SGX can be clocked at 55 Mhz or 100 Mhz, the Cortex is the ARM core which I normally clock at 600 Mhz for the tests.
Results so far for the pandora are pretty promising. Test runs that I have done generate framerates between 40-60.
We expect that a rewritten opengles 2.0 render could give even better performance.

The wiz has some pretty bad graphical glitches, it features a limited opengles 1.1 core called the LF1000. Results arnt too bad given the power of the device. Hopefully I can resolve the flicker at some point.

You can see my demo video's at my channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/Pickle136


For those that dont know these are two embedded ARM devices running linux. Both systems are open, as in freedom to run what you want on them. For example the PSP is meant to be closed. The wiz is designed by the Korean company GPH. The pandora is deisnged by openpandora (which is a select group of people from the community). The commonity has supported devices such as the GP GP32 and GPH GP2X. You can follow or join in at the fun at gp32x.com

[Loris]

That's great!

I was wating for news about the usability of the SGX on Pandora, and it turns out to be as great as I was expecting.

Now, what are the plans? Are developers encouraged to test applications against the OpenGL to OpenGL ES wrapper, to write graphically-intensive apps to use OpenGL ES, or is there a future, native, OpenGL API from the drivers?

The thing that scares me about these OMAP3 devices is... are we stuck with an old Linux and X software stack to keep Imagination Technologies' drivers working? Is there a blob that we can wrap in updated wrapper code, to make it work with future Linux/X releases?

Because... the idea of a Free driver is totally nuts, right?

Oh well... I still won't be able to buy one, so... I'm just being curious: is there the possibility to develop for a (QEMU, maybe?) decently-running virtual machine similar to a Pandora? (Exposing the same software APIs, like GL ES, and... the rest is standard Free software, right?)

I think mobile phone vendors are distributing similar VMs to developers this days, and it would permit a greater range of developers to port, test their software on a similar machine.

That's just plain ARM (QEMU has NEON too, or so it seems), right?

Thank you for making this possible, and thank you for discussing it here too.

[Pickle]

Now, what are the plans? Are developers encouraged to test applications against the OpenGL to OpenGL ES wrapper, to write graphically-intensive apps to use OpenGL ES, or is there a future, native, OpenGL API from the drivers?

To clarify its not a full featured wrapper, it has all the needed opengl commands that the quake engines use, i.e. no display lists. But if something had only the functions that the nanoGL library supports it should work.

The thing that scares me about these OMAP3 devices is... are we stuck with an old Linux and X software stack to keep Imagination Technologies' drivers working?

? I know for sure the kernel is very recent, and the X i think is too. It's based off angstrom and matchbox

Oh well... I still won't be able to buy one, so... I'm just being curious: is there the possibility to develop for a (QEMU, maybe?)

If your look on gp32x someone has just created a VM for qemu that runs the pandora image.