Lowcost Handheld ARM system for Squeak (was RE: Dynapad R0.1 Rele ased)

Swan, Dean Dean_Swan at Mitel.COM
Thu Jun 27 18:43:46 UTC 2002


Actually, It's 16.78 MHz ARM 7, but the RAM limitation is the real problem.  If you want a *very* inexpensive 133 MHz ARM9 based machine with a 320x240x16bit 3.5 inch color display, 8 megabytes of SDRAM, and an SMC memory card port, and USB port, I'd suggest the GP32.  It's still only available in Korea, but you can also buy it mail order from Lik-Sang in Hong Kong for $159 US + shipping.  There are a lot of development support tools available on the net.

Squeak could be ported to the Gameboy Advance, and I've looked at it a bit, but to be at all useable, it would really need a serious overhaul of morphic to take advantage of the display hardware.  I think just using a software bitblit would give a mighty unpleasant user experience.  You can get 32 megabyte flash cartridges with 256K bytes SRAM pretty cheap, but that along with the 256K + 32K bytes internal SRAM plus 96K bytes display memory would still make a pretty tight environment for any recent version of Squeak.

The GP32 costs about twice as much as the Gameboy Advance, but is only slightly larger and much more capable hardware, and the screen is about the same size as the iPaq screen.

							-Dean


See:

http://www.lik-sang.com/catalog/product_info.php?category=7&products_id=812&
http://www.gp32world.de/
http://www-public.tu-bs.de:8080/~y0018703/gp32world/gp32/gp32.html

-----Original Message-----
From: Tim Rowledge [mailto:tim at sumeru.stanford.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, June 26, 2002 9:25 PM
To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
Subject: Re: Dynapad R0.1 Released


Jerome Chan <eviltofu at mac.com> is claimed by the authorities to have written:

> Has anyone tried porting Squeak to the Game Boy Advance?
40MHz ARM7 & less than a meg of ram doesn't add up to great performance
for Squeak.

tim

-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Useful random insult:- A gross ignoramus -- 144 times worse than an ordinary ignoramus.




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