Monogame is a complete pain to get up and running.

This is mainly because there is a requirement for Mono.Android and the user experience for the install is completely abysmal.

It never seemed to try and prompt me to upgrade so I was stuck with a breaking change bug because of a change in the way the DLLs were signed.

I ended up with multiple installers backing up an wanting to run at reboot.

The docs and forums say you need to upgrade to 4.6 or higher but the project is referencing 4.1 and not compiling.. and then the penny drops that the DLLs in the 4.1 directory are actually for 4.1 Android…

With the MonoGame versions so close to the android ones there is some easy confusion.

What I have been able to work out so far is that you need to reboot every time you so much as look at any of the MonoGame config or weird things may happen.

Make a change.. reboot.  Many problems with things not compiling were solved when I rebooted… and I hate that. Suspect the installer is not notifying that a reboot is required to finish the install.

After a reboot and launching Visual Studio 2012 it came to its senses and asked me to upgrade to a working version.

Then I worked out the actual issue could be fixed by getting the latest OUYA ODK bindings and building my own version with the version of Mono for Android I had installed.

The install for Visual Studio 2012 broke my install for Visual Studio 2010. Not sure if I can get them to live together and both using MonoGame. There is no XNA or Xbox360 support in Visual Studio 2012 so its a bit of a bummer having Visual Studio 2010 a little broken. Thankfully it only seems to complain at startup and otherwise works, so it is more of an annoyance.

Some Handy Links

Hints on setting up the an OUVA AVD https://devs.ouya.tv/developers/docs/setup

You need to compile the ODK bindings and reference them because whatever is shipped with MonoGame is broken. https://github.com/KonajuGames/ouya-csharp

I’ve not gotten as far as launching a MonoGame app on the actual hardware, but these following links look handy for that.

Windows 7 USB Issues – http://forums.ouya.tv/discussion/45/windows-7-usb-drivers#latest

Installing an APK on the Ouya via an SD card http://dayoftheouya.com/how-to-install-an-apk-on-your-ouya/

Some Handy Hints

When creating a project, don’t suffix the project with  .Android, It seems to screw up the namespacing.

Avoid breaking your projects up into many class projects. This makes the project harder to maintain between platforms.

My OUYA Android AVD

All I have tested this with so far is the MonoGame OUYA  defaults from creating a new Android OUYA project in Visual Studio.

Note above that I limited the RAM to 512M. Windows does not seem to keep many contiguous blocks of RAM laying around larger than 512M. The actual OUYA has 1G but if you are using Windows and try 1G.. *boom*… well it makes a great stress test..  🙂