Click here to view the embedded video.

EvilDragon gets busy on the INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A triple treat on Youtube today for those who ticked the UMPC box on their Pandoria visa application. First up is a solid ten minutes of OS bits and bobs, delving into office apps, audio & battery settings, and multitasking. Tacked on to that is a further two minutes devoted to themes and colour schemes. No matter what operating system you’re coming from, there’ll be something in here to make you feel at home. To cap it all off, ED toys around with some Pygame source code and launches it from the terminal – all on the Pandora. Hey, stop giggling up back. Barbie Seahorse Adventures is awesome.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There’s something for (nearly) everyone in this video, as Skeezix shows off his own apps Kronos and BattleJewels, launches a video in Mplayer (don’t worry, there is a GUI for that, he’s just not using it), and throws in a bit of file browsing and PND recognition for good measure. He also gives us his take on the current state of software, in the brief text below.

Some real-world stuff here When EvilDragon posted some status updates, some folks loved it, some did not — its a new device, a niche target, for hackers and joe public alike. Some features are rough around the edges, but most of the device works great. Still, thought I’d show a few real world scenarios – run a couple games and apps.

Things are starting to pad out a little, even though general devs don’t have devices yet; we’ve got Picodrive for Genesis emulation, Hatari for Atari ST, UAE for Amiga, MAME, Vice for Commodore 64, and a really groovy port of DosBox with full touchscreen mouse emulation, for instance. We’ve got Abiword built in, along with some little utils — djwillis crammed quite a bit into that firmware space! Some ports are coming along .. Quake 1, 2, 3 — with Quake 3 running at like 20-30fps so far! GemRB, Descent..

Anyway, here’s just a few things I thought I’d show off — video, my new Kronos interp, and BattleJewels. If you want to see Quake 3 or something, let me know..

Video playing is one of those things we all just want, day-zero; we don’t have hardware supported decode yet, so are relying on pure software decoding. This can be troublesome for some video playing software, but others handle things much better. It will struggle _right now_ with software decoded full high def …. but watch the video, and you’ll see full speed no framedrop playing of a standard def ripped right from my DVDs. So its not all bleak like some people think — I can watch my med-quality DVD rips of Firefly no problem! Want to watch animated stuff.. no problem! ITs hyour high def rips that are a problem right now, and we’ll get hardware decode sorted out eventually.

I then pop into my new Kronos application, which is a player for interactive fiction games (Magnetic Scrolls, ZMachine/Infocom style, Scott Adams, and possible others.) We’ll also port over TADS and others standalone I’m sure. But for now, let me just fire up a couple moments of The Guild of Thieves, a classy game I’ve been meaning to work on for oh, 15 years or so

Further, I run the pnd-file version of my BattleJewels game.. a rather cross between head to head action RPG and puzzle games — cast spells, chop down your opponent, buy some gear and level up! pnd-files are working great .. just double-click to run, pick them from the menu, or run them from your own organized directories using the file browser.

Lastly I show the pnd-file auto-discovery as the SD is ejected/inserted — no work installation of the games.

Bear in mind – no overclock here, this is 500mhz default!
Also bear in mind it is hard to tap on a screen or fiddle with buttons, while your other hand is holding a tiny camera

Enjoy

More talk on the forums.

We all want news, and many of us are waiting with baited breath. So, when we have a bunch of news at once, we can wonder. Is this really good news, or are we just hoping? Well, we have some news from the Official blog. I hope everyone is as excited as I am.

EvilDragon

Chinese New Year holidays are over – work has begun at the factory!

We are in daily contact with them, so here is a brief roadmap of what should happen when:
At the moment, the machines are maintained, cleaned and prepared to go into normal production run again. Production will start during the next days, probably on Monday. Then lots of Pandora cases should be spit out each day
While they do this, we try to make them another Silkscreen sample and send us a picture of it (not the whole sample) within this week. If it’s fine, we’ll use the silkscreen – if not, we’ll just go with plain cases, to not waste anymore time.

