Gavin Pugh - A Videogame Programming Blog

If you’re a developer and you’ve picked up the Kindle Fire this past week, you may still be in the Honeymoon period with the device. 🙂 If that is starting to wear off by now, you may have the inkling to try writing code for it. If you’ve previously developed software for Android, you’ll be a little worried when you first connect it up. Out of the box, you can’t develop with it right away.

Thankfully, it’s not too complex to get things working. Thanks to some existing blog posts, it was hardly difficult to figure it out. I thought I’d write up my install process, for anyone specifically developing on a Windows machine. I’m sure by now though, a week after launch there’s plenty of info out there. I’m also wanting to flex my blog-writing muscle again, just to get something written and maintain my recent uptick in pace.

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In an effort to post more often in this blog, I’m writing up a minor vs-android update. I don’t usually write here about the minor version changes, I usually just fire out a tweet when I do those.

I actually started work on this one, the evening after I published XNACPC. I was going to fix some of the issues of vs-android, which were posted to the Google Code page. One of them was related to a new Android SDK (the Java/apk building counterpart to C++’s NDK), which caused issues when building the vs-android samples. So I went and downloaded the new SDK. I also figured I should grab the r6b NDK, which had been out a while now but I hadn’t updated to yet. To my surprise NDK r7 was out! Coincidentally it was posted up the very same day I decided to check it. Spooky.

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On and off during the last month or so, I’ve worked toward finishing a project I wrote about last year. It’s an Amstrad CPC Emulator, written in C# using the Microsoft XNA library. I’ve written plenty about the background and motivation in the previous blog post. This post is just here to announce the finished product, and touch a little on the things I’ve worked on recently.

The picture above is from Hewson’s “Nebulus”. Now that the emulator has a pretty complete feature set; games like these are very playable now. It makes a world of difference having the audio fully working now, for example. It also is great to finally be able to play at the original, full frame rate on Xbox 360. Surprisingly the 360 had trouble emulating this seemingly primitive machine!

Anyway, after the jump is a video showing the emulator in action on the 360…

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