Hi, I am the author of Paintown. Glad to see you guys got it working on the N900. A long time ago I got Paintown to run on the N500 using the Allegro4 library, I had a picture of it somewhere but I can't find it..

Anyway python really has nothing to do with the current implementation. Its just there to experiment with writing scripted levels but so far none exist so a new build could be made that does not include python and you would not have to fool with linking python2.5 to 2.6 (which is fairly dangerous, if python was actually used it would most likely crash at some point).

The platformer thing is an experimental feature that has no content other than being able to scroll around the mario background. You can disable it by removing the (platformer ...) part from data/menu/main.txt.

The keys in the mugen.cfg don't do anything so don't bother changing them.

I know mugen mode is fairly slow, there are many graphical effects that mugen uses which are slow to reproduce in software using 16-bit color. The original mugen was written in 8-bit color and doing palette effects there was relatively painless.

How much memory does the typical n900 have? I have troubles running some mugen characters on the Wii for example because it only has 80m of ram. I am slowly working on optimizing memory usage in mugen as well.

I'm curious as to why the game crashes the first time an option is selected but the second time it works. Can you provide any more information as to exactly under what circumstances that occurs?

Feel free to join me in my irc channel on irc.freenode.net in #paintown.