PocketHAL kick ass

This blog isn’t going to be about CAB-files either.

I ported my code from GAPI to PocketHAL today. I must say that the results surprised me a lot. First off, the code actually runs a bit slower on my hw6515. I don’t know if it’s actually slower, there is some stuff to take into consideration. For example, there is a FPS counter running in realtime, on display. It might take some time to render.

Then I ran it on my h5450, and DAMN! PocketHAL really hits the h5450’s sweet spot! When I was running upon GAPI, I managed to optimize the code about a little. The rasteriser inner loop was optimized using tips from Writing Efficient C for ARM (a thread on PocketMatrix), and I managed to squeeze another 5-6 FPS out of the h5450 (all while the hw6515 was gaining 50 FPS or so, and the Axim x30 another 100 FPS). But when I ported the code over to PocketHAL I suddenly had better results from the h5450 then I had from the hw6515. Damn, was I surprised! The S100 and the x30 however didn’t show any staggering results at all, more or less the same as I got with GAPI. I dare say that my hunch feeling is that it is actually slower on the hw6515, x30 and S100.

I don’t know why it turned out like this. I think that I should investigate some in it, or maybe I’ll just ignore it and live happily with the thoughts of my fine ‘ol h5450 isn’t so bad after all :). I have decided to go on with PocketHAL, because it gives good performance over more machines. I will donate some money tomorrow or so, so that I can have the untagged version.

So what’s up next? I think I will look at the PocketFrog project, it introduces some handy functionality. However after I browsed thru some of the code, I suspect that there are some optimizations left to do (as if I don’t have to optimize my own code first). But still, reading images from disc and other useful stuff would really come handy.

So I suppose I will write about PocketFrog tomorrow.