The next steps
February 9, 2010
The green light shone. The roar went up. The blog went down. And here we sit, pensive in the afterglow. So what happens next? Let’s take a look at what the coming weeks have in store.
We are pushing them to ship us 500 on friday. [...] The factory have already been instructed to get on with it, we should hear something today. We don’t know if they will manage it, but we hope they will. They have told us pretty much every customer makes this week hell for them.
(craigix)
Why only 500, when the factory is capable of doing a thousand or more per day? The aforementioned pre-CNY rush is a major factor. If they did produce the full batch this week, they probably wouldn’t have time to get them packed and shipped:
The major part of making cases isn’t necessarily molding the parts, but carefully packaging up the parts for shipping. Final parts don’t get shipped like samples do which is crammed into plastic bags inside one big box. Regardless of how many cases can be made [this] week, the limitation is on how many can be safely packaged and shipped. That is why Craig wants to pick a reasonable number to ship before the CNY.
(MWeston)
Realistically it’s going to take a couple of weeks to get the first 500 Pandoras assembled, tested and shipped, so the CNY break should not represent a noticeable delay for the over-500 crew. Updates on the case situation should be incoming soon; in the meantime, let’s look at software.
Populating the appstore is on the list of things to get done before launch.
(craigix)
you can be sure I’ll try to put as much nice software as possible (and ported by cpasjuste or pickle
) onto the File Archive in nice .pnd-Format
(EvilDragon)
And, some last minute magic from Notaz:
notaz rocks! Looks like he eliminated the omafb and X11 crashing bug! Tried some games (SuperTux, SMW, Vice, ScummVM,…) and no crash!
(EvilDragon)
For a smattering of titles that are likely to be available on day one, try this delicious pastry.
All quote sources can be found in this thread.
Cool…dunno if I’m in the first 500, but that’d be nice. Ordered pretty early on Sept 30, 2008…P-Day.
Great !
A couple of weeks for 500 Only…
Humm… guessing the last in queue will have Pandora around this summer then ?
I wonder if things like GLBasic will be available one day for the Pandora.
I would like something easy to dev with not like C/C++ and SDL.
Don’t worry, they’ll start off slow with assembly but it will ramp up as they go. At full speed they’ll be into the hundreds per day.
How strange that I should misread craigix’s comment:
“Populating the appstore is on the list of things to get done before lunch.”
Wouldnt surprise that much though since it is craig, considering how time optimistic he have been this whole journey.
Gad, I can’t believe this is actually happening. Seems I’ll be embracing a Panda soon too. My daughter got hers today but its a roboPanda not an all-black beautiful sexy Panda like mine will be. Guess I’m just trying to not feel jealous.
Now I want a panda with my panda. THANKS A BUNCH.
yo dawg…
All good progress. Wish it wasn’t called an ‘appstore’ though, surely we can be more imaginative than that?
I remember someone suggesting ‘box’ originally and that’s pretty cool… pandora’s box etc.
I’d love to have a box that could take a huge load of games. sounds like a great name to me.
appstore doesn’t feel right does it? it feels like something from that fruit company
It’s copyrighted anyway, so it won’t be called appstore.
Yeah, I think it’s the “app” bit I hate. Just sounds like it’s been lifted out of computers for dummies/noobs or something.
It’s such a one-off project, seems a shame to copy the name off something else. Just thought there was a bit more originality around here with all the artists/programmers/designers that have contributed to the project
appstore sounds like shit.
pnd store hmm!
PNDBOX should be the name!!!
Check the boards for several threads in which the name is discussed. No need to fill up the blog too, imo
Here’s hoping for grease-free pandora cases. Fingers crossed.
There will be no charge for the grease.
Current app list:
GAMES:
Gianas Return, Abuse, Battle for Wesnoth, BlobWars, Descent 1, Descent 2, Doom, FHeroes Port (Heroes Of Might And Magic 2), FreeCiv 2.1.9, Hexen II, OpenLiero, OpenTyrian, Pandora Panic!, Powermanga, Quake 1, Quake 2, Quake 3, Reminiscence (flashback), SuperTux 1, SuperTux 2, Tecnoballz, The Mana World, Ur-Quan Masters, Wolf4SDL
EMULATORS:
DosBox, Mupen64plus (big maybe), PAtari, PicoDrive, PSMS, PSnes, PSX4all (medium sized maybe), ScummVM, UAE4all, VICE
List as seen on forum 9-feb-2010 14:00 (this post can not be updated!)
Wasn’t there a port of Sonic Robo Blast 2
Or you could’ve seen that same list by looking that the linked thread in the post above.
Nice list of ports there though, but where are the original concepts? All I can see is Pandora Panic.
Just to clarify, I threw that list together based on what was marked as “working build” on the wiki & has been run on Pandora hardware already, as well as all the videos we’ve seen. There is a heap more stuff in development, but these are the ones I figure we’re likely to see in the appstore(/appbox/whatever) pretty soon.
