Sconsole: a simple function for printing strings on PS3

PSL1GHT is a fantastic SDK, growing day after day thanks to help of talented developers like phiren, MattP, AerialX and others.
What I need to start porting Scogger is to print some debug information (like screen size, sprites information and such), but unfortunately for me STDOUT and STDERR are redirected to the lv2 TTY interface.

Right now there are two ways I know for printing debug informations:

• using Kammy
• using libcairo font support provided by ps3libraries

Altought these are valid alternatives, they represent a complexity level that is too much for my lazyness: Kammy requires PS3 attached to the router via ethernet cable, plus it prints information to a pc, not to the screen. Most important it needs a peek/poke capable payaload, and my PSJailbreak dongle doesn’t have it.

Libcairo is new to me, it has amazing power but for now I don’t want to learn another library, also it is a waste to use it just for replacing printf.

That’s why I created very simple console, called Sconsole, whose job is to print  some text on framebuffer using 8×16 fonts.

Let’s see how to use it:

Using Sconsole

Using Sconsole is very simple: just add the three files included in the zip file in your source directory and you are almost done.

Let’s see an example.

The first thing to do is actually import the header file:

#include "sconsole.h"

Then we need to initialize it, here it is the syntax:

void sconsoleInit(int bgColor, int fgColor, int screenWidth, int screenHeight);

• bgcolor is the background color of the printed string,
• fcColor is the actual font color
• screenWidth and screenHeight are your screen resolution

Colors are in the 0xAARRGGBB format (alpha channel not available). Few colors are defined in sconsole.h but you can use yours. Also FONT_COLOR_NONE means no color (“transparent”),

ScreenWidth and ScreenHeight are actually the screen resolution you get with videoGetResolution function.

sconsoleInit(FONT_COLOR_NONE, FONT_COLOR_BLACK, res.width, res.height);

Printing function needs X and Y coordinates, plus the pointer to the framebuffer where write into.

print(400, 80, "Hello world",  framebuffer);

Or using sprintf before actually print comples strings:

sprintf(tempString, "Video resolution: %dx%d", res.width, res.height);
print(540, 160,  tempString, framebuffer);

Dead simple

Please note: 108 ASCII characters are included (most used ones). They are from 32 (space) to 126 (~) of the ASCII table .  They include digits, uppercase & lowecase letters, pluse other ones like parenthesis, plus minus, commas…

Hope it will help someone, waiting for screen output of STDOUT/STDERR.

Happy coding!

Download

Demo pkg + sources (version 0.1)

Thanks

Bitmaps fonts courtesy of libogc.

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~ di Scognito su novembre 7, 2010.