The Raspberry Pi

[ZauberParacelsus]

Well, the Raspberry Pi is out now (I think). Has anyone tried seeing if Love works on the Raspberry Pi? This post on Google+ got me thinking about the possibility:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/11746300629 ... qx1LbWGpqR

[Ensayia]

The RPi is designed to run an actual OS, I think there's even a linux distro available or being made for it. The biggest hurdle would be compiling love for the ARM architecture. Once that's done, there's really no reason LOVE can't run on it just like any other machine, although games for it would have to take into consideration the limited RAM and CPU.

Anyone with more knowledge want to comment on this?

[miko]

The RPi is designed to run an actual OS, I think there's even a linux distro available or being made for it. The biggest hurdle would be compiling love for the ARM architecture. Once that's done, there's really no reason LOVE can't run on it just like any other machine, although games for it would have to take into consideration the limited RAM and CPU.

Anyone with more knowledge want to comment on this?

Love-native-android is already compiled for ARM, so...

[josefnpat]

Considering the Raspberry Pi runs XBMC, i'm pretty sure it can handle most love games.

[Ensayia]

Love-native-android is already compiled for ARM, so...

I guess that's a yes then, you should be able to run LOVE on an RPi with no problem, grated you use an ARM compiled build.

[Boolsheet]

It may be tricky. I'm not sure if an unmodified SDL 1.2 will run/build on an OpenGL ES platform and if LÖVE's OpenGL code can be pushed through Mesa to get it working.

[grrussel]

Love builds on the RaspberryPI, without issue, following the standard Linux procedure for building from source using the code from the hg repo on bitbucket (for the 0.8.0 release). Specifically, I have built Love 0.8.0 on both of the Debian variants of Linux that the RaspberryPI foundation offer for download ("squeeze", and the beta of "wheezy"). Also, the squeeze release allows installing old 0.5.0 via apt-get.

The performance of love2d on the PI is, at the moment, unusably slow (as seen by running the 0.8.0 demos). This is probably because the X11 drivers are not optimized, nor are the libraries, nor the build of Love2D - the current Linux images are using software emulation of floating point, which must be killing performance.

So, its promising, given that Linux with support for hardware floating point is in the works.

[mlepage]

I recently obtained a Raspberry Pi. I have been running the "squeeze" and "wheezy" Debian images.

My understanding is that floating point support is still software-emulated, and so that will be slow until hardware support is enabled. Also, X Windows isn't as hardware accelerated yet as it should ultimately be.

I believe full GL apps are using Mesa, so software emulated. But GLES apps should be hardware accelerated. That is how fullscreen media center apps such as XBMC run fast. Additionally, they have hardware support for decoding certain video streams (H.264).

So, having a GLESv2 port of LÖVE should make it run fast fullscreen on the Raspberry Pi, as a good first step.

I did manage to build LÖVE 0.8.0 on the Raspberry Pi, but I couldn't get as far as grrussel running it, it complained about not being able to get a GLX visual. grrussel, was there a specific setup trick to getting past that stage? I know it will be slow, but I just want to see it. :-)

[grrussel]

No special build tricks, it just works (tm) on squeezy. It seems not to work on the wheezy beta in fact (it does build there, but not run); complains about the GLX visual, as you note.

In either case, the raspberry pi is not configured in any special way.

[mlepage]

OK I managed to port LOVE to GLES2 (code-wise, at least, enough to play Mari0).

I've built it on Raspberry Pi. But it's still linking (well, failing to link) to glX.

I'm at the point where I'm trying to get it properly linked so I can ascertain whether it can run, or whether I need to edit SDL or something.