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by micah on 2001-06-27 00:00:00

There's been lots going on recently. Unfortunately (?) most of it seems to only show up on the pgui-devel mailing list nowadays :)

Shane Nay, in addition to his Java integration project, has been adding new primitives to pgserver: filled and unfilled ellipses, and filled polygons. I recently added support for rendering to offscreen bitmaps, and automatic sizing for containers. My next few projects for PicoGUI are internationalizing pgserver, and moving most of pgserver's options to a flexible configuration file as the command line system can get a bit cumbersome.

A little offtopic, but I recently got a new iBook. Everone I have talked to was very impressed with the new iBooks. PowerPC processor, 1024x768 LCD, and much better battery life than any Wintel laptop I've seen. PicoGUI compiled out-of-the-box for Linux on PPC. (I'm using SuSE 7.1 for PPC) MacOS 9 seems like it's only good for games, but PicoGUI might be getting a port to MacOS X soon. (Should be easy, since SDL seems to be ported to MacOS X already)

I've been doing a little hardware experimenting on the side. In addition to Kiwi and the "uCsimm box" I'd like to get PicoGUI running on an embedded machine with VGA output. Since I recently decided to teach myself FPGA design, I started with a FPGA-based scan converter. It was overkill, but could convert any speed output from the Dragonball's LCD controller to VGA-compatible video. I'm now trying to get output directly from the uCsimm to a VGA monitor. (Well, with a logic gate or five) I've already got it producing 100x480 (Yes, it's a wierd resolution) with just a uCsimm, buffer, and VGA plug. I think I can improve the resolution further and get 8-color output, and whatever resolution I end up with would be doubled by running this on a 32mhz Dragonball VZ. This could be a cheap way to dock handheld computers to an external monitor/keyboard/mouse. Once I get the bugs out I'll post schematics and source code.