In an effort to make sure that whatever SBC you own the code can be made to work with it, I've been collecting a lot of SBC's over the last couple of years..

I might need help? Serious, professional help.


But the good side to this,  I've tested my projects on almost all these systems, and got them working in some fashion, if you can't get your SBC to work, let me know and I'll try it out, if I don't have your SBC, I'll certainly try to get it.

This is an issue I had with Ubuntu 18.04 running on an Nvidia Nano but I have noted a couple of other Ubuntu systems would fail to run demos so this may be the cause for them too.

Basically if you can't get an X11 window to open from your VisualStudio deployed app, you have to make sure that you are indeed using the correct log in name for your SSH connection and the Target. This is very unlikely to be different.

The issue however seems to relate to autologin on Ubuntu if you are signing in manually, even as your expected user name, you can transfer build and run, but your builds will fail whenever they try to get an X11 display to set up graphics.

I figured it had to be something to do with access rights somewhere, so I went to the settings and checked the Securty and Privacy->Password settings. I didn't see anything odd there, but while I was in I switched to autologin to on.

Guess what.. that solves it.. My projects now happily build and run and can be executed from my VisualGDB debug command.

To double check I set autologin back to off and sure enough my VisualGDB failed again
So the secret is... ensure you have automatic login, with your matching ssh username

Bizzare issue...Dunno why this is happening, but very happy I resolved it.

An odd thing to be sure, and with shipping and customs outside my $100 budget (total cost was around $160), but its related to a project I am working on for my university and I need to see if I can configure this to be a viable dev or target learning system for areas when computers are not so easy to find never mind learn to code on.
1st impressions are...well surprising, its slow of course and I'm not sure what OS they shipped with it, but it does work...apart from Firefox telling me that Google is an unsafe site and wont' got to it.. lol it may be right

Im doing a full update of its current OS now and will see if I can install some dev packages on it. Of course no visual studio, but I want to see which of the Linux IDE's can be made to work if that is possible it might be a viable option to use as a dev system targetting another machine or itself.

I'll also attempt to use it as a target, though previous Pine A64 attempts havn't gone well the software has had time to mature and does have a strong following. The Rock64 from  them isn't half bad but this is based on the older and more troublesome A64 

Build quality is surprisingly good, I had expected from reviews to find it really bad. The small keyboard isn't the greatest thing but nor is it the worst. If it can be married up to a decent OS it might actually be a cool little system.
The current default KDE based ubuntu (I think), installs GLmark2-es2 fine and recognises the mali 400mp2 but it isn't showing any sign of acceleration and the score is naturally very low at 27 on screen but a surprising..188 offscreen..hmmm.. I'll have to see if I can find an A64 OS that has drivers.

I will report back when I manage to get things up and running

Recently I went to a local Game Developer Meetup that I have been signed up to but not attended yet and it was a bit interesting. The main draw was that there was a person from the local EA Mobile group who spoke about sound in games. After the event, I mingled with some folks and when they asked me what I was working on, I mentioned being interested in developing with OpenGL-ES.  This caused some eye brow raising and a question: "So, you're bypassing Unity?"  It seemed a bit foreign to these folks that anyone would use anything other than a tool such as Unity to do any sort of development.

I do find this interesting though since there were folks calling themselves Game Coders but did not actually code; they just used what Unity gave them.

Is this common?

The NVIDA Jetson Nano appears to have a competitor from Google.
The Google Coral Dev Board
https://coral.withgoogle.com/products/dev-board

It's available from Mouser or Seeed at $149.00 US


The Coral comes with on board WiFi and Bluetooth 4.1 where as the Jeson Nano does not, however for $25US you can add a WiFi/BT 4.2 M.2 Module to the Nano.

Like the Nano, the Coral comes in a SoM which is based on the NXP's iMX8M system-on-chip (SOC) with:
- Quad symmetric Cortex-A53 processors:
- Support of 64-bit Armv8-A architecture
- Arm Cortex-M4 core platform
- Vicante GC7000 lite graphics GPU (OpenGL ES 3.1 support)
- Two PCI Express Gen2 interfaces

And other goodies.

I would like to have one to test drive but not looking to pay for it yet.

Hi, I've recently bought your book and I enjoy reading it.  (The Fundamentals of C/C++ Game Programming using targetbased.. SBC's 1st ed.)

I've been coding alot of stuff for many years, as a hobby, but I still feel like a newbie in some areas of c/c++   

I'm currently coding my own game/engine from scratch and the book has helped me getting forward with my own code.

I was wondering if there was any online sourcecode to download ?   It would really help to see how all the code in the book fits together.

I've been looking, but I can't seem to find any code to download..

Depending on the version of ubuntu you may come accross this error when trying to install bullet or mesa libs

Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), is another process using it?

This is nearly always caused by the Ubuntu updater being active in the background, which is the other process it's asking about, and doing exactly what its designed to. Unfortunately while its doing it, there's nothing you can really do, it has a priority over the directories while its in progress.

On the 1st run, the updater is downloading and installing any updates, so you just have to wait for it. Once its done (this can take up to an hour), you can usually go to your system updater via the System->Administration->Software Updater and switch off the auto updates.
Annoyingly you can't switch them off if an update has alrady started.

When I start the project (your code from the code download page) without debugging it says "failed to load" and glGetError 0x501. When I start with debugging it runs fine and loads the images. Why is this? Going forward, am I supposed to always run with debugging?

One of my students has been using this on their project I must say it looks rather nice now that I've seen it in action.
Its not massively hard to set up but it does need a bit of effort... Once done though, it gives a very cool input system you can use to set up values/variables in game via a very nice usable menu, scroll bar system

https://github.com/ocornut/imgui

Thinking about buying the book but just wanted to know what programming experience is needed.