I've been having some fun collecting and testing out a whole range of SBC's like Raspberry Pi and all the clones that have come on to the market hoping to grab a piece of the action.
In doing so I've discovered a fascinating culture of hardware geeks who love nothing more than making these little machines run various versions of Linux and Android in a seemingly never ending quest to create even better home TV boxes?
I don't like home TV Boxes, I hate Android, and I hate Linux even more.
But I do like tech, and fun tech that lets me play with it has always been interesting to me. As a veteran (ie very old) games programmer I wanted to see what these little machines were capable of.
In the process I discovered that though the idea behind these machines is basically the same, produce low power, cheap, self contained systems, using reliable and readily available off the shelf chips, usually ARM with a SOC style main CPU and GPU combo, there was an interesting similarity in the design approach and hardware used. Its wrong to say they are all clones of the Raspberry Pi, though some are, many are genuine attempts to produce a better product that targets the same market, therefore there is not a massive difference in the hardware but tweeks in speed, RAM and GPU make for fun variations while retaining a common core.
So while there is some consistency in the hardware designs, the software support varies wildly. Various flavours of Linux partly work or sometimes just don't, Android usually works very well or not at all and so forth.
The overall success of the machines depends very much on how many people are actively working to make the software work so I applaud that regardless of the comments from those not willing to wait for the software to mature.
The Raspberry Pi, has far and away the most active community with many millions sold and many thousands of active contributors, so its software base is solid and reliable. The Orange Pi by comparison, has maybe 3 people (exaggeration) working on things while other spectators complain bitterly about the lack of support and fail to realise that open source development needs participation to succeed.
I'm not an OS coder, I have little or no interest in working to port Linux to such machines, even less on Android, and most certainly no real skill.
But I do like to write games.. So I've been producing a series of projects for an upcoming university course that will work on almost all these machines, so long as they are running at least a basic version of Linux (Android is a bit too tricky).
The fact that most of these machines have as much processing and graphic power as Original XBox and PS2 and perhaps more, makes them very interesting from the point of view of developing games that work within the limits they have. Those limits are so far beyond the limits of the 8 and 16 bit machines I learned to code on that I am salivating at the idea of what might be possible, if one moves away from endless re-writes of home media boxes...these are great games machines, lets try to make games!
Over the last few months I've been slowly acquiring SBC's to go with my main Raspberry Pi dev target so that I can work out how to get them to run games
I plan to use this blog to detail, how to install working images, working OpenGL ES2 libraries and also OpenAL libs, assuming the hardware's own drivers actually allows these things to work. This then hopefully will form a useful resource to those who want to work with their SBC's for anything other than OS development.
All of this will culminate in the development of a range of games for a book I am working on which I hope people will check back on here to see where some of the choices that were made came about.
So far on my collecting quest I have the following machines... I will update from time to time.
I have a couple of some models, especially raspberries and nano's but will just list the type rather than the numbers :D
Raspberry Pi A+
Raspberry Pi Model B
Raspberry Pi Zero
Raspberry Pi Model2 B
Raspberry Pi Model3 B
Raspberry Pi Model3 B+
Odroid C1+
Odroid C2
Odroid XU4
Orange Pi one
Orange Pi PC
Orange Pi PC2
Orange Pi Zero
Orange Pi Zero Plus 2
Orange Pi Win A64
Orange Pi
Orange Pi One Plus
Olinex A10 OlinuXino-Lime 4G
DragonBoard 410c
BananaPi M1
BananaPi M3
BananaPi M3 with 3amp power jack
Banana Pi Zero M2
Beagleboard RevC
BeagleBoard XM
BeagleBone Black
Pine A64 2Gb
Rock64Pro
C.H.I.P.
Nano Pi 2 Fire
Nano Pi M1
Nano Pi M1+
Nano Pi M2
NanoPi M3
Nano PC T2
Nano PC T3
Nano Pi Neo
Nano Pi T4
Nano Pi Neo4
Nano Pi K1+
Nano Pi K2
RoseApple Pi
Creator Ci20
Asus Tinkerboard
RockPi4
Libre Tritium H5
Libre Le Frite (ANL805)
Up^2 (base 2Gb dual Celeron model)
UpCore (base 1Gb model)
Khadas Vim2
Some I have still to get working, Some are still on the way to me, but this represents a pretty fair wedge of the sub $75 (stretched to $100 max) range of SBC's on the market, most non Raspberry ones, use Mali or Power VR GPU's and all run some form of Linux.
..update, more modern GPU's now coming out, Mali is still pretty common, but the support is still hit and miss.
I'll try to post info on how to get things set up, and some screen shots of games as I go.
I hope that this proves to be a useful resource and I'll try to keep it up to date as long as these little monsters don't have me feeling too stressed out.
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