[sword-devel] WinCE update

[Chris Little]

> Among several others, Chris, you are definitely the man.

Actually, apparently I am not.  I did some more work on building a test app
and found that I'm not out of the woods yet on getting SWORD built for CE.
When I build an app, it just dies upon startup.  I've confirmed that the
problem doesn't arise from any of the non-Sword stuff built in (gzip,
dirent, unistd, etc.), but I don't yet know what part of Sword is causing
the problem.

> Is it possible to try a build for CE 2.0 on an sh3 processor?
> They are only
> 16 bit processors I believe.

I'm planning to do CE 2.0 as soon as I get 3.0 working.  It was trivial to
go from 3.0 ARM (the only one I can actually test) to SH3 & MIPS, but going
to 2.0 will require a little more tinkering with the build scripts for the
Dinkumware library I'm using.

> P.S. Has anyone gone after the Palm market yet?  I have a Christian
> associate from work who rocks on the Palm programing.  Perhaps he could
> help.  Then ofcourse there is embedded Linux which I suspect will
> be my call
> to eventually leave the dark side(MS) and join the purer side of software
> programming.

Palm would be great since it is a hugely popular platform, but I have little
to no hope that Sword could actually be ported to it.  What we could look to
do is a totally stripped down program for reading Sword format files.
Though much simpler, it wouldn't benefit from the majority of work done on
Sword such as new filters and new search algorithms unless they were
re-implemented on the Palm.

Embedded linux certainly has some potential, and will make development a lot
easier for us linux folk.  I don't put a lot of stock into current handheld
offerings like the Agenda or Yopy, but I'm sure something will come along
that can compete with Pocket PCs.  Something I had mentioned to Troy in
#sword yesterday was the potential of doing a Dreamcast version of Sword.
The DC runs on an SH3 processor and loads its OS from CD, so we could press
or post ISOs of DC-specific CDs running a Linux version of Sword.  Since the
DC is now down to $99, after the addition of a USB keyboard & mouse, people
could have very nice, cheap Sword consoles for the living room.  It might be
useful for small group Bible study in your living room or such.

I'm going to steal a line from Microsoft and ask, "Can your commercial Bible
software do that?" :)

--Chris