Earlier I posted http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...&postcount=258 in the rx51 thread, where (in reply to another post) I compiled a text-only, command line Hello World program with the Pandora SDK and ran it successfully on my N800.

That got me a bit curious so I also tried with a simplistic SDL game. That worked pretty well too (although the game is useless as a game or example really, it was my niece's game which she wrote in her introduction-to-C course at uni, so don't ask for it )

Anyway it looks to me that the interoperability out-of-the-box could be greater than I imagined, at least for SDL-based stuff. If OpenGL/ES for the rx51 and the Pandora will be hidden below the SDL layer then things could be really interesting (but at this point I'm way out of my league - I don't know how this stuff will be layered).

EDIT: In case anyone wonders - this application was dynamically linked, i.e. compiled for Pandora with the Pandora SDK and libs, but using runtime libraries (libSDK, libSDK_ttf, libc etc.) from N800. Statically linked applications have an even bigger chance of working but they also have a larger memory footprint.

This site might be interesting for further tests:
http://mydedibox.fr/_stuff/pandora/

If OpenPandora is as open and free as its claimed to be it should be reasonably easy to port the applications and games to a different ARM platform. Hardware is different though; N8x0 doesn't have hardware 2D or 3D rendering.

Usually, stuff is dynamically compiled so if you use different library and binary versions you might burn yourself during compilation and/or execution. To be on the safe side I'd compile it in my Maemo SDK or check out the dependancies. You can run it too, and see if it works, but it might crash on some point when you use a specific function. Sharing your experience and repackaging might also do wonders.

Anything that builds on the Pandora should build trivially for the RX-51, and vice versa; binary compatibility should work too, if you build it against the lower versions of shared libraries. Now it's fairly likely that in final releases some libraries will be newer in each platform, requiring a deliberate downgrade of those libraries in whichever SDK to guarantee compatibility.

Of course, the N8x0 will be suffering from no (or software-only) OpenGL, so any heavy OpenGL work will be impractical, but as long as they're not building to ARMv7, it should "work", and non- or light-OpenGL stuff would be likely to work decently.

(Now I don't know anything about Angstrom, but I assume it will be overall similarly up-to-date as Maemo 5, rather than being stuck major versions behind on some libraries; if it is out of date that bad, compatibility libraries could be packaged for Maemo, rather than targeting the platform's version.)

What if a Pandora program is compiled in a way that it directly accesses the built-in gaming controls? Would it be possible to redirect it to an USB gamepad/NIT controls via a hack without recompiling the program?

In other words, do you think it would be possible to create an environment on the next NIT that makes it possible to just drop in Pandora Progs and use its full features?

Well, I don't know how they'll even be mapped, but obviously a well-implemented game will permit controls to be remapped; I'd definitely expect USB gamepads to work.

The Pandora game controls, or indeed any hardware, are meant to be accessed through a kernel interface, and not directly (this has been described by the Pandora developers). Equivalent interfaces, where possible, can be added to an rx51 where it makes sense. In any case most of the buttons and controls on the Pandora will be mapped to key events, which are trivially handled/redirected with xmodmap and the like. Of course, the Pandora will have more buttons and controls available (e.g. the analog nubs) than the Nokia devices.

In my simple testing with existing Pandora SDL-based executables I've only ran into one problem so far - the Pandora uses ogg/vorbis sound and has libvorbis*.so which we don't, as far as I know, have any version of for the Nokia. (The missing ogg/vorbis support has been talked about since day one.. still unresolved if I'm not mistaken).