Games and other custom apps

Posted by: veixl

Games and other custom apps - 29/08/2001 19:25

Will there be support for multiple applications on 2.0 for ability to play games and have the music playing like discussed here? It would be a nice step towards universial onboard computing platform.

Is somewone considering any new games? I would like minesweeper :)

Veiko
[email protected]

MK1 #317 - 20GB green
Posted by: drakino

Re: Games and other custom apps - 29/08/2001 23:51

As it stands right now, overlay code does exist to be able to display the player and other things at the same time. That still leaves two problems. One is launching the programs. Right now, it would have to be done either before or after the player is run, or a wrapper would need to be built like the irhack to intercept a key combo to then pop up an apps menu. The second problem is the unfriendly nature of the player. It sits at a very high priority (for a good reason), so this can cause problems to programs at lower niceness levels. Plus, even if a program does run at the same level as the player, slowdowns will occur as seen by pressing the tweak order button rapidly. (Something that has been confirmed as fixed in 2.0 by setting non music pumping threads to lower priorities instead of the same).

It looks like a long way off still before anything emerges to allow easy empeg and 3rd party integration. It has come a long ways though from the "poke at it with a stick" Mark 1 launch days.

Posted by: veixl

Re: Games and other custom apps - 30/08/2001 02:21

Plus, even if a program does run at the same level as the player, slowdowns will occur

And they said while ago on their homepage that player only takes 30% of the cpu power...


Veiko
[email protected]

MK1 #317 - 20GB green
Posted by: borislav

Re: Games and other custom apps - 30/08/2001 21:39

Plus, even if a program does run at the same level as the player, slowdowns will occur

And they said while ago on their homepage that player only takes 30% of the cpu power...


The important bit for the player is latency - it must be scheduled really quickly when it's ready to run, or you get a break in the audio. As long as the third-party application doesn't care about scheduling latency, there should be lots of CPU time available.

Borislav