I finally got tired of using my iPAQ
over a 115kb/s serial link, so I switched to USB
networking. Wow. ipkg upgrade (analagous to
apt-get dist-upgrade on a Debian system) is a lot faster now;
roughly 120kB/s instead of 10kB/s over the serial link. The theoretical
maximum throughput is about 1.37MB/s, but I think the limiting factor
here is the iPAQ CPU (a 206MHz StrongARM processor), since things get
kinda slow when I'm doing really heavy "disk" and network operations.
The other thing I did was get QtopiaGNUBoy working on the iPAQ. The problem is as follows: the GNUBoy launcher is looking for the executable qtopiagnuboy, which is placed in /opt/QtPalmtop/bin. For some idiotic reason, that path is not in $PATH. You can work around that by setting $PATH properly from the console (ex: # PATH="$PATH:/opt/QtPalmtop/bin"; export PATH for sh and bash users, or setenv PATH "$PATH:/opt/QtPalmtop/bin" for csh and tcsh users), but typing that out on the mini-keyboard sucks. The correct fix is to modify /etc/init.d/qpe and add the following lines:
PATH="$PATH:$QPEDIR/bin" export PATH
Oh yeah, for those of you who would rather do HTTP proxying instead of (or in addition too) IP masquerading, /etc/init.d/qpe is also a good place to set http_proxy and HTTP_PROXY (Konqueror/Embedded incorrectly uses the latter).
Anyway, GNUBoy works -- even for color games -- but it's really not playable yet. The requisite screenshots: Monopoly and Zelda. For the first time in my life I have more USB devices than I can plug in at once: my UPS, my Playstation controller adapter, and my iPAQ. I'm planning on getting another controller adapter so I can teach Snow-Man why I was feared up and down the west coast in Street Fighter II Turbo (as long as Joe wasn't around), and all across the country in Mario Kart (as long as Sean wasn't around).
