So, I've got more news and some questions I need help with.
The Pinephone can install and run PPSSPP, the PSP emulator. It doesn't run well, but it runs. In the last week or so, the flatpak version updated to 1.10.3, bringing with it controller support and broken touch screen support on the Pinephone (which is a step up from NO touchscreen support). I was able to open the homebrew channel and download/run Cave Story for PSP, and it actually runs. Not great, but controller support is there.
I want to contribute to the community by filing bug reports, but I'm not sure where to begin. Which of the following bugs should I report to whom?
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1-Playing Cave Story in PPSSPP on the pinephone seems to work just fine, but when navigating the PPSSPP menu itself, up and down on my controller are inverted. This cannot be fixed in the Controller settings.
2-Touch inputs are registered improperly and make the screen glitch out in PPSSPP.
3-If the touch screen is not pressed for more than a minute, the screen goes to sleep. I know I can just disable going to sleep, but really button inputs should be detected as a trigger to keep the device awake.
4-If the pinephone is in Landscape Orientation in Phosh then goes to sleep, when you wake it back up the display loads as Landscape- Inverted, so everything is upside down until you manually tap to rotate multiple times to get to the right orientation.
(01-03-2021, 12:30 PM)gamerminstrel Wrote: So, I've got more news and some questions I need help with.
The Pinephone can install and run PPSSPP, the PSP emulator. It doesn't run well, but it runs. In the last week or so, the flatpak version updated to 1.10.3, bringing with it controller support and broken touch screen support on the Pinephone (which is a step up from NO touchscreen support). I was able to open the homebrew channel and download/run Cave Story for PSP, and it actually runs. Not great, but controller support is there.
I want to contribute to the community by filing bug reports, but I'm not sure where to begin. Which of the following bugs should I report to whom?
-----
1-Playing Cave Story in PPSSPP on the pinephone seems to work just fine, but when navigating the PPSSPP menu itself, up and down on my controller are inverted. This cannot be fixed in the Controller settings.
2-Touch inputs are registered improperly and make the screen glitch out in PPSSPP.
3-If the touch screen is not pressed for more than a minute, the screen goes to sleep. I know I can just disable going to sleep, but really button inputs should be detected as a trigger to keep the device awake.
4-If the pinephone is in Landscape Orientation in Phosh then goes to sleep, when you wake it back up the display loads as Landscape- Inverted, so everything is upside down until you manually tap to rotate multiple times to get to the right orientation.
Well, keeping this info here is a good idea! Additionally you could share this with the PPSSPP team on their site and forums! Feel free to join our Pine64 Discord if you haven't already, and share it there as well...someone may know how to help fix that, or not. Either way, awesome that you got it working.
I am using the 'stock' Pinephone KDE + Manjaro. In many places it is amazing and exactly what I hoped for (ssh to install programs from my laptop)
Most KDE games work MOL. The 'theme' dialog doesn't get sized correctly, but still works (select/close dialog).
I made some themes for kdiamond on gitlab/hub https://www.opencode.net/israel-d/KDiamondThemes
They make the game have a more modern looking set of themes, with pleasing colors https://www.opencode.net/israel-d/KDiamo...iew-images
kdiamond is much easier set to 'hard' or 'medium' on the phone though.
knetwalk works well
ksudoku is fine too, though some themes don't display numbers (oops...)
ksolitaire is fine, but the default theme is too detailed/shiny for the phone screen to be the best default, on the phone.
retroarch needs a theme to make it work on the phone. anyone with ideas oh how to accomplish that?
Overall I think the experience is much nicer than an Android 2.0. Especially with the customization you can do to things.
06-02-2021, 05:07 AM (This post was last modified: 06-02-2021, 06:47 AM by biketool.)
I encourage everyone to put your game requests to the Debian Mobile wiki (please include a git/source link), including wrapped web apps here: https://wiki.mobian-project.org/doku.php?id=wishlist
system wide feature requests(like the gyro joystick device) can be made here: https://wiki.mobian-project.org/doku.php...m-features
and this is the instructions to make a web app for something like agar.io, I feel like we need to decide on a way to submit/share working web apps to a separate web app repo so as websites change updates are easy to push: https://wiki.mobian-project.org/doku.php?id=webapps
As for controlling games played on the Pinephone and other Pine flavored OSs on Android first devices I feel that we need to have a standardized accelerometer/gyro to joystick device as well as having standard transparent 'ghost' buttons over-layered on the video to make touchscreen buttons.
For example Accelemymote for the Maemo Linux Nokia N900 is FOSS and can likely be updated with current libs and compiled for most distros. https://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=541756
Though linking the gyros as a linux joystick device and loading an optimized version of jstest would probably be enough as long as a solution for virtual buttons were found.
Another useful skill for a phone already accomplished on the N900 and Android is exporting the gyro and touch buttons as a Linux compliant HID joystick device to play games on say a laptop when on the road without a regular game controller.
Lastly a good GUI like jstest should already be ready to work though like all apps would improve with some UI optimization for phone screen to run bluetooth and USB HID joysticks and gamepads.
I honestly don't think it is worth the effort to test and file bugs regarding PPSSPP on the Pinephone. The much more powerful RK3326 that is in the Odroid Go Advance can't even run the PSP library acceptably so I don't think any amount of bug fixing is going to get the Pinephone into a playable state.
Question, would it be worth trying to get the first two Elder Scrolls games running on the PinePhone? Trying to figure out if I would be wasting my time.
(10-31-2021, 02:03 PM)Antheidan Wrote: Question, would it be worth trying to get the first two Elder Scrolls games running on the PinePhone? Trying to figure out if I would be wasting my time.
It might be feasible, but I haven't looked into it properly. If you can get a DOS emulator like DOS-Box running on the pinephone, then you should be all set (assuming you have a keyboard handy to play the game)
This week, I went through a side project of seeing just how hard it would be to get Retroarch up and running on Manjaro+Plasma Mobile. Turns out it actually doesn't crash anymore! Huzzah! ...But there is still a lot of work to be done!
Issues as of right now:
Retroarch did not recognize my Razer Kishi out of the box. YMMV with other controllers, but I was able to make a pull request with my controller's info so that will hopefully be fixed soon.
Retroarch is for some reason crippled out of the box on Manjaro/Arch. Retroarch by default tries to store information and config files in a directory that it does not have access to in Manjaro. You have to manually switch the settings to Retroarch's backup location, ~/.config/retroarch/*, then use the Online Updater to replace the missing UI assets. CoreInfo files need to be downloaded manually from here, and imported into Retroarch.
The Online Updater for Cores does not have any linux builds for the Pinephone's architecture yet (aarch64/armv8). This may yet be fixed in the future, but for now that means you have to manually download, compile, and import your own cores. This is surprisingly easy, but still a miserable undertaking if you don't have a keyboard plugged in.
KDE/Plasma Mobile's hibernation settings don't look for controllers whatsoever, so the phone display will dim then turn off within seconds even though retroarch is running. This is by far the biggest dealbreaker atm.
In case anyone is itching for more games to try on the Pinephone, Sometime in the last couple weeks, the flathub package for Shattered Pixel Dungeon got fixed and is completely playable! Previously it just wouldn't launch, then a few weeks ago it upgraded to launching but not fitting on the screen, and when I launched it yesterday, I had zero issues trying to play!
