GP2X port of Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection

Damn it's a long time since I programmed in C.

I've just spent the last few weeks porting the GTK/Windows/MacOS/Palm collection of games that are in Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection to work on the GP2X handheld game console.

That involved the creation of an SDL "frontend" for the existing puzzle infrastructure (which, I have to say was beautifully abstracted and documented from a programmer's point of view). It worked beautifully well on the whole. The puzzle framework is designed in such a way that it can be easily ported by just filling out the definitions of a few dozen functions. Basing my work off the existing GTK port, most of the simple functions were only a line or two to convert to SDL (using the SDL_gfx library helped a lot too). Even the font functions were quite simple, when using SDL_ttf. And because the GP2X is Linux-based, I was able to prototype all the functions using the GTK functions running simultaneously with their SDL equivalents on the same development PC, as you can see from the screenshot. Each game is running an SDL and GTK copy of the game and synching display and input between the two, while running on a normal Linux PC.

After they all functioned enough to give me a playable game in SDL, I started stripping out the GTK functions, libraries and dependencies and ended up with an executable that only needed SDL, SDL_ttf and SDL_gfx to run. That ran on any SDL-based architecture so I could compile the same code for either the GP2X or the Linux PC. For the GP2X it was the "simple" matter of cross-compiling them to the GP2X's ARM architecture, linking them against some ARM SDL libraries and then testing them on the machine itself.

But it has to be said that the hardest part of all was actually getting things to compile and link properly! I now officially hate Makefiles, gcc and linkers. I wasted more time trying to get code which I *knew* was working to compile and link in various ways without errors than I ever did coding! That really was the most horrible experience and half the time I had no clue as to what the problem was, even after analysing and googling the various weird and nonsensical errors I was getting. Programmers should really not have to play about with such convoluted and finnicky command lines just to get a simple C program with pre-compiled libraries to compile and link. Granted, wanting to compile a program for both x86 and ARM, with dynamic or static libraries should mean a little tweaking but it should never be as difficult as it was. I was actually *scared* to touch the Makefile each time in case I broke it and I kept more backups of that than I did the actual SDL interface code.

Anyway, I eventually got the puzzles to the point that they were mostly playable, mostly fun, mostly working and mostly pretty-looking. I've tested them all on GP2X and they are, on the whole, working (there is one that errors out in the actual game code, which I haven't touched, but only on the GP2X - a Linux machine with exactly the same code doesn't error. The other problematic one is just a bit too slow because it tries to do a lot in a short time on a slow processor). I was working my way through them one at a time to release them, because some of them exhibited subtle bugs, some of them required more work on input to allow them to "enter" numbers into the puzzles and at least one of them was (and still is) just being a pain in the bum. But now the vast majority of them work and I've built "beta 1" of what I have called (in a rare fit of originality) STPPC2x, or Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection for the GP2X. :-)

I'm surprised at how well and how fast they work, considering that the development 600MHz machine doesn't run them any faster than the GP2X at 200MHz and I'm not even using the hardware acceleration on the GP2X properly.

The first beta, with 25 out of 27 games playable, most of them near-perfectly, has been released on both the GP2X archive and at my website: http://www.ledow.org.uk/gp2x/ You can get the source code and toolchain that I used from my website too, because I find the most annoying thing about picking up other people's code is when you don't have the same compiler/libraries/filesystem setup as they do, so it's a problem to compile even before you start coding.

I consider it a good piece of work, considering that my last C excursion ended about an hour after starting it and I ended up writing the program I needed in something else instead. That was several years ago but I was able to pick this up and run with it. I estimate the total *actual* development time on STPPC2x to be approximately 48 hours for approximately 1000 lines of actual code (not including the Makefile), spread over a period of two and a bit months (it's hard to get in a mood where you want to fight with compilers, pointers and libraries). At least six of those hours was getting the Makefile to work properly. At least two were creating scripts to compile and link each file individually because I was sick of the Makefile not working properly and needed something that worked *here and now* so I could work on either the Makefile or the actual code at my leisure. At least ten hours on top of those 48 were things like "waiting for stuff to compile", "waiting for stuff to copy", "waiting for stuff to upload to my website/the GP2X archive", "preparing screenshots, instructions, proper licensing info, directory structure etc. for releases" and "waiting for the GP2X to finish writing to the SD card". A 600MHz development machine trying to copy megabytes of files over a USB 1.1 connection to an SD card isn't ideal, especially when you trying to write instructions, take screenshots, upload via FTP, etc. simultaneously. :-)



Anyway, it's been my first big programming project for a while. I'm always writing *something* whether it's a shell script or batch, a VB program to do a quick job etc. or something for my own entertainment but they all involve different standards of work - either I'm the only person to ever use the program at all, or it's for a limited technical audience, and it's very rare that the source code is ever looked at in either case.

In the first 24 hours, it saw 100 downloads from the GP2X archive alone and I haven't looked at my website's logs yet. At least I know that it was worth my while.