As for the OS, the devs are really working hard on it right now (despite not having time, as they have so much things to do in real life).
It will surely not be the most polished OS ever released yet, but if you want a polished OS, go get an Apple (and miss all the fun we’ll all have by enhancing the Pandora OS together!)

So, what can you expect, what will not work, where are tweaks needed?

What does work:

* The desktop fully works. It’s like a normal PC desktop. You have your file manager, your windows, your apps, etc.
* PND system is working. You can simply copy games onto your SD Card, put it into your Pandora – and PLAY!
* Apps: Installed apps do work fine so far. That includes Midori, Abiword, Orage, Pidgin, XChat, etc.
* Audio Playing: XMMS working fine.
* Movie Playing: Working… but has some issues (see below)
* USB Devices: You can connect USB Sticks, harddisks, mice, keyboard, etc. Normal things run out of the box.
* TV Out: The TV Out cable works fine, SVHS only for the moment though (see below)
* Power Saving Mode: Yep, it’s included and does work. At the moment, it should last for about 50 hours, not too long, but there might be a lot more components which could be switched off to save more power. Good enough to leave your Pandora lying around for a few hours without having to reboot it.
* LED Warning (Blinking) on low battery with automatic shutdown when the battery status becomes critical.
* Keyboard, us nub as mouse, touchscreen, everything working.

What issues are there?

* The biggest issue: WiFi is still work in progress. The driver works, without using SDIO it was slow (about 1200kbps), DJWillis is working on it, but it’s time consuming. It MIGHT be ready when the Pandora ships, but it might be WiFi will still take a bit longer. Maybe some devs want to help out here once they get a Pandora in their hands
* There’s no software audio mixer yet. This means you can only use the volume wheel. No big deal if you’re just listening to music or playing games, but multiple sounds at once will not work yet. Also, the equalizer isn’t yet working.
* Some apps have to be optimized for the small screen: Fullscreen apps like Midori, Abiword, etc. do look fine. Some stuff however (XFCE4 Settings, etc.) are using windows bigger than 800×480. They are completely usable, but you have to move the windows around to access all buttons.
* Movieplayer: While basic movie playing works, it does not use any hardware accelerations yet. DVD Quality xvid videos do play fine, but H264 is too much without hardware acceleration. Also, in windowed mode the videos are playing before the menus. Watching movies in fullscreen mode works nicely. Things should be way better when hardware support is included
* There is a lot to tweak and optimize here and there. Bootup speed can be increased, more themes (fingerfriendly ones?) could be created, some minor issues like the normal logout of Ubuntu-Netbook-Launcher doesn’t work (you need to use a menu entry), etc. Nothing serious that makes the unit not usable, but there are a lot of things that can be improved within the next months!

So, except for WiFi, all things do work well so far but can be optimized a lot.
Please don’t expect to have perfectly working games and emulators on day 1 – adopting to a new system will take some time and except for some core OS developers, nobody has a Pandora yet. Once delivered, games should start to pop up and become optimized pretty fast!

Some of that stuff might be fixed until first release – let’s hope for WiFi!

source

So, thanks to ED, we have some good news, but more to the point: some honest and fair news.

We still haven’t been let in the front door of the app store (name pending), but as of today we can follow progress from a slightly different angle. Craig was wedged a Twitter API into his store code, giving followers a live feed of new additions to the catalogue. You can follow the dedicated Twitter account, or if you think Twitter is dumb, just grab the RSS feed.

EvilDragon has also been turning over the tweets, with a string of OS updates over the past week:

Standby mode working, battery LED blinks on low power, shuts down on critical power and display goes off when closing lid. Thanks devs!

