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OpenSource Handheld News - Gp2X, Dingoo, Wiz, Pandora, GCW Zero and Caanoo is a News and downloads site for Open Source Handhelds, We have all the latest emulators, hack, homebrew, commercial games and all the downloads on this site, the latest homebrew and releases, Part of the
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December 28th, 2008, 21:56 Posted By: wraggster
mazza558 posted this News:
info from mweston (one of design team)
It fits, but it had to be made thicker to prevent brittle areas in the cups holding the carbon pads. Therefore, it isn't very usable as it takes a lot of force to press buttons. As far as form is concerned, it fits beautifully. As far as more complete prototypes (CNC'd) go, I won't have anything until the New Year. I had to drive over to the FedEx depot to pick this one up myself before they closed up for the holidays or I wouldn't even have had this one!
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December 28th, 2008, 21:13 Posted By: wraggster
Craigix has today posted an update for all those wondering about the status of the Pandora Project:
Hello everyone, Craig here,
Seems to be a little frustration that things are quiet and thus something must be going wrong somewhere.
There isn't anything wrong, we are working onwards, it's just the time of year means we have to wait on companies reopening and most don't until after the new year.
Alas we were unable to get the new FDM case made up in time (although the keypad did arrive in time after all!).
Anyway we should have the new case just after the new year and we are going to do some CNC ones too (the Wiz cases are CNC, which is why they look nicer, it's just a lot more expensive).
So together with the keypad we can assemble a Pandora with the new redesigned more round case, Michael may well post a complete unit using the older case before then just for fun.
The LCDs and batteries are due to arrive in January (finally!) so things can move a bit faster now, assuming everything DOES arrive, I'm a little reluctant to believe companies estimations now as every time we promise a date we are let down and we end up looking bad.
On the software side, as you know, it's going well, the OS is shaping up to be revolutionary for such a small device and it's getting a lot of attention from places outside this forum - we are enjoying reading your feedback on it.
Another thing which has been on my mind, and which I've not seen asked anywhere during this project, is 'why has something like the Pandora not been made before with the same layout?' this is sort of to answer people who can't believe it's taken us so long and wonder why we can't just whack it all together and release it already, I mean it does look simple.
But making something like this is far far more difficult than you might imagine and astonishingly expensive in some areas. When you open up a laptop or a mobile phone it looks so neat and easy in there, but consider it was probably dozens of people working for a couple of years to get to that result.
The design and the whole process has proved to be so complex and difficult to fit in that little box and had we known back when we started this project just what would be involved we might have been a little more reserved - but it's done now and things will be all the better for it, I hope we have raised the bar - especially in the controls area, please try to be understanding to the team when it looks like we have taken a month to solve a simple issue. Trial and error can be a right - lengthy- pain in the arse sometimes.
And on that note, the Nubs are due to arrive in January too - all 8000, I'm not even sure if I have previously mentioned that the first batch were faulty (no fault of ours, the PCB manufacturer drilled the holes incorrectly).
Some of you will start to get emails for reordering via credit/debit card this/next month, as I've said previously we will probably do it slowly and carefully to avoid a rush and trouble like last time - I'd still like to encourage as many of you as possible to consider a bank transfer to help the project right now. I'll post about how well xoom and xe.com test transfers went.
Urgh, bad memories... and I'm rambling on, but Pandora prevails.
We will probably have a nice post in January about the first MP production boards and cases.
-Craig
PS would you believe me and DaveC started a little idea for a new console (possibly at the time a reboxed gp2x) which went on to become the Pandora project almost 3 years ago - 3 years! I'm putting a little video together showing the evolution of the project - just need that video/photo of the final unit first.
OK OK, time for me to be quiet, thanks for the continuing support always, enjoy new year
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December 23rd, 2008, 14:53 Posted By: wraggster
The Pandora gets more exciting, heres some great news from Skeezix:
This one is for Pickle, the eminent DOSBox for gp2x expert. This man slaved and slaved to wring every last bit of hot DOSBox action out of the little gp2x. He's been helping us out sorting out configs and fiddling to get DOSBox working on the Pandora. I asked what a good game to check would be, as I had been trying out some 'lightweights' .. he suggested WC2. Briliant I thought...Check it out..
