wow....

The 64bit is big, though it will create a few teething issues, where a lot of software will stop working, and some need to redo some coding, but it wil make the Pi faster.

But 8Gb... I never imagined they'd bring out an SBC with 8GB....I can't get my head around that..brilliant news.

bit technical and not using any traditional physics engine but this is quite a good talk on the problems and methods of using physics on wheeled objects. This is why I used a hovercraft approach to my race demos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afi8yK-S...I8ZUzhCAec

I seen this article for Gemstone Keeper in Issue 26 of Wireframe Magazine.  This is a cool concept for a game using OpenGL and ASCII and is even available on the Switch.

The creator, Tim Stoddard, initially used the concept as a tech demo, but then it morphed into a full on game Gemstone Keeper.

It certainly has that older school look.

https://wireframe.raspberrypi.org/articl...2d-shooter

Some very nice stuff here... not all of it in easy to use formats but I'm going to do a bit of work on some RP4/Assimp loading to see what can be done with some of the formats. They key point for us doing SBC's is they are all very low poly and therefore quite usable.


https://kenney.nl/assets

https://www.hardkernel.com/shop/odroid-c4/

4G ram, quad core 905x3 at 2Ghz and  emmc slot..... 
GPU is Mali G31MP2 @ 650mhz, one of the newer generation chips so full OpenGLES3.2 though probably not going to be all that amazing unless well coded, with only 2 cores. Though beats the Pi4 according to their charts, it lags behind the Xu4 (my XU4 numbers were considerably better for an off screen version)
I wouldn't really pay too much attention to a companys own sales blurb though, we often see that the numbers are actually meaningless or sometimes (not so much with Odroids) simply not possible to run the test software. They have a video on line showing Ubuntu 20.04 wayland running GLmark2 on screen, which pops up a score of 292...so Id expect an offscreen score at least 2 times that..making it very close if not better than the XU4


Stock price is $50 so thats actually cheaper than the Pi4, as usual though, the postage is a bit high from Korea... and once they land in europe with that shipping cost and import taxes added the price will be quite a bit higher than the Pi4, probably 70-80euros.
I ordered online and also got their own 12/2a power supply, which can be a bit non standard, and paid 77USDtotal, shipping was 15... we'll have to see if I end up paying duty, that can be hit and miss depending on how busy customs are.

I love Hardkernels stuff, its very robust and they tend to take their time making sure its right before shipping, though the N2 is still not what I consider to be fully usable yet, new updates suggest its almost ready to take on the Intel chips..Can't wait to try this out.

well quite a lot actually...

check this out, and this is only half done

https://tinymonstersplayinggames.blogspo...thing.html

So I've been using STB and TinyObjLoader for a few years quite happily on my stock projects, which have no major issues, but recently I needed to load a model and tinyobj could not cope with it, nor load the jpg textures. This was a bit of a pain, especially when I noticed my students were managing fine.

Well at least the old versions of the code I have on my projects couldn't, the new versions can.... so I'll have to produce some builds that link to freshly updated onboard libs rather than continue to use my now outdated versions in source code...coding is never ending fun isn't it

New SBC day, which is good since Im in lockdown due to the Corona Virus and was getting a bit stir crazy.

Ordered the Rock64 2GB board from Pine, with a nice black aluminum case for passive cooling last month, it finally arrived but I am not upset at the time, given the world situation its not something to lose sleep over. Anything from China is going to take longer for a while.
Love the case, but if you need access to the GPIO pins....sorry..


What a nice little board and case combo. Another Rockchip board but this is Rockchip RK3328 Quad-Core SOC with Mali 450MP2. up to 1500Ghz A much lower  end Rockchip compared to the ones on Tinkerboard and RockPro64 etc. So CPU wise with 2GB of LPDDR3 RAM it should match or slightly outperform a Raspberry 3,

In use its as easy to set up as any other Pine board, the very cool Pine installer app lets you select a few different os's to burn to the SD and off you go though it does not give any indication of the feature sets of each OS, but various Ubuntu, Armbian and a Debian flavours are on hand do a bit of reading 1st to select the OS that has your needs.

