Homebrew Development - Page 2

yaustar · 09-30-2009, 08:19 AM

You may find that your main hurdle is installing the custom firmware which is getting increasing harder these days unless you already have the right equipment.

kenshee · 09-30-2009, 12:31 PM

I have no doubt that it will be tough, but I have found a few resources online and a cheap PSP on craigslist

hopefully it will work it, atleast it will be a learning experiance.

yaustar · 09-30-2009, 01:50 PM

Research into how you install a custom firmware on the PSP. It will affect which PSP model you buy.

kenshee · 10-01-2009, 03:45 PM

Thanks for the information about installing custom firmware. It seems to be a really tricky thing to do, do you know anything about the open pandora system?

yaustar · 10-02-2009, 01:23 AM

Yes. It isn't out yet and *should* be by the end of the year but almost the entire first batch has been pre-ordered. At the end of the day from a development point of view, it is effectively a PC but uses OpenGL ES IIRC and has a touchscreen.

I pre-ordered one a while back after playing around with the GP2X.

What is your end goal here? Is it to make a 3D game on anything other then the PC? Do you want to do any low level development or do you want to avoid that? Are you looking to mess around with different APIs or just want to get experience in cross platform development?

If you are still thinking about the PSP, have you tried looking for any pre-hack PSPs?

kenshee · 10-02-2009, 10:19 AM

Currently my programming technique is very sloppy and bloated , lots of wasted memory. I want to improve my coding so that my programs can run with a certain degree of efficiency. If I keep writing programs for the PC I don't think I'm going to improve as there are almost no restrictions in memory, I think that writing programs for a different platform that uses less RAM and has hardware restrictions would force me to write smarter code.

Learning to use a different API and cross platform is a bonus, but not my main goal at the moment.

yaustar · 10-02-2009, 06:56 PM

In that case, the PSP is still your best bet although I would argue that the hardware limitation won't help unless you know why and where performance suffers or how you can improve memory usage. And if you know that, what is stopping you from doing it on a PC?

Saying that, it will be a good experience to develop for a different platform but it doesn't seem to match your end goal.

kenshee · 10-04-2009, 10:10 AM

My main problem is not using efficient programming methodology, preferring to use static arrays and pointers over dynamic, pointer arithmetic or linked list usage is almost nonexistent.

With using a PC I don't suffer too much as, so far most of my programs are trivial, but moving onto Graphics API's and writing code for 3D games I would like to tie up these loose ends.

DTR · 10-04-2009, 10:45 AM

Curiously enough nothing is faster than a static array if accessed in a linear fashion.

yaustar · 10-04-2009, 12:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kenshee

My main problem is not using efficient programming methodology, preferring to use static arrays and pointers over dynamic, pointer arithmetic or linked list usage is almost nonexistent.

With using a PC I don't suffer too much as, so far most of my programs are trivial, but moving onto Graphics API's and writing code for 3D games I would like to tie up these loose ends.

You don't suffer as much but you still suffer. Use profiling to find where performance bottlenecks are and attempt to improve efficiency and performance.