Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s been one of the most requested videos since Ari64 materialised in the scene with dynarec in hand, and it’s been delivered today by Adventus. He doesn’t own a HD camera (or a video camera at all – this was filmed with a mango), but look past the lo-fi exterior and you’ll find ten glorious minutes of sixty four. From the Youtube description:

This video shows a Pandora prototype running Zelda: Ocarina of Time/Sin and Punishment on Mupen64plus with Ari64’s Dynarec and my gles2n64 graphics plugin. The Prototype is at 800mhz. Its being rendered at 640×480 with No frameskip or sound. I would say Zelda is fairly playable, the dungeons are ~75-100% but some cutscenes/towns are slower ~65-80%. Sin and Punishment is OK but not fullspeed, ~50-80% depending on how many enemies are onscreen. Gorgeous game though, looks like it could be on DC. This emulator is still in development, there’s still a few bugs and rendering problems.

Sorry about the Video Quality, I do not own a video camera. Thanks goes out to CraigIX / the OpenPandora crew for sending a prototype my way.

Adventus has also posted his impressions of the device itself (remember, it’s a rev3 prototype) on the forums: Link

Click here to view the embedded video.

Amiga vs Atari soldiers, lay down your swords. The day has been won, on the forums at least. Wasting no time following the arrival of his new (rev3) Pandora, Skeezix has cast away all other priorities to port Atari ST emulator Hatari. The result was so pleasing, so made-for-Pandora, that Craig even used an emoticon. All the best quotes from Skeezix:

Hatari is set to no frameskip, fullscreen, pixel doubling to fill the screen (overscan borders removed), audio on.

This is a fast port with no pandora optimization; not compiled with optimizations (which would speed it up 20%); running regular clock on Pandora (We could overclock another 30%). Using SDL (not as fast as going raw.) On top of X11 full desktop (we could run without X11 for more speed.)

So as you can see, full speed, no frameskip, and not even optimized.

Right away the SDL lib maps the Atari ST keyboard to the Pandora keyboard, and the joystick to the Pandora d-pad and buttons.

Touchscreen maps to mouse right off, which is sexy.

Hatari also can run hard drive images, so you can mount the SD card as a hard drive, and other awesome stuff. Hell, run the MIDI out a USB MIDI device and use Notator/Cubase

I was tempted to geek out and show 3d modelling in mono-ST mode in a CAD, but thats going too far

the games that didn’t work on Outcast/Castaway often work here… Sensible soccer and crazy big RPGs.

It does have various bits of emulation for STE and Falcon, yupyup. Its really quite an amazing piece of work, and this is a full port, not a trimmed down one; get the latest one from sourceforge and fire it up, thats what you’ll have on your pandora

Source | Hatari official site

Click here to view the embedded video.

Christmas cheers from Craig (above), Christmas treats from ED (below), and a happily holiday season to all from PandoraPress. <3

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

He’s got a d-pad, and he’s not afraid to use it.

Just a small demonstration of how well the DPad does work using Picodrive.
I never played any beat-em ups so I can’t show you any cool combos, however, I played some Thunderforce 4 and Snake Rattle’n'Roll.
Not too good there either, but I do hope it shows that the DPad is working perfectly

Click here to view the embedded video.

He’s got nubs, and he’s not afraid to use them.

Click here to view the embedded video.

OpenGL czar Adventus has served up some new Mupen64Plus footage, a little low in the definition department but still smooth enough to make you slide off your seat. Let us journey now, to a time when Rareware were kings.

I’ve made a new video of the most recent sources for Mupen64plus and gles2n64. It shows Banjo Kazooie rendered at 400×320 (then upscaled fullscreen) with no frameskip or sound. Its an amazing looking game, my camera doesn’t really do it justice. There’s a minor bug with the tree rendering in the intro. Its about 17 – 20 fps in game, but it looks pretty fast…. Once the 400×240 framebuffer mode is made available we can get another ~10% since I don’t have to render to an FBO then to the backbuffer. It seems some games are GPU bottlenecked after all, at 800×480 banjo kazooie is about 10 fps. (Adventus)

Source

Evil H. Dragon has blogged up a big one. If you’ve been reading PandoraPress you’ll know a lot of this stuff already, but it’s always nice to get a meaty serve of words from Pandora HQ. Images and video have been snipped to conserve pixels; you can find the post in its original form at the source. Oh, want to know what the above pic is all about? Don’t let your raging inner nerd miss the links at the bottom.

Hi folks!

We got overwhelmed with eMails, so it took a while to answer them all – and also to find a few minutes to post at this blog again.

Quite a few things have happened, if you followed the boards, you might’ve seen most of them.
If not, here are the latest news for you:

1. WiFi is working!
Yep, finally, after months of hard work by mostly DJWillis (with help from other devs), WiFi is working!
WEP, WPA, WPA2… including one of the best GUIs, the Network Manager are working fine!
Additionally, XFCE is shaping up, so you might even get a REAL cool desktop manager!

