Buying and Setting up Pi B 2 for friend with Google Phone

Hi,
I’ve seen several videos on Youtube of Android on the Raspberry Pi Model B 2. The £75 kit looks excellent. I will also buy him a keyboard and mouse (the chap is in his 70s) BUT I have 2 questions:

1-Do I need to add a hard-drive (or one of those solid-state mass-memory devices)
2-Which version of Android works the best? On several videos, the cursor was very chuggy.

While I was an assembly-language programmer for 20 years, I never even had to setup the Devkits (from PDS to Nintendo 3DS - as we said 'THAT is a hardware issue). That is why I am such an amateur on these areas.

One of the things I promise to spend time on is trying to speed up the felide-constructors. We used GNU for many platforms and on the 32X & Megadrive,(that had the 1-cycle multiply), they used the 32-instruction multiple (each instruction performed 1 bit of the multiplications. Similarly, if your subroutine doesn’t make any calls (i;e; it’s the inner loop), the LINK register doesn’t need to be stacked. Only a tiny saving, but for inner loops, it was noticeable. If it stopped a game dropping frames here & there, they STAYED in 60Hz (we had to use 60Hz because 1 European 50Hz frame had 22% more cycles in it.
Lastly, I will add an optimized ADPCM that really does change size. The trick is to alter the input data slightly so you never had to worry about going off the top or bottom of either of the 2 tables. Do this and unwrap the loop by 2 just means the input length has an LSR and branched to the second mixer & then you reduced a counter and exited at 0. This is the example of an inner-loop that doesn’t need the LINK register stacking.

I hope to be up to speed pretty fast (20+ assembly-languages including 3 different ARM variations/derivatives). I don’t know if there are any general routines people would like optimizing, but just to let you know, I’m disabled and can’t get out much so problem solving is good for my mental health.

Thank you for reading and hello, it’s nice to meet you all.

Sean

Hi, to answer your question. If you are going down the Android route are you sure the RPi is the right choice? What do they intent to use it for?

To respond to your experience.
I’m an old school coder too, being doing it since 1981 and the ZX80. So I recognise the little tricks to talked about. When you are talking about contributing to speeding the code up do you mean Android or the Linux tree in general?

Have to say, you’re lucky not to have to set up your own kits. I’ve worked on loads of different devkits for most of the consoles and SoC engineering samples. It’s a right pain in the but at times. Sony kit always seemed to be the most painful. I’ve smoked a few in my time too. LoL :)