Pandora; open source handheld console II

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Op woensdag 17 februari 2010 10:28 schreef Ixnay het volgende:

[..]

Ziet er uit alsof het met AutoCAD getekend is.

Maar de Pandora wordt een flop denk ik.

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Op woensdag 17 februari 2010 14:58 schreef Blinker het volgende:
Waar vind je een handheld met een KDE interface

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Op woensdag 17 februari 2010 14:28 schreef __Saviour__ het volgende:
pandora is natuurlijk nooit bedoeld als ware concurrent voor ds en psp bijvoorbeeld.
Het is gewoon een groot hobbyprojectje van een groep.

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Yeah i did. Haven't had much time to play with it and get it running properly (blame work). I don't have much to add beyond Notaz/DaveC/Zodttd/Skeezix, but my impressions so far are:

* The controls are fantastic, there's no handheld device i know of that rivals this. The Nubs are really nice, its the first thing everyone wants to touch.
* It has a very small footprint, makes the screen looks really large. It is quite thick compared to DS / PSP but i actually find it more comfortable (easier to grip).
* Everything is really solid. The plastic is very rigid and feels thick, i can see this thing being very durable.
* The Battery cover design is nifty, works really well.
* Even though this is just a prototype it has quite decent build quality, the only obvious flaw is the lid sits about 1mm lower on one side.
* The matte black suits it very well, there's too much glossy crap around nowdays.


I'll show some pictures of mupen64 running or something when i get a chance.

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GAMES:
Gianas Return
Abuse
Battle for Wesnoth
BlobWars
Descent 1
Descent 2
Doom
FHeroes Port (Heroes Of Might And Magic 2)
FreeCiv 2.1.9
Hexen II
OpenLiero
OpenTyrian
Pandora Panic!
Powermanga
Quake 1
Quake 2
Quake 3
Reminiscence (flashback)
SuperTux 1
SuperTux 2
Tecnoballz
The Mana World
Ur-Quan Masters
Wolf4SDL

(With the exception of PandoraPanic, everything in that list has been ported by Pickle & Cpasjuste. What an effort - and it's not the whole list.)


EMULATORS:
DosBox
Mupen64plus (big maybe)
PAtari
PicoDrive
PSMS
PSnes
PSX4all (medium sized maybe)
ScummVM
UAE4all
VICE

Pandora running Mupen64plus + Ocarina of Time / Sin and Punishment

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Well i gots me a prototype Pandora, I don't have much to add beyond what the others have said (and i've already mentioned most of these in another thread).... but here's my impressions:

* Everything feels really sturdy. There is little to no flex.
* It weighs a bit more than your average handheld, i like this.
* The battery cover design is nifty.
* The controls are really nice. Especially the nubs and dpad.
* The prototype can only overclock stable to ~800Mhz, maybe we shouldn't expect the 850 - 900 I got with the devboard.
* My one has a floppy hinge, i assume its one of the ones that's been stress tested. The hinge will stay in position as long as its >45 degrees from horizontal and you don't shake it too much.
* The footprint of this device is very small, makes the screen seem huge. Its quite thick though, but this makes it more ergonomic to hold.
* I'm not a huge fan of the glossy keyboard, it kind of sticks out from the matte everything else.
* I'm not much of a thumb typist, I've never owned a device this small with QWERTY, but i find the keyboard pretty good. Some key placings / key sizes will take awhile to get used to.
* The battery is very large. takes up about 1/3 of the space.
* The touchscreen is accurate using the stylus. I can easily manipulate the various OS screens without having to double press anything etc.
* Compared to say Sony or Nintendo it's not the prettiest device. It firmly puts function over form.

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craigix Posted 21 February 2010 - 04:59 PM
--------
mali, on 21 February 2010 - 03:57 PM, said:
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Dead1nside, on 21 February 2010 - 04:44 PM, said:
Okay so if we do any overclocking in software, without changing the voltages this will no matter what, even if it isn't the cause of any problems, void our warranty?
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Nobody will be able to tell if you overclocked it or not, thus it's a non-issue

_If_ it fails, you can either tell them you overclocked or you don't. It depends on you altruism coefficient. I got a replacement motherboard from Asus for my A600, because I didn't tell them.
-------------

So you're a dishonest little shit too?

I want your order number. You are banned from having a Pandora from us.

That's right, your order is canceled.

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Op dinsdag 23 februari 2010 10:24 schreef Tain het volgende:
Hij zal best wel goed draaien op 800MHz, maar Texas Instruments heeft deze proc niet voor niets geclockt op 600MHz. De levensduur zal wel flink afnemen als je hem een tijdje op 800 laat draaien.

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To avoid significant device degradation for commercial temperature OMAP3530/OMAP3525 devices (0°C < Tj < 90°C), the device power-on hours (POH) must be limited to one of the following:
· 100K total POH when operating across all OPPs and keeping the time spent at OPP5 to less than 23K POH.
· 50K total POH when operating exclusively at OPP5.
· 44K total POH with no restrictions to the proportion of these POH at operating points OPP1 - OPP5.

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OPP5 is 1.35v. I believe devs have gotten around 750-800mhz at OPP3, with 900mhz needing OPP5

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Craigix: Chinese mould factory are back at work

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Op dinsdag 23 februari 2010 11:33 schreef Tain het volgende:

[..]

