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Saturday, November 14. 2009Playing with the GP2X Wiz GPH (in Korea) makes a little thing they call the "Wiz", based on its predecessor, the GP2X handheld gaming device.It's just a little ARM linux box, with an SDRAM card, a touch-screen OLED, and a 7-hour battery. I picked it up to play with the touchscreen OLED and ARM linux environment (in a software sense), I just have a few itches to scratch and ideas to try here...but most people pick it up for the wealth of emulators and old games you can carry around in your pocket with it. I had two major obstacles to starting out writing code for the thing. The first was that the only build environments for it are produced by the community of users - and bless them they aren't trying hard enough. To use these toolchains you have to bundle modern libraries along with your code, which completely annihilates any manifest benefit of having shared libraries already on the Wiz...a system that is already strapped for resources. To poke around and figure out what I needed to know in order to build (maybe, if I'm successful) a build environment where you can just drop-in programs, I was using the very good community-built "Termula2X" application on the Wiz, a kind of X-Term for the Wiz. The trouble is, with no keyboard, and no USB host plugs so no USB keyboard, it's hunt and peck with a stylus on your unix shell...painful at best, frustrating at worst.
I came to discover the only way to get USB serial console access on the thing was to literally cannibalize a Samsung phone cable (for the 24-pin connector the Wiz also uses) and graft it to a USB serial "converter." An arcane device our predecessors used, called a "Soldering Iron", was required. So instead, I tooled around for awhile, and built the gadget-serial module, packaged it up in a simple little script, and now I've got serial shell access. It's kind of limited because you can't use the block device gadgets at the same time (so you can't transfer files via USB while you're typing). So maybe it might be a brighter idea to get the USB-networking gadget working, but I'm fine for now. The main thing is to start working on that toolchain; figure out what versions of libraries are installed (that I'm going to use), get their binaries extracted for linking and get the headers in installed form extracted from the matching version's sources. Then I can finally start to play. Trackbacks
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