Slashdot Mirror
First Pandora Console Reaches Customer
neogramps writes "It's been a long time coming, but the first Pandora consoles are finally rolling off of the production line. (Well, this one actually walked out the door to a customer who lived near the 'factory.') Initial estimates had put production and development at taking two months, but Murphy had other ideas. Banking issues, design problems, problems communicating with the Chinese moulding company, escalating assembly costs, and even a volcano all managed to get in the way, but the small and dedicated team soldiered on, and just over a year and a half later, the wait is coming to an end for the 4,000 pre-orderers."
Shouldn't that be "soldered"?-)
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
2 years ago these specs would have been exciting, but with smartphones already pushing over 1ghz and 512mb ram, I don't see the appeal. Pandora seems destined to be an emulator lover's delight and not much more. Sure you can run android on it, but it only has a 600mhz processor and 256mb ram. The same specs as a motorola droid. I guess $300 is an ok price to play every console game before the playstation, but my laptop does that and has a nice big screen too. 2 years ago I would have drooled at this machine (and I did), but anymore it seems like it will be so radically obsolete in a short period of time. My phone is already portable internet enough for me. If anything, I'd much rather have a nice 8-10" tablet that I can share my phone's 3g connection with. Once the tablets start getting near the $300 price point, I think things will get pretty interesting. I guess you could say that the pandora is like the ultimate portable console, but only if you don't want to play any newer games.
zosxavius photography
but where are the games?
The Droid Incredible appears to be more powerful while weighing half as much and fitting in a pocket comfortably. Just add a game controller...
The Pandora team has repeatedly promised a product merely months away from completion. That they could be so consistently wrong again and again so many times is implausible. On the other hand, getting random people on the internet to fund your startup for $1 million+ based on a product that won't be released for years is much less likely than getting them to pay for a product "only two months away." This is the far more likely motivation for the ridiculous number of missed ship dates.
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
Don't open the box!
This ain't rocket surgery.
Anyone else read this as "soldered on"?
Anon
Lovely accessed denied... just a snapshot of site:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Oa6IgGHvHHUJ:pandorapress.net/+site:pandorapress.net+pandorapress.net&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
That is Google cache version, not really helpful imo.
http://www.engadget.com/2007/12/20/gp2x-community-system-dubbed-pandora/
There is your engadget version, they always have nice pretty pictures there.
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
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/
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
When no one was looking, Pandora took four thousand pre orders. It took 4000 thousand pre orders. That's as many as four thousands. And that's terrible.
i just don't get the "just add a game controller"... Are you guys carrying a controller permanently? Buy a netbook then!
Pandora is about being pocketable, running a full Linux distro and having full gaming controls... please don't compare it to phones and non-qwerty gaming handhelds...
Gosh, their logo looks familiar, I wonder where I could have seen it before.
If I buy one of those, does Zoe-whats-her-name come with the package???? Tall (10 ft!). blue-skinned, nice real piece of tail....every basement boy's dream... :-)))))))))))
Seems like a name/trademark conflict as they could reasonably be considered to be in the same target market space.
If focus is on emulation, it's coming a little bit late, since PSP runs almost any console game up to N64/PSX.
slashwhat?
Because there is such a vibrant open source game selection. I mean there's Tux Racer, that Civ 2 clone, that Puzzle Bobble Clone... ummm, did I mention Tux Racer?
Seriously, gaming is one area that OSS does not seem to do well in. There are very few OSS games out there, and they tend to be of poor quality and/or knockoff of old commercial games. Now compare that to the Nintendo DS's games library, which is what this will have to compete with by the way.
I just do not see the appeal.
I mean if you want a portable game unit, well then DS has this beat hands down. Not only does it have far, far, FAR more games and most of those are of professional quality, but it is cheaper too. It is between $170 (for the unit) to $200 (for the unit and all accessories).
Now this thing would also work as a simple, netbook type computer. Ok, except there again you can get another, better device: An actual netbook. For the same price ($330) you can get an MSI Wind U135 which has an Atom, 250GB HD, and Windows on it. There are far more games that'll run on that than this Pandora device.
