2011-01-22, 09:58
brock_gonad Wrote:Hey Scott,
Was wondering if you could tell us a bit of the story behind the story?
When there's a will, there's a way
Part I:
To start, James of FireCore donated two atv2s to me right after they were available. I've known James a while and his thinking was 'give davilla some toys to play with and you never know what he comes up with' Money is tight (still is) and I have to thank James for doing this again, I don't think I would have bought them myself.
I spent two weeks trying to build xbmc depends on the actual atv2 using telesphoreo libs only to find out that the native gcc would not compile armv7 and that means no neon so bag that.
In the mean time, atv2 #2 had an iPod connector soldering in place and a rather large hole cut in the side to see if that would gain us USB host. Buzz road kill, signals don't match that of normal iPad connector so scratch that for now. Pictures of that are here http://code.google.com/p/atv-bootloader/...ems%2Fatv2 . Somewhere in the live testing and poking, doing very rude things to this atv2 and pop goes the wired network. Bummer wifi only for mr.atv2 #2.
Back to xbmc depends and another three weeks later ios-depends is born and we are cross-compiling xbmc depends on osx. Now I'm racing XBMC devcon because I want to show it off there.
First up is EGL, we need EGL for rendering, iOS 4.x can do it but under the atv2 you are a frappliance, a plugin to frontrow. Can't get to EGL directly. Lucky me, some atv1 devs figure out how to get to a UIView and from that I can get to EGL. First demo frapp using EGL is alive now and I can spin a multi-colored square. Rush, rush, devcom is fast approaching, after lots of late nights and swearing, FINALLY get compile, a few days later get link and now its time to play Launch, Crash and Burn and try to figure out why... IcANHazNoDebugger
Finally hunt down the issues and fix them but I can Launch XBMC but I don't see anything, don't have the EGL layer right. XBMC.log looks good, clean launch and rss is rolling but all is black. No time to fix and off to devcon I go.
Part II later.
Soju Wrote:Is there an actual distro for ATV2? (or any A4 based device). I haven't found anything on a cursory googling.
It's listed in the announce on xbmc.org
https://github.com/xbmc/atv2
This contains both atv2 and ios.
For installing, see the wiki info, also listed in the announce on xbmc.org