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.

I generally don't use many extensions, but now that we're getting into OpenGLES3.0 its important to make use of them, and they can be confusing.
I just tried to use some on Raspberry and discovered some interesting issues, namely a missing lib called libdl  which needs to be added if you are going to use extensions on a current Raspberry. Not sure about other boards as I don't have one set up, but if you get a link error add dl

Using an extension requires that you set it up first and that is the first minefield, you can of course list the extensions your system supports using somethng like
printf("This GPU supports these extensions :%s\n", glGetString(GL_EXTENSIONS));

Which will give you a nice list of "extensions" for a Raspberry like this. 

This GPU supports these extensions      :GL_OES_compressed_ETC1_RGB8_texture GL_OES_compressed_paletted_texture GL_OES_texture_npot GL_OES_depth24 GL_OES_vertex_half_float GL_OES_EGL_image GL_OES_EGL_image_external GL_EXT_discard_framebuffer GL_OES_rgb8_rgba8 GL_OES_depth32 GL_OES_mapbuffer GL_EXT_texture_format_BGRA8888 GL_APPLE_rgb_422 GL_EXT_debug_marker 

I put "extensions" in quotes becuase these are not the names of the functions but rather a grouping for the extensions actually available. 

This is a mix, some of these extensions are types, and some are functions. The types we don't care too much about just adding #include <GLES2/gl2ext.h> will give us access to the types that are associated with that name....for example "extension"  GL_OES_rgb8_rgba8 

oh moma

no info on where to buy yet, but oh moma, this is amazing. 
I've been after a jetson for a while but they are so expensive, this expected price brings it into my sub $100 range so can't wait to get my hands on one. The CPU is awesome, but that GPU, oh man that GPU.

https://www.androidauthority.com/nvidia-...aGnS2lJEH8

Oh this is a good one, one of my students was struggling with lots of errors being tossed out that it could not find GLuint or glm. It appearred to be unable to find the files and associated variable types.

This in part was true, however it was Visual Studio's intellisense that was getting things mixed up and in his case he had a genuine minor code error, which resulted in a failure to compile. His error list however was throwing up all the cannot find file issues and he assumed that there was some issue there and didn't get into his code

So his true minor error, was hidden under dozens of other errors, which in fact were not errors, but reports from intellisense. scary.

The error itself was highlighted clearly in his compiler output window, since it reported the compilers issues, which is better to check than the error window which reports visual studios issues, including intellisense. You can filter just the build errors though.

The reasons for this are somewhat annoying. When you set up a connection to a Pi, or other linux system it is supposed to syncronise the files on the Pi and keep copies of the include files on your Pc to allow intelisense to work, but the connection manager only loads the usr directory....which excludes any addition directories, like bullet or glm as well as some directories unique to Raspbian, such as opt/vc/include which is where GLES2 lives...... so these files appeared to be unreachable and unloadable to VS2017. But when sent to the target to compile they happyily find the directories where we say they are in the directory lists sent with the make file

The sync really should pull in all directories used by the project, so this is an error in the system I will report to Microsoft, perhaps its been fixed in VS 2019. I will review the preview copy

Microsoft do suggest you copy other folders manually, but really its not an obvious fix and I hope they can correct this to allow for an automatic update, like VisualGDB does
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cpp/lin...ew=vs-2017

Hmm yes it is, most of the code in those pages is descriptive rather than code you have to expressly type in.. I see now (from my student Kim who's struggling a bit) that its obvious to an experienced coder but not a very new coder.

So, my bad, for not being as clear as I need to be.

At the start of the discussion on page 94, I'm using a constructor like this

Aliens::Aliens(char*, MyFiles*);

Where the char* passed would be an entry from the Names[] array.

But by the bottom of 95 I am using Aliens(int, MyFiles*)
where I am only passing the i rather than the full string in names. I wrote a different constructor which then used the array...I'll change that back to avoid confusion.

That was me optimising the code a little later and pasting in the new version, but either way, here's a bit of advice, don't slavishly type in the code, there's intended to be a little room for you to adapt it to your needs, which is great if you know C++, but clearly very confusing if its all new to you. I'm sorry about that but I have said before this is not a book for absolute beginners.

Use which ever method you want, I expect you to write your constructors and call them as you choose, I've detailed both ways but not shown all the code. I'll review that though and make sure I only show one working way, so that beginners don't get confused and expect both constructor calls to work with only 1 type of constructor.

Also you don't need to create an AlienList I'm simply explaining how we "could" use arrays to hold our enemies, but we'd end up needing multiple arrays for different things, which leads us on to using a MyObjects vector to hold, almost all of them...

A lot of the books source code from Chapter5 on, is there to be descriptive and is mostly incomplete, sometimes partially lifted from source code, you should have the C++ skills to evaluate it and fill in a few blanks or change a few bits to suit what you are doing.

But if anything isn't clear, please just let me know I'm always happy to explain and push you pass a confusion roadblock, all beginners get them and I'm happy to help.