This is a stock DOSBox (by which I mean compiled from source, with no optimizations _at all_, and not even tuning the config. Its got the wrong cycle settings and full audio enabled and installed _from my Warcraft 2 ancient CD_. DOSBox in dynarec mode though, so its working its ass off here  The good news -- runs nearly full speed, and fully playably. I've worked through the first Orc campaign mission. USB mouse and keybord.
Aside, I also tried Wing Commander 1 -- peachy. Civilization 1 -- perfect. Wizardry 7 Crusaders of the Dark Savant -- perfect. System Shock 1 chugged it, but thats fair .. its all software math emulation to do the 3d mode, but possibly with high enough clock and optimization.. maybe. We're just scratching the surface here.
The only thing thats chuggy at all is scrolling around the screen by mousing to the edge; was that smooth back in the day? Its possible with more units it would suffer more as this first campaign is nothing, but still.. this is quite an achievement.
Pandora was set to 800MHz .. and the Panda can go higher still; I probably should've tried for 900 or more to see if it corrected that one nit, but I was too busy drooling
Edit
For those of us so mightily curious, here is Dune 2 running; it is also playable (though I didn't complete any levels, it seemed just fine to play.)
http://www.codejedi.com/cgi-bin/blog...wc2dosbox.blog
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December 23rd, 2008, 14:48 Posted By: wraggster
Cpasjuste posted this :
Hi, here is a few (crappy) videos i made to show a part of the work i'v done on the pandora, including a wesnoth compilation, snes9x port, powermanga and tecnoballz compilation.
Note that the snes port run at full speed, without any optimization or HW acceleration !
http://mydedibox.fr/_stuff/pandora/
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December 21st, 2008, 11:44 Posted By: wraggster
I thought that software development for old Series 80 Communicators is now completely dead and that I'll have no opportunity to post any news in the S80 section ever again... What a surprise, Sami Vuori (aka Sera on our discussion forums) has just ported the classic Dodgin' Diamond 2 game to Series 80. Good work, Sera!
http://my-symbian.com/s80/software/a...Auto=867&faq=3
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December 20th, 2008, 14:46 Posted By: wraggster
More pandora news/pics:
Keymats stopped by Turkey to give you a "Hi!"
Now they are escorted by some Turkish Delights on their way to MWeston!
More news to come soon. World tour of Pandora is going on!
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December 20th, 2008, 14:41 Posted By: wraggster
News from evildragon:
Hellollo! 
As promised, here is just some more footage of the current status of the Pandora OS, based on Angström.
It's now using Matchbox already (the Window Manager we want to use) and I'm connected to the net using USBNet.
We didn't design a Pandora-specific theme yet, so it looks very basic. But I'll concentrate on that soon. The folders could ALL have different icons, so navigating is quite easy and cool.
Now: Enjoy!
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December 18th, 2008, 19:47 Posted By: wraggster
Hello everyone,
As you may have noticed we have not started the reordering yet for Credit Card orders. This is because of a frustrating new problem caused by this 'world wide banking crisis' crap.
We can't get permission to accept such a large amount of money via credit cards - and believe me we have been trying hard. So because some drunken city traders pissed away all the banks money we get told we can't run a business as we have been running it for the last 5 years. Ie we can no longer accept all orders via credit cards.
So we find ourselves in a strange situation, a product which is a success in hard times but we are not allowed to sell it to everyone who wants to buy it. At least not in the usual internet way.
As you know we have been asking people, where possible, to pay via a bank transfer, and a lot of you have (We owe about 1000 of you a drink), but for some of you this means paying a fee to your bank.
What we need to find is a solution to this, it looks like we may have to take about 40% of the orders via other means, we are allowed to take the rest via credit cards. And it's the same message from ALL the UK banks.
In the future, when we will probably sell 40% to resellers that isn't a problem, but right now... it is.
As you can probably imagine I have a headache over this. I hope we can work together for a neat solution.
