Dreamcast PVR and smartphones

[Christuserloeser]

I remember reading that some smartphones (like Samsung's Galaxy series) used a PVR graphics chip. Is there any info on how similar these are and how compatible or useful existing code for these newer PVR variants might be for Dreamcast homebrew ?

[BlueCrab]

They're distantly related in that they still do tile-based deferred rendering, IIRC. However, they're obviously a whole lot more advanced than what we had back on the Dreamcast. Yes, Imagination Technology still develops the IP of the chip, but they're so much more complex and full-featured than what we had back then.

However, pretty much every smartphone app that does any 3D related stuff is probably using OpenGL ES, so you're not likely to find anything useful there anyway. Not to mention that it is likely not open-source to start with.

[Christuserloeser]

Actually I was thinking about the libraries and code examples and whatnot included to dev kits. Android itself is open source as well from what I understand.

[BlueCrab]

Just because Android is open-source doesn't mean the drivers for the various pieces of the hardware is. The OpenGL ES drivers for the video hardware are most likely not open-souce and are provided as binary blobs (much like the official AMD and NVidia drivers on Linux).

The SDK examples are all either reliant on that OpenGL ES layer or are written for Dalvik (aka, in Java), so they're pretty much useless. Even if there wasn't that problem, they'd likely have very little utility because of how different the video architecture of the newer PowerVR GPUs are.

Pretty much that whole idea would be a dead end for all kinds of reasons, unfortunately.

[Christuserloeser]

Damn. Too bad.

[RyoDC]

Well you still can dissassemble them (drivers).

[BlueCrab]

Well you still can dissassemble them (drivers).

A lot of work for absolutely no gain. They're not similar enough to what's in the Dreamcast to be of any use, and we have plenty of sources of information about the Dreamcast's video hardware by now.

Plus, if they have device microcode or firmware, I really doubt you'd be able to disassemble that.