I Don't Know What I Was Thinking.

Boy, that'll teach me to make promises on Friday the 13th, just before taxes are due.  The taxes got done, but not much else.  And now I'm really having trouble remembering where I stashed all the zipit goodies I promised to make available.  I swear I'll get them posted, real soon now...

In the meantime, whilst avoiding packaging up the old goodies, I somehow found myself on an old Nintendo DS homebrew site, which reminded me of the spiffy Bunjalloo web browser.  It runs quite well (with graphics even) in the limited 4MB and small screen real estate of the NDS.  Plus there's some notes about building it for linux with SDL, and it uses the tiny matrixssl library for shttp connections.  I've been looking for an excuse to use that one, but I'm far too lazy to graft it onto one of the other zipit browsers.  So off I went, merrily avoiding what I should be doing, and attempting to port bunjalloo instead.  Turns out it uses some (python based?) WAF build system that I've never heard of, and a bunch of stuff from the NDS devkitarm toolchain.  Well, python and WAF were quite unhappy with my scratchbox build environment, so I quickly ditched them and moved to script based compiling.  I had to resort to Windows to use the NDS oriented grit tool to convert some png files to .c and .h source code because I'm too lazy to pull down all it's requirements and build a linux version.

Then, just as I was reaching 100% of the sources compiled I ran up against a wall.  Oops, the linux build requires opengl.  Apparently some 2D opengl calls match up well against the native NDS hardware, so an opengl layer makes sense for portability.  But not really for my purposes.  Opengl is not so great for the zipit, with it's conspicuous lack of floating point hardware.  However on closer inspection, it looked like most of the opengl calls were using the integer versions of the functions.  Hmm, that got me thinking.  Apparently I still have a few brain cells left over from olden times, when DSLinux wasn't quite dead yet.  Just before the DSI came out and flatlined the last remaining DSLinux effort, I managed to sneak in a really lame port of the opengl version of the classic Elite space game.  I dug through the archives and sure enough, there was the integer only tiny-SDL-OpenGL lib I used for the port.  I think it needs a few tweaks to make it suitable for bunjalloo, and then there's the whole business of reconfiguring the screen and keyboard code, but the wall has been breached. 

Hopefully bunjalloo doesn't animate or use 100% of the CPU in a busy loop, because the opengl example programs are not exactly top performers.  Here's the well known gears program grinding out a whopping 2 frames per second on the zipit.

The shiny spinning triangle isn't a whole lot snappier.

Hopefully I can continue to restrain myself and not try to port any of my old opengl based CAD programs to the zipit.

 Although this does look almost useable in 320x240 pixels...

Must, resist, temptation...

For your  amusement, here's a zip with the tinygl sources.  The gears and triangle executables are also included in the examples directory. 
tinygl-iz2s.zip

And here's what bunjalloo currently looks like running in the debugger on ubuntu.

As you can see, I have plenty of work to do on the screen layout before I can even attempt to run it on the zipit.

Update:  I dug through the code, looking for all numbers near 256 and 192 (the NDS screen dimensions), and replaced all the 192s with 120 to use a half zipit screen instead of one of the NDS screens.  It sorta works but the scrollbar looks weird constrained to the bottom half of the display.  So I think I really want to make it use only one 240 pixel high screen instead.

I was able to confirm that I can use bunjalloo to access my gmail account (cool!), however hotmail seems to really want javascript.