So you’re sitting there thinking to yourself “Gosh this Pandora thing is niche.” Then this guy called torpor strolls along and says “nu-uh, did you know people are still writing games for this thing?” He proceeds to tell you that he has an emulator for you to try, and it comes packaged with a handful of the aforementioned niche niche games. Suitably humbled, you hit the download link and get your Oric on.

Download (Link updated)

Discussion

Click here to view the embedded video.

Zodttd has updated PSX4Pandora once again, with a range of fixes from video scaling to frame limiting to newly added nub support. From Zod’s Youtube text:

This video shows psx4pandora v1.0b2 running on a Pandora at a low 600MHz playing Wipeout XL. The game is smooth with sound and is constantly hovering in the 60 FPS area as it should.

Any questions?

Download

Discussion

Yesterday we were under the impression that only the Pandora boards and battery compartment stickers had turned up in the UK. EvilDragon now tells us that the LCDs and other bits & pieces have arrived as well, hopefullly rounding out the total ton from Texas.

Yesterday, we were in for quite a surprise!

On Thursday, air traffic was back to a regular state – but delivery services (like UPS) have quite a backlog and need some time to catch up.
They told us, our shipment won’t arrive before early next week.

Therefore, Craig was quite surprised when he found a note left by UPS yesterday at his door that there had been a shipment for him – and that they left it to a neighbouring business.

And there he found it: The shipment from Texas. Lying around on the grass, visible for everyone – and nobody was really paying attention to it.
Quickly he delivered the packages to where they belong – and now everything is safe and sound. Still a scary thought that about half a million USD were lying around on the grass…

Anyways, that does mean: The boards, LCD, WiFi Antennas and some other minor things have arrived in the UK!

Now we need to wait for the cases. Those cases have been produced and painted, but as it looks like, UPS won’t pick them up until sometime next week (I guess they try to deliver the stalled shipments first and then start picking up new ones once their back in normal state).

As usual, we’ll let you know when UPS picked things up (well, if they tell us… as said, we didn’t know the boards would arrive yesterday )

(EvilDragon)

And a footnote from Craig:

As soon as the cases arrive we will start building and shipping units right away. I’d guess in the first day we might only ship a few dozen units, but I bet that will get the forum and development going pretty quick.

I can’t wait until you have them in your hands, I can’t wait to see what the Pandora can be made to do. This keeps us going.

(craigix)

Sources: [1] [2]

The UK’s newest assembly line is showing the first signs of life, with the arrival of several boxes of PSUs and one very tired pigeon. (A few Twitterers mistook the boxes for something else from China until Craig cracked one open for a closeup. Arrgh!) Note that a UK mains plug is shown, but you’ll be getting something to suit your region.

Tweets: [1] [2]

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.

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.

Pickle gives us a peek at Aleph One M1A1, complete with clockspeed and keymap tweaks, and a clever hand that hardly gets in the way at all. For those quietly wondering, Aleph One is the enhanced open source descendant of Bungie’s Marathon 2: Durandal. The M1A1 variant completes the circle, bringing the levels & assets from the original Marathon into the Aleph One engine. More from Pickle’s Youtube text:

Im using the new gui to set the clock speed
I also show how key mapping works and finally some in game
Sorry hand is in the way at points and also couldnt play sound at the time of recording but it works.

Source

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.