Hi!
I'm very busy with other stuff at the moment, but I could have a look
at GC Linux again today. The network driver seems to be perfect now
(thanks hampti!), we can mount root from NFS - so I could boot a full
Mandrake 9.1 and run some full-blown glibc apps like mpg123 and
mplayer.
*** Audio driver ***
Both apps had the same problem with kirin's audio driver: Every chunk
of PCM data seems to be repeated about 3 times, i.e. the speed is too
slow, but the pitch is correct. Can anyone else contribute their
experiences?
Looks somehow as if the interrupt handler is too slow and the audio
unit just keeps repeating, until the new data is ready. Just a guess.
Any idea?
*** MPlayer ***
MPlayer works quite nicely (640x384 DivX at 100% speed with (buggy)
sound disabled; sound enabled would slow everything down, because video
would sync to too-slow sound), but the colours are off. MPlayer seems
to try to encode the pixels itself and doesn't really use the
framebuffer driver. Workarounds?
*** X Window ***
X Window also works quite nicely. I have nothing to move the mouse
pointer with, and the colours are wrong as well, but a remote Gnome
session worked very well. See new screenshot on website (about to be
uploaded).
*** Keyboard driver ***
I have both the Tototek and the Datel keyboard adapter now, and I
experienced that it could even get worse. The Tototek adapter has some
very weird mappings, and quite some bad bugs - the Datel adapter
doesn't seem to have any bugs, but quite some dead keys, and very very
strange and Tototek-incompatible mappings. I'll investigate this
further. We might need a kernel command line to specify what adapter
the driver is supposed to support - fixing it with keyboard layouts
afterwards is probably no good idea, because we would need two versions
of every local layout then, for Tototek and Datel.
*** Other apps ***
I tried running VICE (C64 Emulator) on the GameCube's X Window session,
but it froze the machine. I also tried to compile MPlayer directly on
the GC, and GCC aborted. Most probably this is all due to out of memory
problems. I had no swap. I find it really interesting that DivX/MPEG4
works so well with only 24 MB, because I remember DivX 4 always said it
needed at least a 64 MB machine to play movies...
By the way, Steve_- is working on a small Debian-based NFS base system
that will be available for everyone.
Michael
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