I have been wanting to program on a handheld device for a while. My brother originally had a GP32, which was an open source handheld from around the GBA era. I eventually got a later edition of a GamePark Device called the Caanoo. That was also open source, and it was fun to mess around with. But I never got around to figuring out how to program for it. At the time I did not have much experience programming, and the online community for the Caanoo was lacking if not dead. But the idea of an open source handheld always enticed me.
Recently I came across the GCW Zero handheld. It is another opensource handheld but it is not part of the GamePark line of devices. I believe GamePark went bankrupt a little after the Caanoo. The GCW Zero was funded on Kickstarter and runs on Dingux, a branch of Linux. Before I owned the device I lurked on the forums for the GCW and for other devices at Dingoonity.org. Eventually at the end of 2015 I picked up the device, determined to program something for it, or at least contribute to the community since it was still active.
I decided the best way for me to contribute to the community was to write up a tutorial on how to get started with developing for the GCW Zero. The tutorial I wrote is meant to be a compilation of information that I found across forum posts and the wiki page. There was no one spot to find the information you needed to be able to get a program you wrote running on the GCW Zero. So I decided to take what I found and document the process of getting the program running using Linux, SDL 2.0 and Code::Blocks.
For the most part, the process was fairly smooth and simple. The few issues I ran into were because of my inexperience with Linux. But the tutorial is up and posted on the Dingoonity forums and so far has received positive feedback and ways to improve the tutorial even more.
Link to the forum post:
http://boards.dingoonity.org/gcw-general/%28how-to%29-getting-started-developing/
Link to the tutorial:
http://songofstorm.com/tutorial-gcw-zero/