AMD's New Open Source Strategy

In a press statement AMD announced better support for Linux in the future, and "also plans to accelerate efforts to address the needs of the open source community as well". The question is just, what are those efforts? At LWN a declaration to this statement is made, and announces AMD reported at the Kernel Summit, that they will open the graphic specs for their graphic processors from the R500 forward.

Well, if this is true then it's really good news, and just another great move toward full 3D for Linux.

Edit: The speculations about AMD's strategy about their obscure open source effort is finished, and gave a detailed statement, but in short: "AMD will be providing NDA specifications, an open-source library, and there is a new open-source graphics driver as a result."

New GP2X F-200 is coming soon

GamePark Holding, the creator of the handheld dream for homebrew game development announced the new GP2X F-200 coming in October. The specification doesn't diverge from it's predecessor, but it will have a complete new PSP-like controller and a touchscreen.

Open Game Console

Ever thought about a Unix Console like Wii, XBox, or PS would be cool?

So did others, and founded the Open Game Console Consortium, an independent, non-profit organization made up of various companies, individuals, game developers, publishers and hardware manufactures. It is dedicated to the development and maintanance of an open standard by which multiple hardware manufacturers can release their own videogame console that can all the same exact games without modifications.

The OGCC project is creating a console with usual PC components, what also makes it a PC somehow. Actually they don't build the console, but standardize the specifications, so anybody can build the console oneself. The underlying operating systems should be a special Linux distro, but at the moment this is very sketchy. The OGCC is not the first and only project aiming for a Linux videgame system, but what makes this project special is the complete openness.

There is also the OpenMoko project, creating a free smartphone platform using Linux and other free software components, which is also able for gaming.

And also another project called Gamix, is developing open specifications for a gaming console. Indeed, Gamix and OGCC have very similar goals, but somehow it seems a (liberal) company is behind Gamix, while OGCC is totally open for community development.

To make this complete, I refer to the previous GP2X article, the Linux handheld.

GP2X - Linux Handheld

Having Linux as a handheld is freaky. The South Korean company GamePark Holdings made this dream come true. The GP2X is designed for hombrew and professional developers as well, and commonly uses any available emulators, as S-NES, MegaDrive, AMIGA, NeoGeo, etc. It is the successor of the GP32.

It is very homebrew friendly, and the SDKs are freely available. The development is usually done with GCC and SDL, so it's also very easy to create cross-platform games. There also exist an Allegro version for the GP2X.

Actually this sounds so cool, except for one thing: they won't release their modifications of GPL code, as the kernel 2.4 sources they use.