2. Cases will ship sometime this week
According to the company which creates the moulds, the first samples of the cases should ship within this week (they didn’t say any exact date).
That does mean that they should arrive latest next week – and if everything is fine, it’s CASE MASS PRODUCTION time. Yeeeha!

3. First preview of Silk Screening for the case
Michael released a very first version of the silk screening for the case which led to this gp32x.com-Thread. You guys did provide a lot of good ideas there which we will implement into a final version. Thanks! You’re a really cool community.

<images snipped>

4. Emulation goodness
Devving for the Pandora continues. There’s now a first version of a MUPEN port already – an N64 emulator.
Thanks to Ari64, Pickle and all the devs involved (you can find out more infos about it on this GP32x.com thread) (Don’t forget Adventus, ED!)

Here’s a nice video of Michael playing Super Mario 64. The sound is stuttering as emulation is not fullspeed yet, but it’s really really promising already.

<video snipped>

5. CE Testing documents and shielding
As I promised in my last blog post (though a lot of time passed), everybody who’s interested can take a peek at the documents.
Michael already shielded the LCD cable, so everything should be fine now.

Anyways, here are the documents. You can clearly see a few peaks which were too high. But, luckily, not too many

a. Angström Image GUI booted up and idling.
Horizontal testing
Vertical testing

b. notaz testing FW running SNES9x with Bluetooth and TV Out enabled
Horizontal testing
Vertical testing

c. notaz testing FW running SNES9x with Bluetooth and TV Out enabled, connected to original PSP power adapter and USB2.0 stick inserted.
Horizontal testing
Vertical testing

Forum discussion | That blog link again

Click here to view the embedded video.

Aussie ace Adventus brings the noise NEON to N64! From the Youtube description:

This is a NEON optimised build of the graphics plugin gles2n64 paired with Ari64’s dynarec for mupen64plus running on an OpenPandora rev4 devboard. The board is at 850mhz and its rendering at 800×480 resolution with NO frameskip. It is 25 to 30 fps for the ingame sequences, the mario head is initially ~25fps but drops down to ~16fps after awhile. Sorry about the terrible quality.

More tech talk here.

[Update] Mweston has uploaded his own footage, with sound! He’s running the same version  of Mupen64plus, provided by Adventus.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Mupen64plus emulator running on a Pandora prototype unit.

The first part of the video is Super Mario 64 at 600MHz for more real life performance without overclocking. The second part is at 800MHz. Mariokart 64 is at 600MHz again but could use the speed boost.

The Y axis of the nubs is backwards in the software which made controlling Mario so much fun.

I take no credit for having coded any of this. That goes to some amazing software folks who provide me with the pleasure of testing beta code.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here it is. The first video of Ari64’s Mupen64 port, running on the hardware that matters thanks to OpenGL jedis Adventus, Pickle, and JayFoxRox. The usual disclaimer applies; being the first video there is a still a ways to go before we see higher frame rates and smooth sound. But the texture rendering is already a treat for the peepers. Follow the tech talk and lavish praise on our new heroes here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s a little something: NullDC, the Dreamcast emulator, running on Pandora hardware at last! The last glimpse we got of this project was back in March, and was followed by an extended period of radio silence from the NullDC devs (Drk||Raziel and ZeZu). But you know what they say about silence… sometimes, it’s golden. MWeston’s Youtube description is essential reading:

This was sent to me by Drk||Raziel to try. He even added support for the Pandora game controls but most games (of the bunch I tried) want analog controls so the dpad didn’t move me around at all. The CPU is clocked at 800MHz here and it still suffers from the weak FPU problem that hasn’t been addressed with NEON yet. Also, so many texture/blending modes are not supported. I’m told that only two of the 150+ required ones are in here (so that’s why that guy’s head is missing!).

King of Fighters just really doesn’t work well but I thought it was funny to show it because it looks like an Atari 2600!

I’m blown away by how beautiful it looks on the 4.3″ screen being rendered at the native resolution. It’s very much a work in progress still but what a nice point to show where it is at today and then compare it in a few months to where it will be.

Well, the last week has been pretty slow as far as new videos, but today MWeston delivers the goods! F-Zero, Mario Kart, and Donkey Kong all get plenty of time as our main hardware man shows off Cpasjuste’s port of a GP2X SNES emulator after the break. According to MWeston this is a straight port, with little to no optimization involved, but it’s already eminently playable. Great work!

Click here to view the embedded video.

High-quality version also available.

We knew it could happen. We hoped it was happening. Today, we know it is. A new face appeared on the GP32X boards over the weekend; a coder going by the name of Ari64. If GP32X had an award for “best first post ever”, this would be leading the field.

I have rewritten the dynamic recompiler for Mupen64plus to generate ARM code. This will run on OpenPandora, TouchBook, and BeagleBoard.