One thing I didn't know which the installer showed up, was there is a V2 and V3 version of the board...hmm mine is V2 despite the V3 being out for a while, and mine being a recent order..Not too sure what the difference is. Not something I'll worry too much about given my try it and store it appriach to boards.

I started with a version of Ubuntu 18.04 LXDE which installed and booted no problem but in a low resolution..uh oh, but not to worry I found the display settings and set it to full size no problem 
After a quick update and upgrade cycle, I installed GLMark2-es2 and ran it, on screen, right away my heart sank, it was really low, the 1st couple of tests usually give a good indication of speed and 31 and 39 were not inspiring.. So I stopped and ran it off screen, expecting to see the same numbers indicating emulation but no it started throwing out some great 300+ numbers.. So there are drivers but the EGL/X11 pipeline isn't ideal.

Sadly though it crashed out with errors on the last few tests and recorded an average score of 200 off screen. I ran again on screen and it gave a pitiful 34.... oh well
Since its only a Mali 450Mp2  I guess thats ok, its on a level with a Pi3 maybe a 3B+ off screen at least.
I wasn't too impressed with that so decided to try a "feature complete" Debian build 

Debian by MrFixit sadly refused to boot, going into an on off cycle, I was using a V2/V3 version so decided to try a V2 only version and then discovered it was the same version, but I flashed it again...still refused to boot.
I tried a 64bit minimal Debian version, it was a bit flaky, and no desktop but after a couple of crashes and restarts it seemed to stabalise and I did an update/upgrade and installed mesa libs and build glmark2 to see what I'd get... That took a while, maybe the case isn't cooling as well as I'd like and its throttling? (later tests with a desktop CPU temp display showed it running comfortably around 50deg, so the case works)


But nah nothing doing there, I was kinda wondering if I could open a window and run opengl even in a text system...oh well
Armbian does have a GPU addon for this board...but I'd lost interest by then.

In the end I went back to the desktop Ubuntu version with its dodgy x11 updates, and ran my usual maze game test...it built just fine...but mysteriously refused to run...need to investigate that, cos that seldom happens. It seems to regard the executable as an ,so file??? It did run if I tabbed to the dir and manually entered ./runnabledemo but it was very slow, maybe due to the full res, I wasn't able to do much debugging to improve things.


Overall the board itself on paper, is nice, well featured, but not especially fast, I didn't see it hit 1500ghz even when runing 6 threads to compile.  2 USB2's (one with OTG) and a usb3 are fine, an IR port , reset and power switches are nice to see. It needs a thin 3A5v power jack socket rather than micro USB.  I love the $13 case that keeps it all nice and tidy and cool (though the plastic LED lens refused to fit). The software clearly is a bit hit and miss at the moment, so it goes back into the draw while we wait for updates.

Value for money wise though the Pi4 offers much more speed and graphic power and is a lot easier to get hold of and it runs out the box. Not sure this really offers anything useful to me as a graphic coder, but perhaps for a builder who needs an IR and a standard power system it might be nice.

I would have expected better though, the RockPro64 is an absolute beast with nice GPU drivers in place, and even the Pine64 is now a nice stable system. If this is what Pine are hoping will target the Raspberry market it might be a misfire.

oh dear, I don't quite know what happened, but a reader contacted me last night to ask where the chapter 12 files were on the DVD collection of Magpi mags he bought.

I have to take full responsibility for this, I don't appear to have sent them to Magpi, meaning they were just left out of the repo. I will have to reconstruct the files and upload them...sorry if you are waiting to finish of a great game..Watch this space.

Its almost Pi day... I wonder what they will do this year... I read in an article a few months back that they have some super secret project tucked away in a room.. But of course no one knows what... It might just be something like a screen or a hat. It may even have been the USB fix, but I'm guessing it will be something more substantial.

I can't see it being a new Pi, the 4 is settling in and being accepted by the community, its little flaws being slowly fixed.

So... maybe a laptop using the Pi4 as its core?

Lets see on Saturday.