A quick way to run an app: Press Pandora-Button, type in part of the name and press Enter. Works nicely in latest OS with XFCE4

Wooot, fullspeed movieplaying (not yet hardware accelerated) with the current image for DVD Quality movies. Okay, 720p x264 doesn’t work

Just finished keymapping for X11. Now ALL keys do work fine. The buttons are mapped to Pg Up / Pg Dn, Home, End for easy text editing

Oh, and Shift + Upper Firebutton is mapped to Compose key, so people can now also type special characters (tested and working fine).

twitter.com/PandoraApps | twitter.com/Craigix | twitter.com/EvilDragon1717

“You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.” If these legendary words mean nothing to you, you’ve been deprived of one of the great lost arts of gaming: the text adventure. But fear not, weary traveller. It’s never too late to be eaten by a grue, especially when Skeezix is bringing his interactive fiction interpreter Kronos to the world’s textiest known handheld.

If any of you have been following me since the old Palm OS days (Palm, Tapwave) you may remember Kronos for Palm OS; this is a from ground rewrite of course, for Pandora (that will run also on Windows, Linux, OSX, etc). I’ve got a lot to go yet (add the picture-frame for games with artwork, add some onscreen controls so you can tap on word suggestions), add cheats and note taking (auto-mapper and such); but just thought I’d like to show — text adventures are coming soon for the first real mobile game device that can support them (has a keyboard )

Maybe I’m the only text adventure nutbar around, but I just have to keep The Pawn and Zork handy (and people are still creating new adventures all the time, no joke.) This app of mine includes interpreters (written byh others) for Infocom/Zmachine (Zork etc), Magnetic Scrolls, and Scott Adams games.

Source

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ah, PandoraPanic, you’ve come so far. Since 2008 we’ve watched you grow, and it’s almost time to set you free. It’s a little bit sad, isn’t it? Hell no. It’s brilliant. Thanks to the tireless efforts of PokeParadox, MarkoeZ and a solid crew of contributors, PandoraPanic is ready for release. To mark the occasion, Foxblock has cut together a very tidy release trailer (and yeah, he knows about the typo). If you can’t wait to play PandoraPanic on the hardware you’re waiting for, play it on some you already have.

Click here to view the embedded video.

EvilDragon has been hard at work making those videos that we all love. First off, he shows us how easy it is to switch between GUIs as well as some Atari ST emulation. Then, after the jump he shows us some Amiga emulation using UAE (which runs flawlessly).

Click here to view the embedded video.

Discussion

The operating system hasn’t been given much attention of late. But the software developers have been working away to get you a stable operating system at launch. The official status page has been updated to include a table of OS features to expect at launch. Most of these will be working correctly by the time the Pandora reaches our grubby hands.

Keep in mind that this is the CURRENT state. A lot of things will be fixed until you receive your Pandora.

The List | Discussion

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

And Craig twote:

Started to populate the Pandora appstore. Probably not the final name…

Source | Thread

Edit: Refer to our earlier post for a general summary of how the appstore/box/repo/thing will operate. Remember, call it what you want, just don’t call it a pappstore.

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.

A micro update from EvilDragon’s Twitter account.

We got a tracking number! It’s not yet in the UPS system (always takes some time, even longer in China). Good news, I’ll keep you updated!

End micro update.

If you needed a reminder that China isn’t the only player in this saga, this is a nice way to get one. MWeston has informed us that 1,000 boards are being populated with components this week in Texas. Also interesting is the impact certain software developers are having on the hardware production process. What, you thought they just sat around porting Quake? (No offence to those who sat around porting Quake. You’re all doing a bang up job.)

It’s worth saying again that Notaz’s work on the kernel is clearly the reason the device is as advanced as it is today. Sure the hardware may have come along fine with minimal testing as the assembler learned how to solder the boards better but Notaz has helped me develop a comprehensive suite of test software that has helped the assembler perfect their process. So good in fact that they have started building a batch of 1000 this week after tweaking their pilot runs.

(MWeston)

Source

Click here to view the embedded video.

Our favourite preserved vegetable has resurfaced, bringing with him nine minutes and fifty one seconds of glorious handheld gameplay. The titles in order of appearance are Ur-Quan Masters (aka Star Control II), Hammer of Thyrion (aka Hexen II), and Pandora Panic (aka Pandora Panic).