Looking for APP and GAME compilations, especially Shuperchip, chip8 & Sansa Clip

[Jason Arthur Taylor]

Greeting fellow Rockboxers,

Out of the box, Rockbox (pun intended) comes with several basic applications and games that work.  But, in going through some of the patches that have been uploaded by folks, it seems that only a tiny fraction of these ever made it through to the standard distro.  This is especially true for the Sansa Clip, which is what I have.  I guess this is to be expected, since it would be like Microsoft shipping all the apps for Windows with windows. But while I know of sites like http://www.tucows.com/, where you can download freeware of MS software, I don’t know of any such library for the rockbox platform.

So I stared compiling a zip file of good apps and games that also work on my device, which is a Sansa Clip.  I discovered tons, so it is taking a long time and big task.  I realized probably there are other Rockbox enthusiasts (e.g., funman), who have already done this assembly of good non-svn apps and games they like, and I was just duplicating work they'd already done.  So, before I continued, I thought I’d post here to see if anyone would be nice enough to pm or email me a zip or rar file of all the apps and games they have for their mp3 player. 

Obviously, many of the apps are highly hardware dependent.  Since I got no replies to my previous post about my Sansa Clip hardware (at least, none that were actually useful to me), I went ahead and just counted the number of pixels on my sansa clip myself.  It appears to be 128x64.  I still am confused why my device has so little ram yet a 6MB firmware.  Perhaps it has a hidden partition.  Anyway, as it so happens, the Clip screen pixels match the Superchip class of apps, and, via the chip8 plugin, we can run those.  These include pacman, space invaders, etc. Nice to have if you are a geek just for the sake of having them work on a tiny mp3 player.  The low-res 64x32 Chip8 stuff I will pass on, however!  There are even apps out there like voice recognition, tts, all sorts of cool stuff, but I don’t know how to compile those patches yet for my Sansa and am unlikely to find the time so am hereby asking you to help me.

Seems like there are three clases of non-svn apps/games that could be compiled that readers here might already have already compiled together before me:

1) Source code non-svn patches that may or may not work on specific devices,
2) Binaries for my specific device, which is a Sansa Clip
3) Apps and games that work via emulation for most all Rockbox devices

I guess I'm mostly interested in (2)-(3), but go ahead and send me (1) if you got it.  So, I again ask, before I spend much more time assembling stuff myself, if you already have slapped together any compilation of apps that would work for my device, the sansa clip, or if you have a compilation of working 128x64 superchip games with *.c8k keymaps (to make up and down NOT be the *ing volume up and volume down keys), please zip and upload them to save me some time.  Seems like many of the superchip games and applications are in source format, and I have no clue what to do with those, except that all of them will need a *.c8k keymap file since the default keymap is totally wrong for the sansa clip.  Also, feel free to ask me what I've collected so far. My personal interest is brainy games like chess, go, othello/reversi, connect 4, especially where the AI difficulty can adjusted up or down.  Email me, post here, or my phone number is 3O1^_277*6O32 if you’d want to call me. 

[torne]

There are a number of problems with this post.

1) If there are patches which are not committed which you want to use, how about helping out? Test them and report your results, would be a start, even if you can't code. Go through the discussion and work out what the remaining issues are, and see if there is anything at all you can do to help. If there appear to be *no* issues remaining, then you could try asking the developers on IRC what is blocking the patch from being committed - it may just not have received sufficient notice. This applies to any kind of patch, of course, not just new plugins.

2) What do you mean, "especially true for the Sansa Clip"? All plugins in svn are compiled for all targets which can plausibly run them. What doesn't get built for Clip which should?

3) You are also assuming that we *don't* want to ship rockbox with all the apps and games it can run. We do intend to do this, as far as licensing allows! This is why the ultimate goal of patches is to be committed to svn. If there were many thousands of plugins then this might not be possible, but there are not. The comparison to Windows applications is not appropriate; Windows does not (often) change its API in an incompatible way, but we do, and only plugins which are in svn are guaranteed to be fixed to continue to work.

4) Very few people care in the slightest about chip8/sch8. I doubt anyone has taken the trouble to collect games which work well on our emulator and make keymaps for them; the only collections you are likely to find are just collections of arbitrary chip8 games, unrelated to rockbox.

5) It is really not difficult in the slightest to compile Rockbox; we have detailed instructions on the wiki which many, many non-programmers have successfully used to build it. As long as patches are sufficiently up to date to apply to the current code in svn without being modified, applying them is trivial.

6) You are not likely to get very far requesting out-of-tree plugin binaries compiled for your specific player (remember they must also be compiled for the correct build; the plugin API changes sometimes in an incompatible way and plugin binaries must be rebuilt). Look in the unsupported builds forum for other people's builds which may include more plugins as well as other feature changes; nobody else is going to be doing builds for you

Seriously though, number 1 is the important point here: we *want* plugins to be in svn. If there are plugins not in svn, and there is *anything* you can do to help (which there almost certainly is), then your time would be better invested in helping them get there, rather than trying to accumulate binaries compiled by other people which will stop working the next time we re-sort plugin_api.