As I said, I just fail to see the appeal.
Yeah, it is a far better game platform, except for the controls but who needs controls to play a game?
Talk about not getting the point. This ain't about CPU power, it is about having all those controls available on the hardware.
What next, an article on a sports car being slammed because a jet fighter is far faster so race that instead?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
When no one was looking, Pandora took four thousand pre orders. It took 4000 thousand pre orders. That's as many as four thousands. And that's terrible.
Pfft. I'll start worrying when it's over nine thousand.
This seems to be the only device that fits in your pocket, has reasonable specs, and isn't crippled by the manufacturer to lock us in/extort us. I want to run Linux on this thing with a CLI and play classic PC games like Duke3D, Doom, Quake, etc. I don't give a rat's behind about phone functionality, or if it is what all the hip and trendy people cary around.
I also want to use this thing to replace my Cowon D2 as a PMP.
Sooo when will I be able to order one ?
Let's put it this way then: are you all about retrogaming? If yes, Pandora is for you; if not, go buy a PSP or be an Apple fanboy. Thanks. Goodbye
It's an "open source" handheld with an eager development community, and games and other apps will come quickly once the hardware is released to the wild. By the time the pre-orders are complete and anyone not in the queue will be able to purchase one (and that will take a few months at this rate), there will be dozens of games available. Give it some time.
http://xkcd.com/644/
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I've been looking at their site and wikipedia and I haven't dug much up. There are a number of commercial chips in there, so the hardware is largely closed.
They're using a "PowerVR SGX530" in there, and IIRC the PowerVR chips don't usually have FOSS drivers, so you might be SOL on that software front.
Anyone have links or notes for the rest of the drivers?
coding is life
I tried to play one of the Total Annihilation clones on the SpringRTS engine.
I was laughing so hard at the horrible user interface I nearly cried. After a few minutes of fucking with it, and not feeling the urge to read manuals, I gave up and went back to Supreme Commander.
First Pandora's Box opened!
So what games does it support? There is nothing on the home page except the hardware specs. If im in the market for a hand held game machine the first thing i need to know are my games supported.That home page says nothing,and didn't hold my attention,not very much thought went into advertising that's for sure.
Jack of all trades,master of none
Will it run nethack?
It sure looks like my Zipit. http://www.zipitwireless.com/
Kriston
Given that you'd be downloading the ROMs online, and not paying for them. So I suppose that is a narrow market for it: If you want to emulate old games, are ok with not paying for them, and want to do it a small form factor then ok. However that is a rather narrow market there. After all anyone who wants to play emulated games at home would be better served with simply running them on a regular computer (or even a game console for that matter).
I just don't see this as being very interesting personally.
Anyone agree? My new Qi Hardware Nanonote could sure use it...
The n900 CPU (another OMAP3 at the same clock) is well-known to OC over 50% inside a much smaller case.
All the people who pre-ordered where investors, anything else is in fact a lie. I believe for the second batch they will probably raise prices by a bit and automate some parts of the process which they did manually on the first run. I long for mine and hope I get it before my trip to london in july.
This is so obsolete already! This is lame. What a turd.
They're using their grammar skills there.
I fixed my blog, kinda. Thanks for breaking it :P
http://pinopsida.com
the open Pandora is meant as a gaming umpc not a hand held. it can run a psx emu for the guy who said it cant. they where going to use the atom prosser but found the arm cortex to give them a much better battery life why then can get 10 hrs. and the cortex is a pretty fast prosser on its own. the powervr they are using does have oss drivers.the entire platform is oss. this umpc runs a full blown linux distro desined for it with touch screen support. so its a pocket sized pc that can game not a ds. its specks i will admit are kinda dated being it took them 2 years to get it out the door. but its still a full fledged pocket pc with gaming abiltys.
