As you might have noticed, it’s been three weeks since my last post. The reason is simple: I haven’t done much “programatically” for neither the Dingoo, the NanoNote nor the Wii. As soon as I figure out something fun or useful to create, I will update 
Three weeks?!
July 31st, 2010A320E, A330 in the works
July 10th, 2010I just got an e-mail from Jim Zheng over at Dingoo Digital.
Dingoo Digital, as you should know by now, are the original and genuine Dingoo brand-owners, product and manufacturing. This shouldn’t come as news to anyone, but Dingoo Digital are not dead, though we haven’t heard much from them lately.
Read their e-mail after the break, it contains some information about two new games consoles from Dingoo Digital!
xdpirate enters the Wii development scene
June 27th, 2010So, I just spent like half my tax refund on a Wii and a 1 TB external HDD. The external hard drive will be mainly used to store games for the system. After poking around the Wiibrew and Wiihacks websites, I finally decided to get one, and after being a noisy and uneducated grunt on the #wiidev and #wiihelp channels on EFNet, I learned how to get things going in regards to developing homebrew for the Wii.
According to the person who ported SDL to the Wii, SDL will automatically scale video modes that are less than the Wii output resolution (640×480). This means (in practice), that all the applications I’ve written for the Dingoo and the NanoNote will only require a remapping of keys and a recompile in order to be playable on the Wii. I should get the devkit for PowerPC CPUs running on my computer, but I can’t be assed yet, as it hasn’t arrived.
I’ve grown quite fond of my BlueCube ports for Dingoo and NanoNote, so I think the first application released from me unto the Wii scene will be BlueCube4W.
The Wii resolution of 640×480 really opens up a big world of possibilities in regards to porting. Almost every SDL game I’ve tried for computers runs at 640×480, and provided the authors write portable code, should be trivial to compile for the PPC platform, no need for that pesky downscaling you need for playing those games on the Dingoo/NanoNote. I need a header file containing the SDL KeyCodes for the Wiimote/GC/Classic controller buttons, though, though if I can’t find one, I’ll just pop my keyCodes application in there and write my own.
Like father, like son
June 14th, 2010
Like father, like son!
A mini-person with a mini-computer!
BlueCube4D and BlueCube4NN
June 14th, 2010My work on porting BlueCube2x to Dingux and NanoNote is done!
Screenshot of BlueCube4D. Image grabbed with fbgrab.
As per usual procedure, get it from my Google Code project.
Dingux package here.
Ben NanoNote package here.
Dingoonity release threads here and here.
Source code is as always included!
StartWatch and Countdown for NanoNote
June 14th, 2010I previously created a stopwatch and a countdown timer for Dingux, which I’m now re-releasing for the Ben NanoNote, with new keybindings and updated guide text.
Screenshot of StartWatch for NanoNote. Image captured with fbgrab.
Download Countdown here.
Download StartWatch here.
Source, as always, is included, though with these releases, makefiles are not.
I used this line to compile (compiled with Dingux toolchain):
mipsel-linux-uclibc-gcc main.c -lSDLmain -lSDL -lSDL_ttf -o binaryname
Copy the binary files and the font font.ttf to /usr/bin if you want to run these applications without having to change your working directory into where they are stored each time you wish to use them.
If you find any bugs or have any feature requests, let me know, either via comments or via the Google Code issue tracker.
BlueCube4D
June 14th, 2010BlueCube4D is a game I’m porting to Dingux/NanoNote from a GP2X game, which in turn is a port of a tetris-clone for Linux, by Sebastian Falbesoner.
Screenshot of BlueCube4D. Image grabbed with fbgrab.
It should be released very soon, and when it’s available, you’ll find it on my Google Code page, as usual. I’ll make a post for the release when it’s done.
AFAIK, there’s no tetris clone for Dingux yet. That’s all going to change now! 
Ben NanoNote keyboard defined!
June 12th, 2010I couldn’t find a list with the Ben NanoNotes key codes, so I fired up my keyCodes application, and compiled a list with all the keyboard keys, which can make your life easier when developing games or programs for the NanoNote. The file is called keyboard.c, and #defines every single keyboard key!
Download here!
NanoNote arrives, dex gets released
June 12th, 2010My NanoNote finally arrived yesterday. It’s made of pure awesome. I’ve tested dex on it, made a few optimizations and fixed a few bugs, so here it is, the first release of dex! Enjoy!
dex v1 stable
Download it from my Google Code page here! Please read through the readme.txt file for usage and other related information. Protip: Copy the dex binary to /usr/bin, and you won’t have to navigate to the folder it’s stored each time you want to use it. If you find any bugs, or have any feature requests, please use the issue tracker on my Google Code project. Comments can go on the comments to this article. Thanks.
Unrelated news:
I also made two mini-tools today (both for MIPS/Ben NanoNote):
- A random password generator which will generate a random 8 character password, containing lower and upper case letters, and numbers. Download here.
- An SDL-application to view key codes for pressed keys, which can come in handy when that’s not documented (I used it to find the keycodes of the Vol Up/Vol Down buttons). Press Escape to quit. Download here.