Geeft TI eigenlijk garantie op die chip als je hem overclockt? De 720MHz chip van de 3530 is hetzelfde chipje alleen door TI getest dat deze naar behoren functioneert op 720MHz ipv 600

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Op donderdag 25 februari 2010 15:21 schreef makkie88 het volgende:
draait iemand al android er op?

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Op maandag 1 februari 2010 15:46 schreef Bosbeetle het volgende:
Ohja en android is geport (zegt mij niet zoveel maar alle google liefhebbers denken er anders over)

Pandora booting android

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Craig tweets:

Looks like everything will have arrived here by the 22nd. How exciting.

EvilDragon tweets:

Production, here we come! Just confirmed with Fatih, cases will arrive in UK March 22nd. We’ll have the assembly site ready by then! Go!

Craig elaborates:

(The 22nd) is when everything should be here, including the cases. To be on the safe side we probably won’t start until a few days after that.

I feel a lot more confident about this now we are back in control.

Our own assembly line, this will work far far better for batch 2 and so on. It should always have been like this.

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Keep it going.
Wednesday, 10 March 2010 11:05 EvilDragon
E-mail Print PDF
Long time no blog post - and a lot has happened, really!

First, let's start with some OS development.
The OS is getting better and better. We will probably add another minimal menu, similar to gmenu2x with no fancy effects and graphics but PND-Support.
This is for all the purists of you.

Also, notaz and DJWillis are slowly stepping forward in getting WiFi working.
While it's not perfect, the packet loss is decreasing and things are getting better.
It might still be a long way (or it might be finished soon, you never know with such things), but it's improving.

I also successfully managed to setup a Bluetooth PAN connection to my mobile phone. I got an IP address via DHCP, I got DNS resolving and I could ping the phone.
Pinging websites outside of the phone didn't work yet, but that might be my mobile phone (custom cooked ROM, never tried Bluetooth PAN before).
As I did use the terminal to set that up (it only takes a few lines to do so), the next step is including this into the Network Manager.

Next let's go on to the Mass Production:
As most of you already know, we moved the assembly from US to UK - we'll do it ourselves!
This is because the company in US finally gave us a price for doing this - a ridiculous high price.
The boards will still be populated there, but we will assemble the units ourselves. Craig is currently setting up the village hall to turn into a proper place to do this, including buying everything needed (ESD stuff, etc.)

Our current roadmap is like this:
(note: It still depends on the case production and on the board production. This is based on the dates they did tell us - but as we already experienced a few times, we are a small client for them and therefore have low priority... let's hope they keep their dates this time!)

March 18th: Production of 1000 cases is finished and will be shipped to UK.
March 22nd: 1000 cases will arrive in UK and will be inspected. If all is well, the next 3000 will go into production.
March 22th - March 26th: 500 populated and tested boards and all parts will be shipped to UK.
Approx. April 1st: Assembly will start.

Yep, another promise broken - whereas the company in Texas told us they can test 1000 boards a week before, it's now down to 500 boards a week.
At least they kept their shipping dates for all the prototypes and testing boards so far, so March 22th - March 26th should hopefully be fine.

Some parts already started to arrive in UK, e.g. the PSUs are there.

We decided to start on April 1st to have a small bufferzone for the stuff to arrive.
It doesn't make much sense if we all sit around in the village hall without having any parts to build together

The complete assembly process will be broadcasted live via Webcam. That will be fun!

BTW:
The Pandora stirred up a lot of interest in Germany currently.
I've been at the CeBIT in Germany doing a presentation about the OpenSource gaming handhelds and of course the Pandora.
It was crowded.
Thanks to Radio Tux, you can listen to the presentation.
You can also download the PDF I used for it here.

They also did another interview here.

And if anybody wants to watch it, we've got the full thing available as video on Youtube here.

Beware, it's all in German!

After the presentation, a lot of guys (some from the community as well) could get their hands on the Pandora and play with it.
They all loved how well the controls and the keyboard work. Looks like our design is working well

That's it for today - hopefully we have good news within the next two weeks!

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Op zaterdag 13 maart 2010 11:15 schreef Notorious_Roy het volgende:
Komt 'ie ook in blauw?

DboxFE and Warcraft 1

Windows 3.11 and Exaile Music Player

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Craigix: Got another delivery today, will take photos tomorrow. More boxes.

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Op vrijdag 19 maart 2010 14:53 schreef __Saviour__ het volgende:
Leuke duidelijke vooruitgang nu
Hoe zit het eigenlijk met de stroomadapters?
Krijgen we er gewoon eentje die hier werkt of zal er nog iets van een verloopstekker nodig zijn?

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Op donderdag 25 maart 2010 09:35 schreef picodealion het volgende:
Damn, 70% van de posts hier is van jou Bosbeetle

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Pheewww... so much things have happened. So many stuff to tell you... and that's what I wanted to do tonight.

However, I just came home from a 13-hour workday after having 3 hours of sleep and having another 17-hour workday before...
I'm too tired to do anything except for closing my eyes and rest a while... I hope you do understand.

I will use the weekend to recover and try to get you all informed latest at the beginning of next week.

Really sorry about that... had so much work to do. Didn't even find a few minutes to use twitter, update the buglist or status page here on the website...