Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Play Tegra, Qualcomm and PoweRVR Based Games on Android.

Nvidia Tegra is a series of system-on-a-chip developed by Nvidia for mobile devices. It integrates everything onto a single package including the ARM architecture processor CPU, GPU, northbridge, southbridge, and memory controller. The series emphasizes low power consumption and high performance for playing audio and video. Such as; LG Optimus 2X, Motorola Atrix 4G, Motorola Droid X2 etc. These are Tegra based devices which has high graphical and 3D features for games, videos etc.

My Galaxy SII too has incompatibilities with many games made only for certain platforms. For an example it’s incompatible with 3D, Tegra based game like Samurai II. All you need is a 2.1+ Android version on your rooted device to try this. That means higher than Éclair version of Android. But it doesn’t work on 3.0 [Honeycomb] tablets.

1. Download ChainFire3D from the Android Market to your device and install the ChainFire3D driver comes with the application and reboot. Free version would do the trick and no need to buy the ChainFire3D Pro version.
Link
2. Download all 3 plug-ins for TEGRA, QUALCOMM and POWERVR drivers.

3. Place them on the SD card

4. Tap on ChainFire3D application and tap on install plug-in. Wait for the auto detection and install all 3 drivers one by one.

5. Go to Default OpenGL settings in ChainFire3D application and select Use Plugin - NVIDIA to do a test.

6. Download the .apk of an incompatible game. Let’s try Samurai II

NOTE: Do not expect all the incompatible games to play on the device. Just select the appropriate driver from all three that we installed via ChainFire3D and try your luck.

Make sure to tick the "Reduce Texture Quality" on ChainFire3D and it’ll reduce the usage of your RAM.

Tested on Samsung Galaxy SII, Samsung Galaxy S

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Let’s Root and Install Sinhala Unicode on Android.

Android is a fast growing operating system for devices such as mobile phones and tablet computers developed by the Open Handset Alliance owned by Google.

Let’s see how to install Sinhala Unicode on Android. For that, you need to root the device. Through this tutorial we’re discussing about one click rooting methods for;


Android 2.1 [Eclair]
Android 2.2 [Froyo]
Android 2.3 [Gingerbread]



Rooting Android 2.1 [Eclair]

Tested on Samsung I5700 Galaxy Spica, Vodafone 945 and Sony Ericsson X10 Mini
Do it at your own risk. The author is not responsible if your device got damaged or bricked during the process.

Download and just run z4root application on your phone and click root. You can even choose whether to do a permanent root or a temporary root.

Rooting Android 2.2 [Froyo]

Tested on Samsung Galaxy Mini S5570 and Samsung Galaxy Ace [Android version 2.2]
Do it at your own risk. The author is not responsible if your device got damaged or bricked during the process.

1. Download SuperOneClick and extract it to your desktop.
2. Enable USB debugging on your phone [Settings - Applications - Development - USB Debugging]
3. Connect the device to the computer via your USB data cable and run SuperOneClick.exe and click the Root button.

Rooting Android 2.3.3 or 2.3.4 [Gingerbread]

Tested on Samsung Galaxy Ace [Android version 2.3]
Do it at your own risk. The author is not responsible if your device got damaged or bricked during the process.

1. Download upd_1.zip and copy it to the root of your SD card.
2. Boot device into recovery mode. [First turn off the phone and turn it on again by pressing Home button and Power button simultaneously. You’ll see the downloading icon.]
3. Update from sdcard and then select the file upd_.1zip.
4. Once the file is flashed, it will reboot the device automatically


Rooting Samsung Galaxy SII

The process is quite different when it comes to this recently launched new high end phone. Let’s see how to root a Samsung Galaxy SII. We are rooting the device by flashing an insecure kernel.

Do it at your own risk. The author is not responsible if your device got damaged or bricked during the process.
Download all these things to your desktop.
Odin Downloader
XWKDD tar file [don’t extract]
SuperOneClick
Samsung’s KIES 2.0 as you will need the correct USB driver for software to communicate.

* Turn on USB debugging mode in Galaxy SII from Settings - Applications - Development - USB Debugging.

* Make sure KIES is closed and not running in the system tray because it will flash block during the process.

1. Boot device into download mode. [First turn off the phone and turn it on again by pressing Volume down button, Home button and Power button simultaneously. You’ll see the downloading icon.]
2. Start Odin downloader
3. Connect the phone to your computer through USB.
4. Odin software notifies when it detected the phone and got connected
5. In the Odin software, just select “Auto Reboot” and “Reset Time” checkboxes and leave every other option as default.
6. Press PDA icon and select the XWDD tar file downloaded
7. Press Start and Odin will flash the kernel and Galaxy SII will reboot.
8. Don’t remove the phone from USB while rebooting.
9. After rebooting, start SuperOneClick and press ROOT.
10. Reboot the device.

Note: While booting, your phone will be showing a yellow triangle with exclamation mark now, which indicates you’re running an insecure kernel. If you want to remove this icon, just flash the original kernel back to your device.

Download XWKE7 Stock Kernel from here for re-flashing. [Password: intratech@XDA]
Repeat the process from number 6.

This method currently works for all Samsung Galaxy SII versions running android 2.3.3 or android 2.3.4 and above.

Once the rooting process has successfully finished you can see the superuser icon on your device and don’t forget to install Root Checker application from the android market and confirm the root access.

Installing Sinhala Unicode

Download Root Explorer
Download DroidSansFallBack ttf
Install Root Explorer unzip the DroidSansFallBack ttf , enable R/W permission and copy it to /system/fonts directory. Unicode rendering is not perfect on android but readable.