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The photo in the engadget link is ANCIENT and by far the ugliest early development pic.

For pics, go here and here:
http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?/topic/53552-look-who-flew-the-nest/
http://twitter.com/craigix

Got this link of their original source with some more pictures: http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?/topic/53552-look-who-flew-the-nest/

Looks like Gruso's blog got slashdotted pretty quickly.

Here's some more links to keep people occupied:

Official Site: http://www.open-pandora.org/
Wikipedia Page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora_(console)
Pandora forums on GP32X: http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?/forum/61-pandora/
Craig Rothwell's Twitter feed (all kids of pics there): http://twitter.com/craigix

Nonsense! I've seen the prototypes. That's more than I can say about DNF.

I get a kick out of craig. He's always spitting out funny quotes.

Wifi nails a lot of battery life, as does the screen. The Pandora devs gave some specific measurements - the Pandora has a separate chip for measuring consumption.

http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?/topic/49385-current-drains-by-speed-and-device/page__view__findpost__p__751966
http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?/topic/49478-pandora-battery-upgrade/page__view__findpost__p__753323

Playing PSX4all at 500MHz: 599mA (peak value I saw) and at 800MHz: 692mA (peak value)

Here was an idling kernel with various backlight settings:
100% - 507mA
88% - 484mA
70% - 456mA
53% - 424mA
35% - 390mA
18% - 364mA
0% - 337mA

You can see that turning that backlight down when not needed can add a fair bit of battery life. You can also see that overclocking the ARM core does not have a significant impact on battery life (relatively speaking). It certainly will reduce battery life but 2x the clock does not mean 1/2 the battery life.

So that puts CPU/GPU power consumption in the sub-100mw range. Under half the consumption of an LED-backlit LCD, and probably still less than OLED.

Really, the solution for phones is to make them bigger. Pockets are fairly large - a bigger phone with a tactile thumb-keyboard, loaded up with a 4200-6000 mah battery and closed-source power management drivers would get ludcrious battery life. Easily a day or two.

Can you imagine a phone as heavy as a Gameboy? That thing would easily have 20k mah in a Li-Po battery. 5-10 days of talk time and usage!

Wifi nails a lot of battery life, as does the screen. The Pandora devs gave some specific measurements - the Pandora has a separate chip for measuring consumption.

http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?/topic/49385-current-drains-by-speed-and-device/page__view__findpost__p__751966
http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?/topic/49478-pandora-battery-upgrade/page__view__findpost__p__753323

Playing PSX4all at 500MHz: 599mA (peak value I saw) and at 800MHz: 692mA (peak value)

Here was an idling kernel with various backlight settings:
100% - 507mA
88% - 484mA
70% - 456mA
53% - 424mA
35% - 390mA
18% - 364mA
0% - 337mA

You can see that turning that backlight down when not needed can add a fair bit of battery life. You can also see that overclocking the ARM core does not have a significant impact on battery life (relatively speaking). It certainly will reduce battery life but 2x the clock does not mean 1/2 the battery life.

So that puts CPU/GPU power consumption in the sub-100mw range. Under half the consumption of an LED-backlit LCD, and probably still less than OLED.

Really, the solution for phones is to make them bigger. Pockets are fairly large - a bigger phone with a tactile thumb-keyboard, loaded up with a 4200-6000 mah battery and closed-source power management drivers would get ludcrious battery life. Easily a day or two.

Can you imagine a phone as heavy as a Gameboy? That thing would easily have 20k mah in a Li-Po battery. 5-10 days of talk time and usage!

And the Pandora has been measured at under half that. ;)

http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?/topic/49385-current-drains-by-speed-and-device/page__p__751966&#entry751966

Here was an idling kernel with various backlight settings:
100% - 507mA
88% - 484mA
70% - 456mA
53% - 424mA
35% - 390mA
18% - 364mA
0% - 337mA

They use a separate chip which is accurate to single digit mA. At 3.6v, 500mA is 1.8 watts?

