[maemo-developers] Xsp pixel-doubling solutions for Nokia 770?

[From: Siarhei Siamashka]

On Monday 30 April 2007 12:26, Frantisek Dufka wrote:

> Daniel Stone wrote:
> > Specifying that pixels must be exactly _doubled_ is a
> > hack around both the performance issues and a lack of resolution
> > independence.  Apparently an important one, if you happen to like SDL
> > games, but a hack nonetheless.
>
> Yes limiting ourselves to doubling is bad. Why not to add custom ratio
> if N800 can do that.
>
> This all leads to request to have some more advanced gaming API. Sadly
> this is probably not what internet tablets are currently designed for.
> Gamers are big target group and this device is meant for entertainment
> so maybe extending target audience to gamers in not that bad idea.
> Gaming devices are moving online too so this is direct competition. Why
> to buy internet tablet if better Sony or Nintendo device in future will
> do this too plus gaming. Unfortunately gaming business has complicated
> rules similar in complexity to devices with GSM radio. BTW are internet
> tablets in same Nokia multimedia division as N-Gage?

Well, SDL is to some extent this advanced gaming API, its current
implementation for Nokia 770/N800 is just poor.

As for pixel doubling, a practical solution would be just to support 400x240
fullscreen resolution in SDL so that no extra hack would be required when
porting each game or emulator in particular. N800 hardware probably 
makes it possible to set any resolution up to 800x480, with all this available
using standard SDL API.

Having support for both pixel doubled and normal graphics in the same game 
may be useful, but it will require extra efforts when porting games, while low
resolution may already work out of the box without doing any tweaks to the
sources. Let's try the simple solution first.

The very first step would be to take Nokia 770 xserver and SDL sources and
tweak them until setting 400x240 fullscreen resolution works transparently for
any SDL applications. Anybody up to this task?

Also it would be a good idea to benchmark SDL, identify maemo or ARM
architecture related bottlenecks and try to fix them. Many older generation 
games worked perfectly on hardware way slower than Nokia 770. So 
Nokia 770 may be a good platform for mobile gaming if properly 
optimized (though I'm not sure about realtime games because of 
unsuitable controls). I could probably do these optimizations myself, but 
have quite a limited amount of free time available for free software
development.