89.5 Trials and Tribulations of a Sony Tablet S

Barring any major issues of finance and timescales it seems the coding job is mine. Needless to say I can't say too much about it but I will outline a few things to form part of a doc that I will present to students as a guide on how (not) to do a project

Its a nice little game which I won't give details about so will limit myself to the fun getting used to a new bit of kit. In this case PlayStation Mobile (PSM). Essentially Android OS on specific Sony approved machines with graphic accelerators and written in C#.

Android is something I am just getting my teeth into at work, but C# is relatively new for me, though I have tinkered with it I've never done a full project

PSM SDK and IDE are freely available so I spent the last few days setting them up and working through the docs and tutorials, no real issues, aside from lack of familiaity with C#. But I've picked it up pretty quick in the last 2 days.

I do have a Playstaion Mobile certifed device, a Sony Tablet S, which I wanted to use as a dev target so I had an idea of hardware speed. Sadly hooking this up is not a simple case of plug and go, indeed plug, go, install, uninstall, plug, go, re-install, find udpates, uninstall, find different updates and so on has been a major waste of several hours research time, which still has not resulted in getting the machine accessable....oh well...The SDK comes with a perfectly usable simulator

The game reequires a few basic featires and 1 major feature which is a bit tricky to do, so I've spent a few days testng if the basics work..yup, no real issues there... But the major feature which involves accessing and modifying graphic data in game...proved a bit hard. There's many ways to do this in c++ but c# wasn't having it..It does not like its memory to be directly accessed...this requires a few work rounds.

The core API does allow for some ability to transfer buffers to VRAM, so using a sledgehammer approach I can impliment what I want...the question is how fast is it will I have enough memory to contain this heavy handed method....will it impact on gameplay?

At this point, hard to say, especially not being able to run on hardware at the moment, but I am setting up some tests to find out.

So far all so good...the weekend will tell if the game can be done then I can dump the tests and start the project proper.

I will need to have a bit of a break from the Sony Tablet though.....why is hardware always a pain!!!


Ahthankyew