I would never. You serve a valuable purpose!






Once I discover it, I'll share with the community.

How did you download it on the tablet and from where?

Well, it is just patchwork, so far mainly stealing bits from other places, nothing too much creative. I have not written anything big by myself.

What's holding me back:

- little or no documentation for the hardware
TI and OMAP architecture is not very open and so is other hardware (wlan chip), we'd like to have documentation for jazelle, 3d chip, IVA, or source for DSP kernel running on tablets so we can add stuff and rebuild it

- fear of breaking the hardware
with no documentation some changes may damage the device, also we still have no info about cold flashing the device, I would probably do more work in hacking the bootloader if I had a way to recover from breaking bootloader or config partitition. Even getting the pinout (for newer devices, 770 is known) and building the right cable takes time.

- chronic lack of time
I'm picking lowest hanging fruit first, there is simply no time for bigger stuff, any small roadblock and priorities change. Over the years there were a lot of comments from @nokia.com people on the mailing list about how everything is easy and right under our nose etc. Not true when seen from outside. Also why to bother reverse-engineering stuff? Yes it is fun for the first or second time but my happy reverse-engineering period was at the time when I had C64 or Amiga, not today. This also relates to

- hate to do duplicated or useless work
Who knows what Nokia is cooking in the labs? Why to bother with reinventing the wheel? Why to bother when next release may break it? The only device worth of attention now because of this is 770 :-)

As for pushing upstream (where upstream is Nokia, not kernel.org), yes this is problem too. Why to bother when Nokia will not include it in stock firmware and most users will not be able to use it. We were thinking/talking in maemo-developers about adding some nice features (mainly pixel doubling, rotation) of the epson video chip to the kernel and optimizing SDL for it, the answer was something along the lines - no we don't want it because it is HW specific hack and this HW feature may not be available on future devices (which is probably true).

Also as Nokia is doing relatively good job with kernel one reason why there is not much work done is simply because there is no need, it already works :-)

Thanks for that excellent clarification, fanoush.

This one at least I can answer (sort of): Your wheels are way better than Nokia's. Yours are round! Lest we forget e.g. the original SDHC hack...

Hee hee. My roommate, who doesn't particularly care for my N800, has become semi-addicted to Numpty Physics anyway. Maybe it's the killer app that everyone talks about. (I always suspected that the key to the popularity of Windows was Microsoft Solitaire...)

Numpty Physics: AWESOME.

I agree that this app may very well be one of the "killer apps" for the NITs.

Here's my "Trebuchet Solution" to the final level!

Note that this is only a "paused physics solution," and that it is much easier to do things on pause than while the physics are "running".



So, where should we post our new levels?

I caught myself, more than once, shaking the tablet like a bottle of ketchup, as if that would dislodge the little red ball and make it roll where I wanted it to go!

This game is awesome!! and it's in alpha stage? I can't wait until it is in stable state!!

post new levels to numptyphysics-users@garage.maemo.org
- the list is broken atm but i still get the messages. i will include some new levels in the next release. once i work out this mime and dbus stuff we can have a wweb catalog of levels.