The Pandora.

[som99]

Well the pandora is comming along just fine

Ive preordered so I will get the first batch, im mainly only buying this for Amiga emulation

For the ones who do not know this is a open source Linux handhelt, but this one more powerfull then ever seen before, the dev mk0 boards are allredy running psx in fullspeed so it´s promesing, also ofc its running the older Amiga systems 100% fullspeed

Specs:
ARM® Cortex™-A8 600Mhz+ CPU running Linux
430-MHz TMS320C64x+™ DSP Core
PowerVR SGX OpenGL 2.0 ES compliant 3D hardware
800x480 4.3" 16.7 million colours touchscreen LCD
Wifi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth & High Speed USB 2.0 Host
Dual SDHC card slots & SVideo TV output
Dual Analogue and Digital gaming controls
43 button QWERTY and numeric keypad
Around 10+ Hours battery life

Check it out and tell me what you think about it at:
Pandora Home
and here is the "official" forum for it.


Here are a youtube video of the dev board running some amiga games. Keep in min that it´s only a devboard no software filters etc are implanted teh emulator port is just in beta stage but still looks great!

The thing that makes this realy great is that it has wifi, bluetoth, usb 2x sdhc slots etc. Realy nice to fill this baby up. Also I love that it has a qwerty keyboard witch helps alot when running amiga apps/games.

Pandora running amiga!

//som99Pandora forum

EDIT: test has been shown that the cpu can run in 900Mhz without any trouble but ofc it reduces teh battery time.

Woulden´t this be a great AROS system?

[denli]

I've also preordered.
At last a usable portable "Amiga". :-D

I tried running Amiga emulation on my PalmV but the game control was next to useless.

[arkanoid]

I'm interested in this, but I learnt from my experience "pre-ordering" my GP2X. So I will wait for the second batch which will hopefully NOT include the hardware bugs that users may discover from the first batch!

looks like a nice little system.

[RMK305]

What happened with your GP2X?

[mikrucio]

bah just get a Sony PSP. best thing since well the best thing since hand helds.

[CaptChaos]

Gp2x uae4all is faster and has better sound than pspuae, pandora is going to completely stomp the psp and the gp2x for amiga emulation. I pre-ordered on the first day as well. I just read a post on gp32x from craigix saying the 128mb ram has been scrapped for 256mb...

good times, good times.

[som99]

Yes the preformance and specs on the pandora will stomp every other handhelt gameing console into pieces

Finaly I will be able to run amiga in my pocket wihtout any problems

I also have ordered 2 32GB sdhc cards, what other handheld gaming machine have you seen with 64GB storage

I love the gaming controlls and the qwerty keyboard that have I never seen on a handheld gaming console before.

[alexh]

I'll wait. TRUE battery life and construction quality is still unknown.

All images of the Pandora exterior are still 3D models, meaning the final case still has never been made!

[Edit: I've now seen one video of a real Pandora plastic case, but it is not a great quality video]

It has this great 3D capability but all the demos I've seen are all software rendered! Something doesn't seem right here.

[yakumo9275]

well most of the existing software was written for SDL, so why would that know about a new 3d chip?

I have not seen any of the SDL/GL demos tho, that would make things a little more interesting.

I'm going to wait tho, first version of my gp32 was crap, first version gp2x was crap (oh man the horror stories)... I still have my gp2x-mk2-f100 and its nice. I passed on the F200's.. I want a pandy but will wait until the second batch or so...

[alexh]

yakumo9275 wrote:
well most of the existing software was written for SDL, so why would that know about a new 3d chip?

Quake 2? I think that could be compiled with OGL support!

I'd just like to see that the drivers and infrastructure are there and can be used.

yakumo9275 wrote:
I have not seen any of the SDL/GL demos tho

My point exactly.

[SamuraiCrow]

alexh wrote:

yakumo9275 wrote:
well most of the existing software was written for SDL, so why would that know about a new 3d chip?

Quake 2? I think that could be compiled with OGL support!

I'd just like to see that the drivers and infrastructure are there and can be used.

yakumo9275 wrote:
I have not seen any of the SDL/GL demos tho

My point exactly.

The holdup is that the graphics drivers are OpenGL-ES not standard OpenGL.  These things must be translated to take advantage of the hardware.

[som99]

yakumo9275 wrote:
well most of the existing software was written for SDL, so why would that know about a new 3d chip?

I have not seen any of the SDL/GL demos tho, that would make things a little more interesting.

I'm going to wait tho, first version of my gp32 was crap, first version gp2x was crap (oh man the horror stories)... I still have my gp2x-mk2-f100 and its nice. I passed on the F200's.. I want a pandy but will wait until the second batch or so...

Hey don´t drag the GPH gp2x etc into pandora, pandora is made by members of the community because they where tired of the flaws and bad construction of the gp series, they wanted to focus more on what gamers want, the pandora team are the european distributors of gph´s products, and like everyone knows gph don´t realy know what people want they just build consoles and focus to much on media parts and not real gaming preformance.

This machine is made by gamers for gamers

Btw the battery specs will be up to 10 hours in normal use based on calculations of powerconsumption etc so atleast 8-10 hours. Don´t forget it´s runnig cortex 8 arm cpu, just check how little that cpu takes in pwoerconsumption.

Also no real 3D rendering videos is up yet but that´s ofc because noone have a pandora yet only mk0´s and not the final system yet. So it´s early and what people allredy have ported on the mk0´s is impressive.
Also people are just in the beginning of proting stuff to it the first thing you do is not to use the 3D chip but getting the emulator to just run aint it.

you will see so much more when people get the machine in their hands.

Also you can do a little research yourself on teh 3D chip.

PowerVR SGX GPU (OpenGL ES 2.0, several million polygons per second). OpenGL ES demonstrated

Just search around on the gp32x forum and you will find all information about all parts


But it´s realy nice to hear that the MK1 will have 256MB ram instead of 128 and 512MB nand

[Turambar]

RMK305 wrote:
What happened with your GP2X?

Probably the same thing that happened with my pre-order GP2X. Dodgy joystick, broken solder joints on the headphone jack, components falling off the board for no reason etc, etc.

Which is why i'll be waiting a while before buying a pandora, though i do realise it is being made by completely different people.

-edit-

In response to the above i'm not assuming Craigix and Evildragon etc. will be as incompetent as GPH. I just refuse to pre-order another product from an unproven manufacturer again.

[CaptChaos]

Well its a moot point anyways, all the pre-orders were sold out in 3 days, so those of you that chose to wait have no choice but to wait.

[alexh]

som99 wrote:
Btw the battery specs will be up to 10 hours in normal use based on calculations

Yeah, I'd prefer some times based on experimentation.

som99 wrote:
Also no real 3D rendering videos is up yet but that´s ofc because noone have a pandora yet only mk0´s and not the final system yet. So it´s early and what people allredy have ported on the mk0´s is impressive.

Absolutely. But before I buy one, I'd like to see some 3D applications running and some benchmarks etc.

som99 wrote:
Also you can do a little research yourself on teh 3D chip.

PowerVR SGX GPU (OpenGL ES 2.0, several million polygons per second). OpenGL ES demonstrated

I know some of the team that developed it. A handful of top people at Imagination Technologies used to work with me at another company where I designed the GPU (based mainly on my knowledge of Amiga hardware). It's a very small world where ASIC design is concerned.