Wish there was an edit button. :)

Found the link: http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?s=&showtopic=48259&view=findpost&p=733993

If interested, you can search the forums for more info, and look up the Palm Pre battery life.

They will ship somewhere around April or March. That's the whole point of pre-ordering. See the videos, like for example the last one, of a prototype (there are other movies as well, with working ubuntu, openoffice, gimp, etc.. - see the links in OP), which is now heading into mass production.

The OpenPandora guys were wise enough to not take any loans from banks, and so they are safe now despite the worldwide financial crisis. Instead they let people to make preorders about three months ago. People who don't trust, were not required to preorder ;) Their servers almost overloaded when preordering started, anyway. They sold about 1000 units in first 10h (or so - this post was written 17 hours after preordering started). And the first batch is just 4000 units. If you keep your eye on it, maybe you will be lucky to get one from the second batch, there are lots of people who want it.

I have preordered the Pandora console and I'm happy. It gives me about 10h of running Ubuntu on an ARM cpu in a mere 0.3 kg of weight.

Oh thre's also an unofficial blog and a video vault. You might like the forums too.

Once again I gotta reply to this thread and ask that you guys take a look at the GP2X

I bought one and I never looked back at the other guys/soldiers out here (I'm deployed to Iraq) who bought PSPs and all they talk about is how damn crippled the DRM-loving Sony PSP is.

And no I'm not a frigging paid shill damnit. Just a happy owner of a product that actually listens to its customers

For what other games console can you name 400 developers? (grin) You can go to gp32x.com right now and get yourself a list of thriving coders making daily releases.

The GP2X has 2 released commercial games, not 'just 1'. And over 1,000 non-commercial releases. This is why its hot: its a wild frontier for people to get their game code on unhindered by competition and market posession by bigger fish.

EB, and other retail outlets, are owned by commercial developers, and people with a vested interest in seeing that homebrew consoles don't edge in on that space. Don't count on such vendors ever letting in the 'little guys' - this doesn't mean the little guy won't grow, though. 40,000 shipped units is not a trifle, and if you're a homebrew developer looking to cottage-industry your apps into a viable expanding market, this is it. 1,000 customers is still a lotta moolah for the little guy.

Every single day we hear of new coders working on apps for the GP2X, and almost every week we hear of someone in this community making a deal for real $$$ with their games and apps. This isn't going to stop, and is a viable tractor of new innovation..

Case in point: Did you ever think you'd run this on your portable game console, with a simple download? How about this?

Its a nice hack indeed, to add IDE to a DS, but if you invest in an Open Game Console in the first place, you'll find its not so hard to do yourself ..

There are plenty of emulators, freeware games and utilities. There is also stuff for the previous-generation GP32.

After agreeing to provide the Linux kernel source a few months ago, GamePark is still not in compliance. Their latest firmware release is missing the I2C drivers. And the modified MPlayer source is still missing. :(

There is plenty of room in the market for another hand-held gaming platform, especially an open one .. noticed something? All the handhelds, bar one, are closed to open development.

This means there's a market for an open-development handheld ..

God how about some quality control? the original article is plain wrong. 1: GPH are not responsible for the source code of the version of linux used by the device. It is subcontracted to these guys : http://www.dignsys.com/eng/ . 2: you can get the source code at http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?showtopic=226 50 3: read the GPL at somepoint. It only says companies must make the source code available on request, not the time scale in which it has to be provided (as long as they make reasonable efforts to provide it) Can we get the original post either deleted or modified to reflect that the writer getting hysterical about the supposed GPL violations just didn't check the facts?

Firstly, if nothing is released publicly, how the hell is anybody meant to know that you've made changes, and secondly, it's the distribution that is the ket issue. Don't distribute binaries created from modified sources, no need to distribute changes. Cannot say fairer than that.

Anyway, as others have pointed out, the source code is available. There's no story here.

