Richard Jones' Log: Nokia 770 / pygame.draw playage

Mon, 19 Jun 2006

I've finally installed an ssh daemon on the 770* which makes developing on it much nicer (until I magically acquire a bluetooth keyboard and mouse - which I'm not even sure the device supports ;)

Anyway, I've run a few of the pygame.draw challenge entries on it (yes, I've had a couple already, woot) and the results have been interesting. Most run at quite a reasonable frame rate.

My entry, which I cap at 30FPS, runs about 26-29FPS. I have to work on the user input side of things - the little direction-pad doesn't really lend itself to games, unfortunately. We'll see...

One very CPU-intensive entry ran at 2FPS. It gets about 90-100FPS on my A64 3500+ desktop :)

Some gotchas for developing pygame on the 770:

  1. DON'T switch apps - you will lose the pygame window, requiring a shell "killall python2.4" (assuming no other python programs are running ;) )
  2. Related to point 1: make sure your app has a 770-compatible "exit" method (i.e. not the "escape" key like most games).
  3. PyGame is version 1.6 which is missing quite a few sprite features that are in 1.7.
  4. PyGame's default font is MIA. You will need your own font, which is a shame for the pygame.draw challenge.

*: I used the meta-package which includes osso-xterm, tiny-vim, slocate, openSSH and usbnet.sh. There's good install instructions on that page, but note that the install does require you enable root access.