Thursday, January 7, 2010

BennuGD in the Spanish TodoLinux magazine

Sorry to be a bit off-topic with this one, but the news are pretty exciting.
One of the users of the BennuGD forums has written an article for the TodoLinux magazine that is on sale in Spain.

If you want to know more on the issue, go to the main news piece in the main Bennu website, here.

Friday, January 1, 2010

Some work on video

New year: more work done.


I've integrated libgrbase, libvideo & libblit into the runtime. As you can see from the module dependency diagram above, only librender rests to be integrated before I can integrate mod_video and do a set_mode() (or others, of course).

On a couple of related notes, on the last post  I told you that all the modules that didn't depend on libgrbase that I wanted to integrate were already in. Well, I realized a bit later that mod_regex
(which only provides one funtcion, but a very useful one: split()) isn't in and should be. I'll fix that as soon as possible.

On an unrelated note, the main idea of the modular design behind Bennu is that the user should only load the modules they need, so no resources are wasted moving parts of Bennu that won't really get used.
Well, as you might know, the Wii has a pretty limited amount of RAM (~88MB) and therefore memory is a pretty serious concern here.
So, as this project basically takes all the modules and integrates them into the Bennu core, that main advantage of the modular design will be lost. To fix that, Splinter (the guy who does all the real Bennu hacking) has suggested that I find a way to only integrate -at Bennu compilation time- the modules the user will be needing, so that you can get a version of Bennu tailored to your particular needs.
I have a couple of ideas of how to implement that, as it seems pretty reasonable so expect to hear more on that when the project advances.

PS: Oh! And happy new year!