Palm Pre gets SDL! native gaming
 

http://www.precentral.net/palm-bring...ve-development

I guess you might want to know why am I interested on this kind of news... some random device getting commercial games. Well, I think you'll understand when you see what I see:

• The Palm Pre has a OMAP3430
• The Palm Pre has a PowerVR SGX and OpenGL ES 2.0 libs
• The Palm Pre is running GNU/Linux
• The official way to code native apps in the Palm Pre is using SDL 1.2, which has a standard interface and Palm has released their modifications in compliance to the LGPL.
• Did I say it's getting (some) commercial games?
• The N900 has a OMAP3430
• The N900 has a PowerVR SGX and OpenGL ES 2.0 libs
• The N900 is running GNU/Linux
• The N900 has SDL 1.2
• Thus the N900 could potentially run the same unmodified Palm Pre binaries (and vice versa)

Of course, I still don't know what the draconian DRM scheme will be, but even then, I think this is a pretty interesting fact to consider :D And hopefully, may induce Nokia to make a similar announcement in the future...

Re: Palm Pre gets SDL! native gaming
 

This is great news! I'd love to see some Pre games (commercial and otherwise) find their way to the N900. Also, the development community just got a lot larger!

}:^)~

Re: Palm Pre gets SDL! native gaming
 

Don't forget the fact that the Palm Pre has multitouch support, while the N900 hasn't. Many games will probably use that feature, which will make the games for the pre unplayable at the N900...

Re: Palm Pre gets SDL! native gaming
 

depends, they could make use of the keyboard as well.

Re: Palm Pre gets SDL! native gaming
 

But then they won't directly run on the n900 (if they don't make use of the pre's keyboard)

Re: Palm Pre gets SDL! native gaming
 

Well, the Palm native SDK has been released today, and yes, it is indeed a codesourcery toolchain + a patched SDL for OpenGL ES support (not unlike the SDL_gles extensions I released a few days ago to extras-devel...)
Instead of, say, (like on SDL_gles) a Palm native SDK developer would have to . I could change my extension to resemble that easily... (rest is mostly the same).

• Keyboard events go through the usual way.
• Single finger touchscreen events are sent via mouse events (like on the N900), multi finger touchscreen events are sent via "multiple mice" events.
• Gestures in the gesture area via virtual keyboard events.
• Accelerometer is read via the sdl joystick interface (like on the N900 with accelemymote).
• Sound is handled via the Pulseaudio SDL driver (and SDL_mixer) -- like on the N900.
• They have written a very simple SDL binding for some media player framework (gstreamer, I suppose): SDL_cinema. The wrapper is very simple (too much IMO).
• They have a new SDL event type for their OS stuff, like the above library's end-of-stream event.
• They also have an extra library for OS stuff: preventing the screen autodimming (Nokia has this already in hildon-games-wrapper), changing/detecting the device orientation, enabling the gesture area, their own equivalent of Maemo's liblocation, etc.

So, source compatibility can be attained with a few one-line preprocessor macros :). Let's see about binary compatibility.

Re: Palm Pre gets SDL! native gaming
 

very excited ^_^...although I have a bit of a problem...maybe games would search for specific license/signatures of the device, that'll be a major problem right there, also games maybe extremely buggy, lets face it we're tired of bugs :( . As I have learnt through life, things arent always as easy as they seem...Although I quite sure that a minor notification to ea would make em develop/port games for the n900.

Re: Palm Pre gets SDL! native gaming
 

Oh, you're going to love this...

Re: Palm Pre gets SDL! native gaming
 

A new win is born!

Re: Palm Pre gets SDL! native gaming
 

I'm surprised this thread hasn't exploded yet. Great work once again.