@levi: The reason there are mostly ports and not many original titles in the list, is that Cpasjuste and Pickle have Pandoras and most devs don’t. There are lots of projects out there just waiting for some hardware to test on, so the list should explode with heaps of original stuff in the first month.
Ah, that’s good then. I look forward to seeing more
Ohmygod. I read the list and many of the games are also ported for Wii homebrew. But Abuse. That would be so awesome on big screen with Wii controllers, while waiting the second batch of Pandora. Tried to google “abuse wii” and all I found was sites about child abuse.
This seems like sensible approach from OP, 500 cases… Thats enough to evaluate the case quality properly and not too much of a problem if there are still things to tweak. then its also more likely to get done and packed and mailed at the factory end… also a reasonal number to assemble in the first 2 weeks of the assembly learning curve (then packed and shipped etc).
250 one week and 250 the next… so no pie in the sky asperations… Superb!
Fingers crossed then. Good luck team, we are rooting for you to succeed even if we are a fairly histerical bunch!
No, that’d be forgetting the 2 week long CNY which comes in 5 more days. In fact, until you suggested making sure on a smaller test run, I couldn’t understand why a 1k order wasn’t made, as even the most conservative reading of the facts says we should easily be able to get.
No mate, the 2 weeks to try n build 500 finished units plus pack and ship them to us IS the Chinese new year… after that the chinese will be back at work for the next green light which (if all is well) theoretically could be “10,000 more like these ones as fast as you can send em please!”
Or am i missing your point?
Am I the only one incredibly disappointed by this post? Over here: http://pandorapress.net/2010/02/02/ed-tweets-fatihs-feats/#more-2992
We were told “They need the green light by the 8th in order to produce 4,000 cases before they hit the red cordial for two weeks.”
And now you’re telling us it’s impossible to hit the 4000 cases by then. Over in the boards, someone suggested a small batch of 500 to see if they were right – if they weren’t we could send them to people who didn’t mind cases with cosmetic imperfections – and then this was decided to be unnecessary because of the response from the Chinese company.
We’ve repeatedly been told they can pump out a thousand (or more?) a day. That’s meaningless if it takes them several days to package said thousand. (Yet another awful time estimate from OP?) Sure, the company has other people with pressure to finish before CNY, but they’ve been stringing us along for quite some time now, and deserve to give us some extra priority. Didn’t we get a promise that they’d ship us at least 1000 first, and then do the rest? Did we get these things in writing?
This gives me incentive to work on Onee-sama Tasukete. Just sayin’. If I start now I might be able to get it ready before all first batch Pandora’s have been released. >_>
Wtf, that was supposed to appear at the bottom, not in a reply. O_o
I’m a little bit disappointed too. I mean, first I was sad because I thought the production would start after Chinese New Year.
Then happiness when I found out the green light was given yesterday which should have meant all the 4000 would be produced before CNY.
I thought they said they would produce 1000 cases each day, and all would be well if the green light was given yesterday. And now I hear that even though they were on time, the Chinese Company only ships 500 cases before CNY?
Well, I’ll hope that I’m 1 of the first 500 then
Not incredibly disappointed, no. More resigned to the situation.
Just how bad is your reading comprehension exactly?
“The major part of making cases isn’t necessarily molding the parts, but carefully packaging up the parts for shipping. Final parts don’t get shipped like samples do which is crammed into plastic bags inside one big box. Regardless of how many cases can be made [this] week, the limitation is on how many can be safely packaged and shipped. That is why Craig wants to pick a reasonable number to ship before the CNY.”
-MWeston
So even if the could blow through 4000 cases before CNY, they have to carefully ship them or they just end up looking trashed.
My reading’s just fine, thanks. How’s yours?
I saw that comment, and want want to know why this is the first we’ve heard of this extra time cost. As I already asked:
“We’ve repeatedly been told they can pump out a thousand (or more?) a day. Thats meaningless if it takes them several days to package said thousand. (Yet another awful time estimate from OP?)”
What gives? Or is this another one of those “Oh, it’s easy to do” … oops, it will take a while, though, and we haven’t started yet.
I’m sure the company could pump out thousands of cases a day… if OP was their only customer. The company that is making the cases isn’t small. They have other customers, and I’m sure they are all pushing them to get their own stuff shipped before the CNY. And when it comes down to it, I’m sure the large majority of those other customers are much larger than OP, and the company has much more incentive to worry about their orders.
Also, you don’t have to schedule machine time to package already made cases. OP never said the company would send them 4000 cases in 4 days, they said they could make a thousand per day. The last thing OP wants is to have their cases sitting in China for 2 weeks doing nothing because of the CNY.
Sitting and doing nothing but being shipped the 1st day after CNY and not to wait to have them done: wait another month just to fit into a slot in this factory.
