Rockbox Technical Forums

Rockbox Development => Starting Development and Compiling => Topic started by: ubbut on May 11, 2010, 06:01:54 PM

Title: rockboy for sansa clip+
Post by: ubbut on May 11, 2010, 06:01:54 PM
Hi,

I would like to help porting rockboy to the sansa clip+ .
I just thought before i read all the sources and try to understand everything, someone could just tell me which part is missing.

just to make it a bit easier for me to start.

Thanks a lot
Title: Re: rockboy for sansa clip+
Post by: Chronon on May 11, 2010, 06:09:44 PM
I don't think this player has enough RAM to run rockboy. 
Title: Re: rockboy for sansa clip+
Post by: Vague Rant on May 15, 2010, 06:54:57 AM
Or the display size to make it remotely enjoyable for most games. GB/C has a display of 160*140, Clip/+ has a display of 128*64, split into two smaller areas of 128*16 and 128*48, with a gap between them. Not to mention a monochrome screen where even the original, sometimes erroneously named "mono" Game Boy had a four colour screen.

Perhaps it'd be plausible to try to get the Chip8 (http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/PluginChip8) player running on the Clip+, but even beyond the technical limitations, Game Boy on Clip would be no fun at all.
Title: Re: rockboy for sansa clip+
Post by: nls on May 16, 2010, 07:02:26 AM
Rockboy works (but is very slow) on the old archos recorders which have a smaller mono display than the clip and just as little ram so it should definitely be possible to make it work on the clip with its *much* faster cpu.
Title: Re: rockboy for sansa clip+
Post by: funman on May 17, 2010, 06:05:00 AM
I just tried it on clipv2, it works realtime but of course the screen is very small.

See those pictures here (http://img534.imageshack.us/img534/1127/dump100517114735.png) and here (http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/4193/dump100517114542.png) from pokemon.

rockboy seems to run on every target, I am not sure why it is only enabled for some of them.

I committed a keymap for Clips but I didn't enable it yet, to do so just look in apps/plugins/SUBDIRS for rockboy and change the preprocessor condition (or remove it completely)
Title: Re: rockboy for sansa clip+
Post by: Vague Rant on May 18, 2010, 12:36:01 PM
Been messing around with rockboy on my Clip+, seems to run respectably although Faceball 2000 crashes and reboots whenever you hit Start or Select which makes it impossible to get in-game (EDIT2: verified same behaviour on desktop versions, not RB's problem).

That aside, I was wondering if there's any chance of getting an unscaled viewing mode; obviously I'm aware of the screen's size limitations, but here's an example of a game which (if it worked) would be functional without scaling:

(http://i40.tinypic.com/t6qop3.png)

(128*64 highlighted.)

By having an unscaled view and allowing user panning (perhaps toggling volume up/down for screen up/down in the menu?) a fair few games could be made to be playable where otherwise what's going on on-screen is unidentifiable.

EDIT3: I tried to get an unscaled view going on smaller-than-original displays, but wasn't able to get any meaningful results. I managed as much as getting the scaling menu to appear in Rockboy before stalling completely; I focussed my efforts on menu.c and lcd.c, but ultimately changing the settings did nothing to the way the game was displayed when running. This was my first time even trying to compile anything Rockbox-related, so it's probably not all that difficult to accomplish for anyone who knew what they were doing; just wasn't for me yet.

EDIT1: Incidentally, there's a tool called GBS2GB (which I won't link to, as the homepage also features ripped Game Boy music and that's legally questionable at best) which converts GBS files--the ripped format for Game Boy/Color music--into .GB ROMs for playback in emulators or on hardware; while the small screen of the Clip and similar series make a lot of games unplayable, having GB support adds the side effect of rudimentary GBS playback; the sound quality isn't perfect, but since the GBS codec hasn't been worked on in years and isn't included in general use builds, this is one alternative way to go about it.