Realized I never posted actually how to set it up and have gotten a few questions. Probably the best place to go is the Piggy Tracker facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/LGPTusers/
But honestly I hate Facebook so I'm copy pasting instructions posted there:
1. Download stable and experimental dingoo builds from the official website
2. Replace the stable .dge file with the experimental .dge file. This converts your folder to an experimental dingoo build.
3. Download the bitboy patch file from https://github.com/Mdashdotdashn/Little
er/pull/10 and simply place it in your folder
4. Put this folder onto your SD card (you can literally just paste it into the "main" partition of your bitboy SD card.
5. Launch the console and go to the apps page and press select while any app is highlighted.
6. Press create a link
7. Select the bitboy file inside your piggy tracker folder
8. Enjoy!
Regarding midi output, I have so far been unsuccessful at that. On the RS-97 I modded the unfunctional GBA link port to connect to an internal UART, and got serial data out but never got LGPT midi to send anything on that port. On the pocket go I modded the AV out to connect to an internal UART (thinking you could use a TRS MIDI adapter) and the story is the same. Got serial data but the serial port just dies as soon as piggy starts sending anything on it.
I've paid the dev out of my own pocket to make these ports, but that dev doesn't seem to be super interested in doing much else with it, even for money. If someone wants to continue work on piggy I'm happy to pay bounties. Specifically what I want is:
- MIDI out on a modern handheld. This could be the pocket go, or any of the other ones. Some of the new ones have USB host so even if you just plugged in a USB MIDI interface to the handheld, that would work. Prime candidates are Pocket Go because it's so cheap, RG350 because it has USB host, or even the ODROID Go Advance because it runs straight up Ubuntu and has a full size USB port.
- 64bit support
- Nintendo Switch port because homebrew is easy on switch and there's an SDL port for it
- Android/iOS ports, bonus points for MIDI as well
- Maybe even a web port straight up? There's web MIDI now and you can compile C++ to JS so maybe that would work??
- Any other features you think would be cool
The only thing I ask it to contact me before you start working on it so we can agree on a bounty price and to make sure someone else isn't already working on it (I'd hate for two people to do the same thing).
I don't really get anything out of this other than my own personal satisfaction because I think Piggy is rad and the lack of modern portable options really limits adoption. It's been super cool to see more and more people pick up Pocket Gos and make some tunes with it!
I was also talking to herr_prof who suggested possibly just an LGPTv2 which might be a complete re-write. That might be easier than maintaining all the old device ports, I know that's a concern mdashdotdashn has with merging these pull requests into the master branch.