That’s right folks. Nintendo 64 emulation, for real reals. Ari64 says he’s been working on this for “around 4-5 months,” wisely keeping a lid on the project to avoid an onslaught of premature hype. There is still work to be done of course:

Unfortunately OpenGL acceleration does not work. It is possible to use software rendering, but it is very slow and some of the textures display incorrectly. Since several people are working on OpenGL ES libraries, I am posting this as-is for testing purposes.

As you’d expect, some of the scene’s best known coders are now hovering around this like kids at a candy store. The next few weeks should be interesting, but before you get caught on the hype train, take a moment to tip your hat to the scene’s newest household name: Ari64.

Source

Click here to view the embedded video.

That’s right, to the power of three. Three new videos, multiple games within each. Press the Back button and return to normal life, or hit the read link and see how deep the Pickle jar goes.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It was all devs on deck today, with a little video-fuelled excitement on the boards and a bevy of questions answered. First up, a word from the Dragon.

Well, some quick news (I didn’t have time to do a blog post, as I was in Leipzig at the GCO and needed to catch up on everything).

The 105 boards are finished, though I have no idea whether the MP company did take some pictures or if we have to wait until they arrive at Michaels place.
The review of the case is complete, mould creation started.
The TV Out Cables are being built, as soon as Michael gets the first final one, there will be pictures for sure
WiFi is getting better, everything works except reading the calibration data, the rest is fine. DJWillis is still at it.
And Michael is currently putting the new firmware on all of the nubs… joy

Source

On reading that, the observant Pandorian might be asking why the case mould is starting now, when we previously reported that it started two weeks ago? Just for you, it’s been asked and answered already.

It was about 30 days for just mould creation and about 45 days for mould creation including the review.
It might change if they need to change something, but that’s something we don’t know yet
The first review went pretty good, so we’re positive about it

Source

Winner. Not only was our reporting correct (which it isn’t always, as you’ll see soon), but ED has confirmed that we’ve begun the 30 day approach to the first real Pandora cases. Could we see some early next month? It’s plausible.

Now to the recent PSX video. We had assumed by the video title that we weren’t seeing Zod’s PSX4all, but another Linux PSX emu. Wrong! Fire that guy. It is indeed PSX4all, and MWeston goes into some detail here:

Zod hasn’t figured out how to properly use the audio buffer in the Pandora kernel (Zod and I think) plus there appears to be some vsync timing issues since all of the audio seems to rely on timing. The LCD is set to 67Hz because the settings Notaz tried at 60Hz caused some flickering on the display. No one has gone back to try and play with the registers to find the magic setting and so PSX4all ends up a little out no matter what Zod does. That would account for the crackling in the audio. The entire audio tends to be a good second out of time with gameplay and it doesn’t matter if the clock is 500MHz or 800MHz. There is something missing in how the audio should be buffered and passed out during emulation. I can’t help him solve that one unfortunately. I did ask around but it may take more eyes on the code when more people have their own devices.

Zod works mostly on his iPhone versions and only recently has had a second platform powerful enough (3GS) to keep up with video and sound going full out at the same time. It’s still a work in progress. The fact that it runs pretty smoothly for me at 550MHz (just a number I like to use) and the audio doesn’t change with the clock increases means that there is something being handled incorrectly in the code. Again, I think it is timing because vsync doesn’t change no matter how fast you set the processor clock.

Oh, and this is still completely software emulation except for using the hardware scalar to make it full screen. Exophase has helped with adding NEON instructions which is supposed to help with screen blitting, especially in 320×240 games. Zod can correct me if I’m wrong but I think it provided up to a 6x improvement in blitting, but it’s still experimental code and not always stable so I don’t have a build that uses it.

Source

Also working on PSX4all is lad named Tinnus, who drops a few hints as to what’s in store for the emu:

Running too fast: it just doesn’t have a framerate limiter yet. Obviously it will before release For now it’s interesting to let it run as fast as it can so we can easily see how something added or changed helps out in speeding things up.

Rendering: yep, and that’s still pure software (not for long ). I’m very excited with the possibilities of the GL ES 2 GPU, not only for speed but also for the possibilities of improving the graphics–bilinear filtering and postprocessing filters for instance, like Pete’s GL2 plugin for the PC emulators does, not to mention rendering to any resolution (actually to a multiple of the original game resolution, but then that can be scaled down).

Source

Phew!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here there be Playstation! MWeston comes to the party again, with a range of PSX games on the show reel. The Youtube description says this:

Michael made this video of the Pandora running a Linux PSX emu.

The sound problem seems to be file access or timing related as it stays the same from 550mhz up to 750mhz.

Given the description “Linux PSX emu”, it’s probably fair to assume that we’re not looking at PSX4Pandora, the emulator being worked on by Zodttd and Tinnus. Which in turn, is reason not to worry about that choppy sound. Follow this one in the forums for more details. Correction: This is indeed PSX4all. Check our more recent entry for details.