Time for a quick, lazy post full of games.
Sonic Robo Blast 2, ported by Pickle. Built on the Doom engine, this was probably the pinnacle of 3D Sonic games. Sorry Sega. You’ll need to grab the PND and data files separately.
Download PND | Data files
Angband, ported by Skeezix. A rogue-like game similar to nethack, ASCIIlicious.
Download
Until last week it was looking like we’d be SNESless on day one, as we waited for a white knight to prepare one of the builds we’ve already seen for public consumption. So what do you do when all your white knights are busy? Dial S for Skeezix, of course. In the name of day one righteousness, he’s gone and done a quick port of Snes9x (Dingoo version) and it’s available to download now.
In this video, EvilDragon gets up to some networking ‘nanigans using the USB wifi stick that is set to accompany the first 1,000 Pandoras. For the benefit of the tubeless, he covers web browsing and forum posting with Midori, internet radio via the Exaile media player, downloading and installing a .PND from the archive, and unrelated to wifi, a quick look at the sleek, fast “Minimenu” app launcher recently put together by Skeezix. Onward to the bigger picture, ED has this to say on cases and boards:
Last week Skeezix extended an invite to any Toronto dwelling Pandorians, to join him at a pub for some grub and a hands-on with his Pandora prototype. WizardStan and Tempel took him up on the offer, skipping out on an office commitment or two and rather appropriately packing their own obscure gadgets. Here’s what they had to say about it.
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.
“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.
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.
EvilDragon has taken the time to list the great contributions that people have made to the project and some history of it’s birth. Frankly, I can’t say more or add more than what ED has already said:
A big thanks to all of you!
Well, it has been a wild rollercoaster ride. It was fun. It was annoying. It was amazing. It was frightening. It was unique.
Just as a child can’t wait to open his presents on Christmas morning, so have most of us been sitting here, trembling with anticipation, waiting to open up our Pandora. Some people have claimed ‘Vapourware’, or that is an outright con. Well, some lucky children have received a late Christmas present, and their excitement is palpable!
For those who follow Craigix’s Twitter, you might has seen the following and wondered what he was talking about:
Craigix via Twitter – Some threads showing up on gp32x of people receiving their Pandora. I can’t stop smiling at them.
A dump n’ run update from the frontlines, to break the eerie post-weekend silence.
Craigix: Just a little update to say the cases are still on schedule to be completed this week.
Jumpman: So the last “test” cases had all the technical problems fixed right? So these new test cases(rev.3), are only to improve on the finish quality right?
Craigix: Yes, this one is just a general clean up of a few things and a slightly bigger test run, it will be coming with keymats too so we can build up quite a few units.