What you're getting with the Pandora is a hand-held, arm powered laptop - umpc if you prefer - with OpenGLES 2.xaccelerated graphics. Play your videos and music with it. Mix music, browse the web, do your normal desktop stuff with it, emulate arcade games, NES games, or, potentially, N64 games. Tinker with it to your heart's content. Put Android OS on it. Develop your own games for it. Or play some of the games the development community's been working on, or ported.
It's not for everybody, but it's one of the first open consoles to have accelerated 3D which makes it exciting for a bunch of us home brew guys. It also has wifi and bluetooth. The wifi is a nice touch as I anticipate decent network play on some of the games.
It'll never rival the PSP or DS for sales, which eliminates the larger software houses as developers, but there are independent developers who've expressed interest in it.
What'll be interesting to see is how much interest it has two months(tm) after the first batchers have their Pandoras in their hands and some of the projects targeted for it get released. Even if round 2 doesn't have many orders, I believe the current batch of developers will give the hand-held their enthusiastic support. If it DOES have decent sales, the potential to interest at least a few published independent game developers increases dramatically.
But can your PSP play N64 games?
Uh, yes?
But only those few that are officially ported to PSP and in the PSN store. As I understand it, Sony has been rawther proactive in closing PSP jailbreaks, especially since the PSP-3000 closed the service battery method. Unlike Nintendo, which takes three to six months to respond to a given jailbreak, Sony tends to have a new firmware version out within a week.
Don't you already own a cell phone?
Yes. It makes calls. It doesn't get on the Internet. That's why I have an $80 per year plan with Virgin Mobile. Besides, U.S. carriers tend to charge extra for tethering because PCs with a 10" or bigger screen tend to run apps that use more data than phones with a 4" screen.
No where near enough value for the cost compared to a cracked PSP Slim
PSP-2000 is no longer available new, and I'd bet a lot of older ones have had firmware updates applied to them.
if all you want to do with it is play games.
Sometimes I want both a keyboard and a gamepad. For example, I might have a Z-machine text adventure on my card; how well does a PSP run those?
If all you want to do is play $50 commercial games, buy a PSP or NDS or some other big-name console and play it.
I have a DS Lite. I even bought the official $35 homebrew kit and the official $35 browser kit. But those are far too limiting for what I want them to do, and I don't want to have to carry two devices in my pocket, one exclusively for major-label games and one exclusively for indie games.
Also with touchscreen, hardware buttons are obsolete because you can have as many buttons as you want on a touchscreen.
Sega tried putting an on-screen gamepad on an iPhone to port the Sonic games, but it failed because a touch screen has no tactile response. On a keyboard or traditional gamepad, you can feel the edges of the buttons as your fingers slide over them. But on a multitouch screen, you don't know whether your left thumb is over the left direction or the up direction, and you don't know whether your right thumb is over the jump button or the fire button. And I wasted $5 to put Tetris on my aunt's iPhone before I realized that the control was so damn much clunkier than, say, the control in Tetris DS and LJ65.
Also it's not a console (i.e. sits in your entertainment center under your TV). It's a handheld. So when are we going to see the Phantom Console roll out? ;-)
It's at Best Buy today, and it's called an Acer Aspire Revo. It has six USB ports for plugging in a keyboard, mouse, and four gamepads, and VGA and HDMI outputs for your HDTV powered by NVIDIA GeForce graphics.
What can i do with Pandora that i cannot with an iPad or Kindle or even an iPod touch.
A bunch of things:
I used to run SNES games on an old Pentium 133 that we dialed into AOL with, using a 28.8k modem.
But how accurate was the emulation? A lot of the older emulators made assumptions about the platform that improved the speed of emulation but caused some games not to run properly. Nor did they support coprocessors like the ones used in Star Fox and Super Mario RPG. It's like the difference between Nesticle and Nestopia: Pandora can run some of the more accurate emulators (though admittedly not bsnes, which is the Nintendulator of SNES emulation).
I heard it was going to ship with a pre-installed copy of Duke Nukem Forever.
