Personally I want one in my car hooked up to a GPS so I can make a street atlas kind of thing except that I am interested in castles, long barrows, stupid roman remains and slight ditches in a field - most of which are not on the standard car GPS kit auto routes. I was hoping to use OpenStreetMaps and then I can also add on all my own personal photos, text and places of interest etc. The raspi runs on about 3W or 600mA at 5V which would be about 250mA of 12V car battery power which is not a lot. Add to that the USB GPS unit of about 50mA and thats no problem. You would also need some kind of small screen like a 6" LCD which is a few hundred mA too but its all no problem. Less than a stereo. You could also hook in loads of MP3's etc as well since it has the capability of being a nice media player anyway. Its small enough to be modded into the car somewhere like the glove box and take power from a standard cigarette socket.

What the raspi seems to be missing (at least when I looked and that was only briefly) was SDL2.0. Incidentally that has been in beta for ages but it was announced today that it was the first release of that. So when there is a useable raspi port of SDL2 then its pretty much good to go. I have already had the dice app running under linux using the SDL2 beta and opengl 1 but raspi has no opengl (ES) 1 only opengl ES2 so there will need to be a far bit of porting to be done. But nothing should prevent it working. Since VDale works off of the GPU mainly and the raspi has a stellar GPU then it should run pretty good !. But we will only know for sure when it runs - the cpu is slow it has to be said and it may yet be too slow. But when it first came out it was 256Mb and that was a close call. Now they are all 512Mb so that gives an adequate amount of head room to code it into. My PC version only uses about 120Mb for the app and the raspi needs to allocate 128Mb for the GPU (unlike PC's, it shares the video memory) so it should be a perfect little card to run it on. Since the whole OS runs from an SD card and its naturally an SSD hard drive, then the loading of the icons should be super fast. This was the slowest part on the PC.

The limiting factor to all of this is my time which still gets eaten away ! But I still plan to do it at some point and ill post about it here when I do.