Pandora (Open Hardware) now available to pre-order

[xoen]

Originally Posted by john4p

Dunno. Don't think the PSP's 333 MHz MIPS CPU is WAY faster than your PDA's 624 MHz ARM CPU (although MHz don't mean much when comparing different architectures).

heh heh, i had ps1 and psp on mind..
but i was not exact - psp is just not only 1 simple cpu, PDA usually is.
nvmd.

[Xytec]

Arm Cortex microprocessor, built in Wireless.

120 Gig.

£129.

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/martprd/pro..._id=HotUKDeals

Hope price is similar?

[xoen]

Originally Posted by Xytec

Arm Cortex microprocessor, built in Wireless.

120 Gig.

£129.

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/martprd/pro..._id=HotUKDeals

Hope price is similar?

it doesnt matter how similar is price if it has NO hardbuttons, LOL.
it is just another 800x480 fail with probable zero soft support.
such babies are killing PDA's.
sry, you hit the string.

btw, such ..thing cannot be compared to Pandora, oh noes.

[chiark]

And the circus continues! The final final sample case has arrived, which was supposed to be production quality, with silk screening.

No Silk screen. Less than perfect finish. Worse then previous quality around the LCD cable hole. Plastic containing different colours, swirls...

So these should not get the green light.
Ho hum

[john4p]

Still 500 might get produced now - just to get "some into the wild". If the problems are just cosmetic I'll gladly get one of those.

But if something is wrong with the hinge (as someone suggested) or the buttons - no, thanks...

[chiark]

agreed. The hinge issue is slightly worrying, and it could very well be that the factory thought, "no point warming everything up, mixing a new batch of whatever" just for 1 sample run...

They should push the button on 500 and see what happens. i guess the unit cost of cases is negligable and it's the mold that's hugely expensive...

[john4p]

You're right:

Originally Posted by Craig

We spoke to the factory over night, everything is cool. Those errors were because the machine was not warmed up/tweaked/cooled. They would never mass produce something with such errors.

They just assumed we would know that.

So, green lighted.

[chiark]

Woohoo! Doesn't explain the hinge or LCD exit though... Still, I really hope that there's a few of these being delivered in February!

[tonyyeb]

Originally Posted by xoen

notice that Amy emulation is far more complicated than that(uh...)..console.
Until i see real vid i'd be cautious then.
624 mhz pxa273 xscale i have in my old but powerful PDA (with probable wifi chip support) is not able to keep Amy emulation even at 80% without sound(usually situation's far worse, sometimes it is 100%, muted - Ruff n'Tumble, i.e.) while being able to emulate everything up to ps1 with full speed.

Pandora's seems to be better, but how good...we will see, maybe.
So far i haven't seen ANY vid with fullspeed, fluid emulation with sound.

i asked about that on pandora forum about yr ago, no conclusions so far, though;/
i am not convinced so far then.

well i am not able to buy one anyway, so...i may need to repair my second c64...pm if someone can help.

Maybe this will help:

[ Show youtube player ]

I like the Super Frog part myself, sounds like near flawless sound to me...

[john4p]

^ Keep in mind it's a quick'n dirty port without Cyclone.

[tonyyeb]

Originally Posted by john4p

^ Keep in mind it's a quick'n dirty port without Cyclone.

I know. Good isn't it.

[T_hairy_bootson]

Also keep in mind that isnt Gn0stic's P-UAE or UAE4ALL, it is full blown UAE.

[john4p]

Originally Posted by tonyyeb

I know. Good isn't it.

Yes. I was just saying because someone might moan about this because it's frameskip 2.

But I just read on GP32X's forums that for this original UAE "frameskip 2" doesn't really mean "frameskip 2" since "frameskip 1" means "draw every frame" for the original UAE.
So this "frameskip 2" really means Turrican II and Superfrog run at 25fps (=frameskip 1) which is damn great for an unoptimized port with perfect sound.

What's even better is we now have 3 Amiga emulators for Pandora: classic UAE, UAE4All and P-UAE.

[nnever2000]

Frameskip 2 is totally crap. I remember used it on my pentium 100 width the Mathias Ortmann's winUAE 0.6.9r12 (too slow otherwise) . Most game have serious gliches (like turrican) because most games altertate bob's for special transparent effect at 1/25 seconds.

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by nnever2000

Frameskip 2 is totally crap. I remember used it on my pentium 100 width the Mathias Ortmann's winUAE 0.6.9r12 (too slow otherwise) . Most game have serious gliches (like turrican) because most games altertate bob's for special transparent effect at 1/25 seconds.

So which handheld would you recommend for 50/60fps Amiga emulation?

D.

[stainy]

Pandora - dummy

[john4p]

Originally Posted by Dunny

So which handheld would you recommend for 50/60fps Amiga emulation?

I'm sure the Pandora will have it - for OCS-titles. Thanks to Cyclone (which has yet to be added).

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by stainy

Pandora - dummy

Originally Posted by john4p

I'm sure the Pandora will have it - for OCS-titles. Thanks to Cyclone (which has yet to be added).

I'm aware of that :-) I was just baiting the chappy who thinks the current achievements are crap...

D.

[T_hairy_bootson]

frankly, i lost interest in pandora but i still develop PUAE (now, 2.0.2 b6 and it has most of the features of winuae 2.0.2)

LINK



SUPER HAPPY FUN EDIT:

Pickle quoting gn0stic

Gnostic puae infact does run on pandora I compiled it a couple days ago, had to hack a couple things to get it to compile though. We have uae, puae, and uae4all running.

LINK

[Dunny]

And now things are really getting stupid in the OP camp. CraigIX (one of the main... well, I don't actually know what he does besides distribution) has started threatening to cancel people's pre-orders if he doesn't like them.

The latest was a chap called Vimacs, who is (or rather was) writing the package system that the Pandora will use - He threatened to pull out and withdraw all his work on the OS because of Craig's behaviour earlier on in the same thread. Craig basically told him that he didn't give a toss, and offered to cancel his order for him. Vimacs cancelled it himself.

The earlier behaviour that caused Vimacs to threaten to leave was Craig's treatment of another forum member, threatening to cancel his preorder too.

People have been cancelling their preorders for a while now, but to my knowledge there are four people that craig has been unprofessional enough to threaten personally (I am one of them, when I called into question his tendency to lie through his back teeth when he proclaimed that the unit would be ready to ship by end of November 2008), and now his attitude and behaviour has gotten so bad that the developers without whom the Pandora will be a useless piece of hardware are now beginning to cancel and pull out.

Who knows where this will all end, but if I were the other members of the OP team I'd be seriously considering removing craig from the team, or at least banning him from talking to the public, for the good of the project as a whole.

D.