Check this out: http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?showtopic=226 50 The source code has been released 1st Dec 2005.

Look here or here (Spanish) and see if this is enought for you.

So where are all the GP2X stories on slashdot?

.. this is the hand-held linux portable machine de-jour...

i mean, you can't beat the last 3 weeks worth of nice, adventurous, linux-like hacking the gp2x has had done for it, nossir.. way ahead of the pack.

.. this is the hand-held linux portable machine de-jour...

i mean, you can't beat the last 3 weeks worth of nice, adventurous, linux-like hacking the gp2x has had done for it, nossir.. way ahead of the pack.

The frequent reason I see people having for getting a GP(insert version) is running various emulators. And I highly doubt people will be dumping and playing their own personal ROMs/ISOs of classic games they own.

Lets not forget homebrew, you can get clunky open source PDA applications and games. NO wait a minute, what am I saying.... That can't be true, they never do clones/knock-offs, all their stuff is 100% A+++ quality & bug free, and they sure are not "... full of posers" that fancy themselves to be the saviors of this current "sorry state" of the games/applications/etc industire(s)....

I think the GP32x is a good system(PDA stuff, plays videos, music, homebrew apps, emulators, etc), but I highly doubt this system is going to do jack against the industries as much as people like him claim. Look at the links they provided for crying out loud, it is funny how a section labeled "General [GP32]- Reviews" is full of reviews for SNES, NES, Atari, etc ROMs. And linking to a German and Korean site really does good to sell one the system.

If it is anything like the last one, expect little to no impact. At the most I expect it to do better then the Gizmondo.

i can see plenty of reasons why this is a puff piece, designed to distract from the truth ...

the game industry is full of posers, tho' ..

320x240 is the IDEAL screen for emulation which is one of its main points. That page you linked to is comparing the gp2x to the xgp, not the gp32. The gp32 has a 320x240 resolution. The company that made the gp32 in 2001 split into two companies, one called gamepark (the original company name) and one called gamepark holdings. Gamepark is working on the xgp which hasn't been released yet. It is trying to market the xgp as a commercial game system. Gamepark holdings is working on the gp2x which is being marketed as an open source system that is IDEAL for emulators and media. If you don't believe that the 320x240 resolution is better than the 480x272 resolution, please check out the comparison on the bottom of this page:
http://www.gp32x.com/gpx2xgp.php

http://www.gp32x.com/gpx2xgp.php

they went from a 4" widescreen capable of 480x272 to a 3.5" 3:2 screen capable of 320x240................

why?

i won't buy a PSP because they cripple video playback, and now a completely open platform comes along....... but with a crap screen. :(

"What does a kid care about the OS? He wants something cool to play with!"

Show me the game you made on your PSP; 'Fun' and 'Making' are not mutually exclusive.

I think you've missed the point of this device - the successor of the hugely popular GamePark 32.

I'm look at this page (http://www.gp32x.com/gpx2xgp.php) which compares the two handhelds. Is there another page I should be looking at?

I like big screens too. I read a review the other on the gb micro that just came out and while the guy said the screen is a lot nicer rpgs are difficult becausethe text is too small. I mainly play rpgs so I think I'll be giving that one a miss and sticking with the sp. the gp2x looks appealing though.

Wake me up when I can download (for free) the Generation NEX development kit, and can find a way to get my home-brew apps on cartridge format for cheap.

If you want retro-gaming resurrection, look no further than GPX32, Gamepark et al, yo.

http://members.lycos.co.uk/fangeles/gp32/cross/qte /gpqte1044.jpg
http://members.lycos.co.uk/fangeles/gp32/cross/qte /2/Image-01.jpg
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gp32linux
http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?showforum=35

Or is it a "good, fast, cheap, pick two, tough shit" situation?

Yes, but it's more like a "open, popular -- pick one" situation. A friend of mine is a GP32 developer. The architecture is completely open, he bought it to hack on it more than to play with it. In fact, he's now maintaining the Linux kernel port for the specific ARM architecture of the GP32 port.

