Honestly I don’t remember having such a good fun with a device since the very first Nokia 7650 was introduced or for those of you heading the forties, since the Commodore 64. On a tangent, the Nokia 7650 was the first mass market embedded platform we have ported eyeGT to. It truly amazes me the fact that in such a compact format it has been possible to cram all that technology. As per my job, I regularly traverse (to use another more business-wise word, instead of browse!) the net to search for new embedded systems or devices with interesting market prospective and seek to port our graphical platform technology to them.
When I started to look at the gaming handheld field, the first device I came across has been the Nintendo DS. From a games prospective I’m not an expert, actually not even a player so I can’t comment on the quality of the gaming software, what I was looking for was the ability of producing software that could transform this device in something more than “just” hardware to run games; in fact even Nintendo packs it by default with a wireless chat program called Pictochat. Unfortunately while I found the touch screen a neat addition to the system, the lack of any storage media (without external add-ons at least), incompatible WiFi with actual standards quickly pointed out that I could not achieve many of the things we generally look for in an embedded system. In many other blogs and forums with focus on the current trends in handheld devices, I quite often come across discussions on which of the two is longer, faster and better but I should say the programmability of the Sony PSP is quite superior not to mention the fact that is totally open to expandability whether this is memory or a GPS sensor, keyboard and other.
The Sony Play Station Portable (PSP)
Beside this, the processor of the PSP is very fast as well as the graphics and audio subsystems which are working very harmoniously together to spit out very nice performance. Of course without a license from Sony there is no way you can produce software for it, the so called “homebrew”. That hold true until some very cleaver guys started to hack and patch the GGC to produce code for the Allegrex MIPS processor that power the PSP and some other (or probably the same people) actually build a PSP SDK from scratch by reverse engineering the system. I believe that some similarities between the PSP and the PS2 actually helped the creation of the SDK. You can find everything on the PS2 Developer Forums at [Just a little note: don't go there if you are looking for cracks, hacks, copied games and so on, they do not really tolerate those kind of things.....]
The only real limitation is that in order to be able to run homebrew software you need to have a PSP with firmware version 1.0 or 1.5 which have some security holes that make possible to run unsigned code on the system, something that is not possible with later firmware revisions (like 1.51, 1.52 or the latest one 2.0).
So after downloading and installing the SDK (which runs under Linux or Cygwin) I was able to port the entire eyeGT platform is less than 1 week (including running the over 200 regression tests that come with the suite) and the first demo was ready in about half hour.
Very impressive, I never saw eyeGT running so fast in any other embedded system, especially considering that the port doesn’t currently include any specific PSP optimization either at system levels or processor level.
A few demos will come in the next few days.