Compatible devices?????

SatheeshJM

Are there any specific group of devices which may not be compatible with apps created by Gideros.

The reason I'm asking is I saw a forum post saying their phone was incompatible(Neon Command something?).
The main reason I switched over to Gideros(well, actually one of the 2 main reasons) is its support for ARM 6 devices. I do not want to find out that my app wont run in many devices mid-way through developing an app. [-X

GregBUG

if i remember correctly (on android devices) you need at least 2.2 version of android OS. i testet my libs and demos on very budget phone (90€ with 600Mhz cpu) and work really fine.

SatheeshJM

Oh good! thanks!

OZApps

@greg, I did confirm that it also worked on a very basic 320x240 android phone though it did not run, but crawled. So if fps is not such an important thing, the app will work on very low end devices too (dunno how usable it will be)

MikeHart

Are there any specific group of devices which may not be compatible with apps created by Gideros.

The reason I'm asking is I saw a forum post saying their phone was incompatible(Neon Command something?).
The main reason I switched over to Gideros(well, actually one of the 2 main reasons) is its support for ARM 6 devices. I do not want to find out that my app wont run in many devices mid-way through developing an app. [-X

You missread my comment. It works on Armv6 devices. The problems I had were caused by my way of carbadge collection.

techdojo

The ZTE Blade is probably about the lowest spec phone you can find (with an 480x800 display) with an Arm v6 running at 600mhz. As stated you need to have at least 2.2 on it.

I was actually surprised at just how fast and smooth it was running basic code (even at the high res), however try and use any box2d functions and the lack of floating point unit just makes it crawl.

Both @Scouser and I have this phone and use it for development and one thing he did notice was that he could get better performance by using iPod touch res graphics (ie 320x480) and then using the scaling options to fill the screen (and the graphics still looked good), I think he was also working on a plugin to try and do some detection (processor speed, ram etc) that would allow him to decide which set of graphics to use.

As a side note - the same physics demo that ran at about 5-12 fps on the Blade, was pushing a rock solid 59-60 on a 3rd gen iPod touch, that's the kind of difference the FPU in the Armv7 makes

GregBUG

my gideros game "Gidhelix" ( which uses some physics stuff of box2d) run at 40 fps on my iPod 2^gen (armv6) and smooth on Huawei Sonic (MSM7227 armv6 CPU)!!!

MikeHart

I first had problems on my Ipod 2nd gen (Armv6). Contrary to my HTC Desire (Armv7), Neon Command run on the IPod like crap. It turned out that the IPod couldn't handle garbadge collection in every frame well in my game. The HTC had no problems with it.

So I changed the garbadge collection in a way, that i had removed the Gc in the main event that is called each frame and instead call it via a timer at a rate of 16 ms. It basically still is called every frame (60 FPS = 16 ms per frame), but now it runs smooth on my Ipod: Here is the code:

collectTimer = Timer.new(16, 0) collectTimer:addEventListener(Event.TIMER, function() collectgarbage("collect") end)

techdojo

Looking back at my previous post, it makes me smile when people list a 600mhz processor as "crap" (me included) as my first two computers (a Commodore VIC-20 and C64 respectively) actually ran at 1mhz (or there abouts) and you could fit 7 galaxies and an entire 3d space trading game running at a fairly decent frame rate into less than 64k.

By the time I was leaving university my then state of the art PC a 486-DX2 66 with 1Mb of RAM (affectionately known at the time in the magazines of the day as a "turbo nutter bastard") ran at a staggering 66Mhz (if you pressed the clock doubling "turbo" button) and could play a software 3D voxel rendered helicopter game (Commanche) again at a decent speed, and even this is 1/10th of the clock speed of my "crappy" phone these days.

When I saw my first Pentium chip sometime late in '95 it was almost as big as my phone! 8-|

If I was more of an old curmudgeon I'd probably say something like "you lot don't know you were born", but instead I'll just link to this...

http://www2.b3ta.com/heyhey16k/

GregBUG

Looking back at my previous post, it makes me smile when people list a 600mhz processor as "crap" (me included) as my first two computers (a Commodore VIC-20 and C64 respectively) actually ran at 1mhz (or there abouts) and you could fit 7 galaxies and an entire 3d space trading game running at a fairly decent frame rate into less than 64k.

i agree! my first computer was C64!!!

http://www2.b3ta.com/heyhey16k/

fantastic!

petec

I've got a ZTE Blade as well and up to the latest version of Gideros had no problem and been surprised how well it runs stuff. But the latest version of Gideros has produced a text bug on my phone - see this thread: http://www.giderosmobile.com/forum/discussion/1008/ttfont-bug-in-2012.2.2.1

We've also got an Archos 70 tablet that shows the same error and has another intersesting trait that it won't repeat play a sound file using the loop count of the play command. Whatever number I use for the loop, it just plays the sound once. I have to use a listener to check the sound is completed and call the play function again if I want repeated or continous music playing in the background.

Just to mention that exactly the same apk that cuases the above problems runs fine on a Nexus One and an Archos 80.

OZApps

@greg, I was on the team Spectrum like Scouser and it had 48K usable RAM as compared to 64K that C=64 had and yes I agree with you that these had some of the best games ever. However some android devices are cr*p not based on the CPU alone, but the total usability of the device, of which the CPU is a major player. If you have compared, you will see that though you purchase a Windows Box with a CPU of say 3MHz and pick up a Mac with the same CPU and a Linux box with the same CPU, you will find different results as each machine will have different results, of which you will find that the Mac and the Linux box are much better in performance, the Windows box would start up only to update like a gigabyte of updates for Windows7, Office and VS and by the time you get to use it, you are already tired of that and continue working with the Mac.

techdojo

Personally I just find that most Android devices just don't feel as responsive as 3rd gen iPod or 3GS, in fact you've got to really go for a top end device to get anywhere close (although I've been reliably informed that it's due to the fact that the main render thread on iOS is of a higher priority than the update thread, but on Android they're at the same priority) ???

OZApps

@techdojo...100% agreement...
there was an article on why Androids are slow despite having the same or faster processor that outlined that, I think it was written by an ex-google engineer that joined Microsoft.