And yes, nobody else had a GP32 in his town when he bought it (or in his state, maybe even country(!), for that matter). But he found a very exciting user and developer community on the internet. So the installer base in [whatever specific place you are] is not that relevant.

Still, after seeing the GP32, I was almost tempted to buy one for myself (but I was broke at the time). Chances are, if you buy one, your friends might follow suit.

And emulators work like a charm, so there's no shortage of games, especially if you're into the classics. ;)

Looked at the GP32? I don't know how large it is in the world, but it has/had decent hardware and a homebrew scene. Console done right.
GP32 xtreme got news.
GBAX sells it.
Emuholic got emus.
GP32 devrs got the tools.

How about the GP32?
It's a completely open handheld gaming system
more info at GP32 Xtreme, one of the biggest GP32 community sites

It's easy to play old SNES games on a plane. Get yourself a Gamepark GP32. It looks like a GBA, but has tons of freeware apps and emulators. I picked mine up on Ebay, dirt cheap.

sorry about the link... wrong copy paste I suppose ;-)
it shoud have been this one, I beg your pardon.

The GP32 and the forthcoming Zodiac are both excellent homebrew handhelds.

The Tapwave is really just a Palm designed for gaming.

Read up on them, many emu's came out for the GP32 and the Zodiac promises much of the same. It will most likely have full speed SNES and Genesis before long. Givens are NES, TG16, ATARI, GB/GBC, and possibly MAME and Neo-Geo.

Or how about a GP32 and a phone?

BTW, don't buy a GP32 is you aren't technically adept. It's not a GBA. It's not much harder to use than a MP3 player, but it's not idiot proof like a GBA.

How about a GP32 instead?
You can pack quite a bit of video onto a 128MB SMC and the screen is nicer than the GBA.

If you are looking for a handheld console that has a free SDK, can be used with any development environment on Linux, Mac or Windows then have a look at the GamePark 32 which is available in Korea and soon into Europe.

I recommend looking at the GP32 site though as it has better descriptions, reviews, news and gives you a great overview of what is possible. It is the first 'Open' console that's been produced and already has quite a 'bedroom' community that has sprung up around it.

Not only it is open, it just happens to be the most powerful handheld console out there and there's ports of Doom, Heretic on it already as well as Atari ST, Gameboy, SMS, PC Engine and Megadrive emulators. It has a built in MP3 player and you can also plays DivX movies if you pay a small fee (3.50/$6) for the player. All the commerical games for it are very cheap too - most in the 7/$12 bracket.

In short it is superb and runs on standard Smart Media Cards so once you've bought the console you aren't tied to buying proprietry hardware like the Gameboy.

So, you have no excuses now - buy one, start developing and make money! :)

Yeah, why not just get a GP32 instead? They go for ~$200 with the backlight.

The emulators for the GP32 get better every day. NES, SNES, C64, Atari 2600, Atari 800, Atari 5200, ST, GBC, Genesis...if only a MAME port would be finished!

The new Divx and Mp3 players for the GP32 rock too.

Yes, it's the GP32 that has a 320x240 screen (and stereo sound and a 133MHZ CPU and uses SMC cards instead of cartidges and...)

It does play ogg.

Nowhere in that list does it say "Game Boy Advance" or "GBA". Considering that it lists the Game Boy separately from the Game Boy Color, I think it's a bit presumptuous to say that it supports GBA games just because you see that category there.

So, seeing as how it does not actually support GBA games, I don't find it superior to my GBA, which *does* play GBA games.

My sons have GBC and GBA original consoles and I have played them and an SP at wally world.

I like my GP32 better. It fits the hand better and the joystick is orders of magnitude better than the GBA D-pad.

Also, it runs lots of emulators and ports, plus MP3 and Divx video players. It's amazing how much stuff fits on a 128MB SMC card.