One of the main issues I have with VisualGDB is its inability to redirect key input to a file, it always send it to the console, meaning you get your window full of random content...even worse if you use enter in your game you may even trigger a linux cmd on the terminal


Apparently its due to the way VGDB gets its data, I have not found a solution to this problem yet but when I do I will post it here.

Most SBC's (except Raspberry) come in multiple OS flavours and Android is very clearly a popular option. 

I don't personally like to code in Java, Androids preferred coding language,  its slow, its rather clunky in my view and it does not give me the kind of hardware control that C/C++ on Linux does.

But, if we are using VisualGDB (You need the Ultimate edition), its not incredibly hard to alter some of our projects to work on Android. 

And there is the added advantage that pretty much any machine running android is going to have access to GPU drivers. Almost all the chip makers are contributors to the Android standard so they have to release their drivers to the android project. There is a commercial benefit to them for that, but not for linux so many chip makers just don't make their drivers available to Linux, that's a pretty big deal.

I don't plan to write another book on the topic, but I will over time make some efforts to port the projects and describe how to do it. It needs a bit more setting up and a tiny dabble into Java to kick things off, but once we're working inside the NDK its usually going to be pretty much the same basic ideas, with a few differences on file and key/mouse/touch access.

There may be issues with variations in hardware though so its not a given that an android ndk project will work on all platforms (with the same android).

The forum now seems to be stable and happy but a bit empty and in need of a bit of colour, I'll work on that but need to focus on cleaning up demo code for the main site.

However if you've just arrived, hello, and welcome, please take a few moments to register and say hello.

Over the coming weeks I will add as much content on here as I can, hints, tips and occasional rants about using SBC's for graphic programming which is my main area of interest.

Why? You are probably asking yourself, and with good reasons, almost nobody buys an SBC to write games on.
Well, my reasons are really simple, I'm a console programmer, but I am not allowed tell people how to write games on Xbox, PlayStation or Nintendo consoles.. So I wanted to try to simulate both the experience of working on a console as a target system, and working at a fairly low level to get the hardware to work. That's possible on PC's of course, but there's just too much variety of system and speed. Having a system with fixed constraints forces you as a coder to consider how to get the best out of it and that in itself is also a lot of fun. There's a fantastic sense of achievement in getting a Raspberry to do Shadows and post processing effects fast enough to be useful in a game, and that's the kind of dogged determination that console games coders need to develop.

And, if you like SBC's generally, they really are a lot of fun to work with. You are not going to make any money writing games for SBC's but you will learn a lot about HOW to write games, by using SBC's

If you are experienced with SBC's and are aware of some of the common pitfalls beginners have getting them set up to be useful in a coding situation, please register and post your experience, the more people we can attract with a little knowledge the more we can help those seeking knowledge.

One very important point that will become apparent when people start reading the book, is that I did NO (zero) optimizing of any of the graphic code in the books. That was to avoid confusing new coders and also to present challenges for them to find and resolve. We can discuss optimization of things here as any game with a decent GPU load is going to need some considerable thought about optimizing.

Log in, say hi, and lets see if we can get a nice community of SBC game coders started