It is easier to make all of them at once then to make them by 500…
I agree with Anon on this. The articles had said that they could make 4000 before CNY. I had also taken that to mean that they could make, package and post 4000 before CNY. Not that they could make 4000 before CNY if given the green light by 8/2 but there’s no point because they couldn’t pack and ship them. Fair enough that only 500 can be made, packed and shipped, now its been explained…. However we were meant to get confirmation that they could do that yesterday (9/2) and I still haven’t seen that confirmation anywhere so we don’t even know that 500 are happening this month.
The ones that are being pictured now do look fantastic. I don’t recon though that the rest will ship from China till mid march at best, 1 week to Texas, some weeks to build them all, then ship to customers, recon the last 1000 of us still have till mid April.
Im probably somewhere in the 3000s so Im not bothered if they make 500, 1000 or 2000 even, 4000 would be idea for me, this is what they said “was” possible in 4 days, hmmmm? I’d just just be happy with A Pandora, my Pandora
*Ideal, damn you fingers…1!1!!1!?!?!?!?
Somebody needs to post where everyone is on the list of 4000. We can post the original order confirmation number to hide the identity of the purchaser. We need to do this because there will definitely be a real possibility of theft from those whose order numbers are less than 500 by those whose order numbers are greater than 500.
Can anyone think of a legitimate reason (other than it’s more work) not to post this list? I ordered mine a week before the original deadline (last week of september or first week of october of 2008) I want to know where I stand in the list of 4000.
Because of the ammount time out of someone’s busy day it would take to compile the list.
you’re welcome
They need to have such list anyway…
All you need is my bank account number and sort code?
good thing one of those 500 are mine ;D
Im a bit surprised about the negative responses to the case news… Right now they are the bottleneck but once the devs have 500 or so to crack on with the bottle neck will be the assembly and shipping, Id say if they got 4000 cases now we wouldnt get our toys any quicker than if the cases are sent in batches, providing the batches are produced and sent JIT.
You think 2 weeks is a reasonable amount of time to finish the production for 500 pandoras? That’s only 50 a day. At that rate, to finish up the remaining 3500, it will take … wait for it… 14 extra weeks (not including the original 2). That’s not two, but *three* months.
Thats because production will speed up immensely after the first 500 are made, and after the Chinese New Year.
How long does it take to ship those 500 cases from China – 1 week?
If so it would be more or less 3 weeks to build 500 consoles… and then provided the factory ship more cases as they will be catching up after CNY with the other orders as well.
I am not sure if asking for just 500 will not lower the quality of this build (it is a half day worth of job) – as it probably takes half a day just to setup and calibrate the tools… They should be asked to build 4000 (which would ensure quality) and to ship them by 500 which would make the transit disaster proof.
LOL, I agree with all your arguments here, really, 500 in two weeks is a low amount but that just makes it very realistic (I dont think anyone would argue that this whole project has been built with unrealistic timescales)
Then… they better get a leg on after that
cos the chinese should be back…
We should get a reasonable idea of case quality… But agree`d a bigger batch could mean better general quality.
You know people are talking like the next two weeks are life or death… they arent really, its just 2 more weeks, I dunno about you but i can see it doesnt matter… they will be 2 more months tm.
How many of you have usedd either van lines or movers to move, either long distance or short? I know thaqt I have, and this (IMO) gives me a good workable estimate of how long it actually takes to package up cases, and I believe it’s quite comparable to the packing time for dinner plates. I don’t honestly think that 1K/day is very far off the mark, do you?
Second, folks keep on referring to 2 weeks we have until CNY, please justify that, because my calendar says more like one working week.
I ordered mine oktober 2009.
damn……………..
Damn, found out I’m position 1500-1600 I ordered the day after it got slashdotted
On the bright side the OS/apps will have had a good tinkering with by the time it arrives 
Where did you get the info for this position estimation?
send an email and ask them very nicely. I managed to restrain myself until now,
To be honest I shouldn’t have bothered really. Not like knowing is gonna speed it up.
I remember reading that they can make 1000 a day so If they setup the machine tweak it and run it, they should be able to get a few K I guess – but just hoping.
I’m around 200-300 – still doesn’t make the waiting any easier
lol i could be in the 500. I pre-ordered on the same day (1hour after the news)
Thats about when I ordered I think, so I reckon you would be
Ordered about end of January 2009. Makes me probably somewhere around +-1500 in the queue.
So, just two more months.
Sigh…
I will devour you all!
February 24th Nintendo Press Conference. Their next handheld. PANDORA!!!! That would be a shocker lol
Well I am in the 3900-4000 range, so you’ll have to wait a bit longer for Neverball and Neverputt
How do you know wich position you are on???????????
I am around 3400-3500, You find out by sending your order number to the email on the ordering page.
Correction – I was told back in June 2009 that I am 3004th on the list.
Have a look at this it may make you smile -> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9fchf3nVn4&NR=1
Then again maybe someone els already found it.
Mind the gap… Alan…