Under the law of Slashdot's home country, downloading games from the Internet is copyright infringement ( UMG v. MP3.com ), but dumping your own is not (17 USC 117(a)(1)). With PlayStation, if you own the authentic game disc and a PC with a CD drive, you can dump the game to an ISO. With Super NES and Genesis, if you own the Game Pak and a Retrode cartridge reader, you can dump the game to a ROM. NES is far more difficult, as the copier comes as a kit soldered into the NES, but there are also some freeware games for the NES, such as my own LJ65.
The DSi looks pretty cool, but why that doesn't have the Wii store like the Wii does is beyond me.
You might have forgotten that DSi has DSi Shop. But like you, I'm puzzled as to why DSi Shop doesn't have Virtual Console when PocketNES and Goomba proved that the older games can run on a machine with 1/8 of the DSi's CPU power.
If they had managed to persuade a few developers to take the risk and write something - even a simple puzzle game or a port of an existing title - this would have a lot more hope of taking off.
If you want a port of an existing simple puzzle game, I've got just the ticket: install an NES emulator and LJ65, then install a GBA emulator and TOD and Luminesweeper.
Have you ever tried playing Tetris with a touch screen? My aunt has it on her iPhone, and there's no way that a player using its control scheme can get nearly as fast as I can with a traditional D-pad.
That those giant Smurfs in Avatar play, isn't it?
My missus gave me her iPod Touch when she upgraded to an iPhone and, don't get me wrong, it's a neat little device, despite the fact I've never had the urge to buy anything from Apple.
However, as a mainly Linux and ex-GP32 user, I can definitely see the Touch going on eBay and the money I get for it going towards one of these - it may be quite a bit bigger than a Touch but as far as I'm concerned, "portable" means that it just needs to fit into a pocket, and closed locked-down devices where I can't do what I want with it just don't float my boat these days.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Who cares about games? I used to have a Zaurus, and it was (mostly) great for note-taking, calendaring, web surfing, MP3 playing, even casual video viewing. Plus, it ran Linux, was pretty hackable and had a terminal. And it fit nicely in a pocket, although it was a tad heavy. My Symbian smartphone sorta kinda does (most of) the same things, but not quite as well and it doesn't have a proper keyboard.
I want a pocket computer, but nobody makes those anymore now that everything, for some reason, has to look like a damn Iphone. The Pandora looks very interesting. If only they hadn't wasted so much space on those game controller thingies and instead made the keyboard a little bit bigger.
... but our options increased
-- dnl
I can see this as the start for something real big. If they make enough money off of this, they could probably start to put more powerful hardware in this thing. And it already seems powerful enough as it is! XBox level graphics are nothing to sneeze at since the XBox, correct me if I am wrong, was the more powerful console of its generation right? Not many handhelds can boast that level of graphics capability. On the other hand, I do worry about that processor. Using a processor meant for phones and the like seems self defeating since they don't have to restrict themselves to that small of a device. Size matters nowadays, but they should take better advantage of the fact that their device isn't meant to be used with a pair of tweezers. Other than all of that, the thing to keep in mind is that this is a grassroots group. For all that they have done, taking their concept and actually DEPLOYING the fucking thing, I tip my tower of hats to them. I look forward to deploying games to this platform, as I already fully support Linux with my work whenever possible.
Boredom is bliss.
I read they already ported Quake3 to these, so that means Tremulous and DBZ mods will all work awesome.
Doom3 port was being derived from how someone ran that program with a mere Voodoo2 to Voodoo5, so that means it'll be a clean'd optimized engine without Shader and Pixel effects but with an edge over other PC players by being a playable responsive framerate.
My hat is off to them, because they will take charge to reprove that Doom3 engine to perhaps be even back-ported to run on other PDA's, Phones, embedded or tablets, and computers dating back to a AMD K6-2.
The Stock Ticker is reporting over 9000 YEN!
OVER NINE-THOUUUUWWWWSSSSAAAAAANNNNDDD!
Yeaaarrrrrr!
Porting all the Loki Entertainment Software programs to these would bring that company back online for sure. Only 10'years late for Kohan/ImmortalSovereign, Heroes of Might and Magic 3, Myth 2, Heretic 2, and Heavy Gear.