Wednesday 4 May 2011

Programming: the final frontier?

The GP2X has given me so much enjoyment even in the few short weeks since I bought it, but I'd consider it much more to be mine if I could produce something of my own for it. The machine's openness to development is, after all, one of its most significant features. The problem is that I'm a pathetically useless programmer! The GP2X Wiki's Getting started with GP2X development page provides a summary of the options, and for the most part they're too hard for me. C/C++ (the most popular choice, unsurprising on a Linux system) is really above my head, and the idea of my programming in assembler is laughable.

So, what else is there? Excluding things like Perl, which has never come out of the beta stage in its GP2X incarnation, and the otherwise promising avenue of GLBasic (though free for many platforms, it ain't for handhelds) there are probably four realistic options: Python/Pygame, Pascal, Fenix and SdlBasic. They all have their pros and cons, but I'm tempted to go with the last. It's not going to be blazingly fast, but I do at least have some idea what I'm doing in Basic! So, stand by for a "Hello World" program before the decade is out...

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