Yes, those lovely people at FriendlyArm are sending me one of thier little Rockchip beasts. I love the T4, and its basically the same chipset with less bits attached, so very much looking forward to seeing this in action.

Course I still don't think the drivers on the RK chip are fully working but in time we'll see how they work out.

I've seen and worked through some examples of running SDL and SMFL on something like a Raspberry Pi so I was wondering if there is an advantage of using OpenGL ES over these graphic options.  Recently I heard a podcast where the guest was talking about using SDL for the interface development they were working on. It seemed like an interesting option. 

Any thoughts on these?

Posting here, as suggested in the How to Register thread, to show I'm not a spambot.

I'm here hoping to get some help with the MagPi articles.

Ok all you Beagle owners, I'm sorry its an old board but tbh I wasn't very impressed when I 1st bought it, aside from having eMMC on it, its a really slow and tired board, at least for graphics, I'm sure its still quite awesome for maker projects with so many I/O options on it.

But I've fired up my old one, now that I have a bit more info around me..with only a single core 1Ghz system with "3D acceleration" I'm not expecting too much here.
But this is a popular board and I'm sure some of you have them.. so lets see how it does. (After a long wait for an update to occur)

I don't actually have a Fire version but given the only difference is a network RJ45 connector I'm going to assume it will produce the same result. I connected wireless and it handled that fine, but quite slow. But in terms of graphical results I have to say there's nothing to report.


Its not really a game board, having only one USB and HDMI its hard to imagine it would have any use. Its Debian as supplied by Friendly Arm is  quite a limited version with low res 720 HDMI .Its also no longer in production so the OS isn't being updated, and even Armbian don't have it, but one of the other S5P4418 builds might work.

But it is a functioning system, when all said and done its another mini  quad core S5P4418 with a Mali 400, but only 1 core I think. I could install libs and get building but just wasn't able to get a screen to display, and even without the screen it was reporting painfully low update rates, so I think its a no go as a graphics target. But fun as a deadless device for some non graphical usage.

I am going to try a Nano2AFire image which has OpenGLES2.0 support, not sure if it will work any better, but it is a more uptodate OS for the same CPU and though the board has some differences in layout it seems to have the same functions (famous last words)! The download links all seem to go to the same S54518 support page, I'll let you know.

As you might notice we get a lot of spam bots trying to log on to the forum, a few do get through, but I am doing a pretty good job of keeping them out. But even so, up to 20 applications a day are recieved from spam bots, which are booted mostly before they get a chance to post.

Registration here is easy, just log in, register and wait for your email.....which will never come... I've disabled the emails because the spam bots were automatically responding and gaining access.

So all access is down to me checking your IP is not listed on a spam check site, and approving.

It is also helpful if you post a notice on the open parts of the forums to verify you are indeed who you claim to be.. Just a hello, and why you are here is enough to ensure a smooth ok on your application. Even without a post I will validate your request within a day or 2 and feel free to come back and check if you have access.. Then please post a hello notice or ask any questions you might have.

If you have registered and not been given access after a few days, please just post here in the open sections, it will be moderated, but I will see the thread, and activate you.

All part of the service, keeping this forum spam free.

Not an actual error but a change of content from the book so best to list here.

Most of the projects available for download are including lib files where needed, this tends to make them self contained but also rather large. GLM in particular is a large repetative download on each project.

So over time I am going to be assuming that Bullet, STB and GLM are preinstalled on your targets using git clone, (see details how to install elsewhere), for Raspberry that will put the dirs in.. /Home/Pi

For non raspberry systems it will got into /Home/XXX where x is your user name when you logged on.

This will reduce the download size of the projects but may, just may, result in some incompatabilites of projects expecting specific versions of the GLM (in particular as its live) libs. I will try to maintain regular updates of the libs and resolve changes as I find them, and note them here.

I've avoided doing a full switch to the 3B+ for a while now, not because it worried me at all, but the MagPi articles and occasional mails I get from book readers tend to be more related to Raspberry 3B with Jessie. My old 3B allowed me to keep a hybrid updated Jessie/with stretch libs on board so I could test code. The 3B is pure Stretch. 
 
But I've now updated fully to the 3B+ and enjoying the little extra kick of speed both on builds and execution as well as debug with the faster ethernet.

I don't really anticipate any issues with this transition, the system is pretty much identical, mostly I'll have problems with tools or templates I had stored on the old machine and now have to replicate on the new. If I get people having issues with older code I can still hook up the 3B

onward and upward.

Now we know how to speed things up, lets get retro and fill the screen.
Discuss the separation of logic and display and work out a way to scroll.

Also lets make a start on using some fonts on our system to display text

Time to think about our baddies and the basics of a state system to give them some logic.
Also we're starting to push our systems a bit, what can we do to make it better, delve into the workings of the GPU, thats what?