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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...
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.
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
well, it's certainly not over nine thousand...
RUGBYRUGBYRUGBY
I don't carry a game controller because I play touchscreen games on my touchscreen phone.
Pandora is certainly not pocketable.
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.
i dont think psp is powerful enough to run an NTSC SNES game well. besides, since the pandora is open, i expect programmers will take a stronger liking to optimizing their programs for it. they might know how to take advantage of it's hardware better since sony probably keeps the best psp programming secrets for themselves.
Nintendo DS is not pocketable. The DS Lite is, uncomfortably.
Sooo when will I be able to order one ?
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
That's not a sign of popularity, that's as many as they could commit to building.
It is very much a guerilla operation and not a competitor to the DS, PSP, or even the GP2x. Show a little respect.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Pandora is certainly not pocketable.
My Nokia 770 and a folding keyboard fit together in an inside jacket pocket. The Pandora is a similar size to the 770 alone (0.4mm taller, 0.5mm deeper) and weights the same amount. The 770 fits very comfortably in a jacket pocket, without deforming the outline at all - it's smaller than a large wallet.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
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.
One of them is a web radio station, one of them makes a pocket netbook. I'm really not seeing how their markets overlap.
I fixed my blog, kinda. Thanks for breaking it :P
http://pinopsida.com
WOOOOOOSH!
That's the sound of two memes flying past you while performing some sort of perverted sexual act.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Hah I wasn't paying attention.
My bad. :)
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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.
I play touchscreen games
D-pad game systems exist because some popular genres are not well suited to a touch screen.
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.
Actually, the team admits that the missed launch dates were largely caused by lack of experience (expecting Chinese factories to be punctual and completely fluent in English; completely underestimating the complexity of the project; not knowing that you can't take CC payments for something you don't ship shortly afterwards), although bad luck also figured in (a bank froze their assets for "suspicious transactions" (money from the preorders coming in); a subcontractor went bankrupt and they had to commission and pay for a crucial part again; the volcano eruption delayed parts shipments by a week).
They initially estimated about a year of development time, IIRC.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
The Pandora normally runs at 500 MHz (to conserve power) and is formally specced at 600 MHz. Each CPU is expected but not guaranteed to do 720 MHz and one prototype is known to run stable at 900 MHz.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)