There are various companies online who will do an international bank transfer for a much smaller fee than most banks. We should probably start to figure out the best route ahead.
We are willing to discount the bank fee from the Pandora price, as we are charged a fee for accepting credit cards anyway.
Opinions, solutions, ideas? I know it's a bastard, let's just try to work though it, some kind of reward for people going the extra mile to pay via a transfer is possible.
http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?showtopic=45767
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December 16th, 2008, 01:23 Posted By: wraggster
Yay! I got something to show you: Our very first, freshly bitbaken Angström build on the Pandora!
So, I'm gonna show you the desktop (the FULL DESKTOP MODE, not the minimal mode) with some apps. No Pandora-Customized theme (or fonts) yet, that's what I'm gonna do during the next time.
This boots off a single speed SD Card, so it will be much faster on the final unit. It's also not using any accelerated SDL yet (it's just for testing, customizing and selecting the apps we want on the stock Pandora. So while the other devs are enhancing the drivers and making that thing faster, I can already concentrate on the functionality and look-and-feel!)
Oh, and if you think I speak weird stuff on that video... I'm from Germany and just spoke what came to my mind
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December 12th, 2008, 19:42 Posted By: wraggster
Heres news from the Openpandora site:
The credit card reordering which is required for some customers has not yet started, we will email you all when it does and we will try to make it as close to the actual shipping of the Pandora consoles as we can.
Remember to add your name to the newsletter mailing list if you want to order a Pandora when more are available, it's possible this may be sooner than you think as we will probably have 200-300 spare from the first batch.
Also we now have a dedicated press relations guy, if you need anything press related please email chip@openpandora.org and he will do his best to make wonderful things happen.
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December 9th, 2008, 23:17 Posted By: wraggster
Cpasjuste has released an Atari 520 Emulator for the Pandora Console:
Here is a great Atari 520 emulator compiled for the pandora, ready to play with when you'll get a pandora board
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December 9th, 2008, 23:14 Posted By: wraggster
Cpasjuste has released a Sega Master System Emulator for the Pandora Console:
PSMS - Pandora Sega Master System
=================================
Ported by Cpasjuste from SMS 0.9.4a.
Controls : tested on a sidewinder usb joypad, use select button to go back to the menu.
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December 9th, 2008, 23:08 Posted By: wraggster
Craigix posted this news:
Hello everyone,
Sorry about this slow credit card reorder process, please don't get angry at us as we can only move at the pace of the bank who started all this mess (and probably wish they had not done it now).
We want the make sure ALL card orders are refunded before we put up the reorder pages, and the reorder pages will probably go in batches, ie UK first, then euro then the rest of the world to avoid any server issues.
Please try to be patient and not give us a hard time (believe me the bank situation is a nightmare enough).
Also please don't request charge backs - this only leads the bank to believe they were 'right' to do this and weakens our argument that there were wrong - they have also told us they plan to charge us $38 for every charge back they receive just to kick us while we are down due to their actions.
They are refunding the orders but they are doing it very slowly, almost in an awkward manner.
Please try to work with us though this, it is the last step in a long project and we have worked past so many other major issues put in our place in the last two years - we just need your help to knock this one down too - and don't worry I'm keeping a diary of all the interesting attempts to try to derail the Pandora project and will post them soon.
Also remember that you won't lose your place in the queue and work continues full time while all this is happening - there are some very nice announcements coming up in regards to the drivers for the Pandora 3d, dsp, video in the next few weeks too which will again make the Pandora even faster and more complete.
If you liked Skeezixs Pandora benchmarks vs. other handhelds and thought they were impressive, well, prepare to turn it up to 11.
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December 9th, 2008, 23:05 Posted By: wraggster
SteveM has posted some beta releases for the Pandora Console, as of writing the only folks who will be able to test are some lucky devs
This is a straight compile of SIMH for Linux on the ARMv7 Cortex-A8. The
executables are dynamically linked but require no special libraries.
The "mkpxml.pl" script can be used to generate similar PXML files for the
available binaries.
Pandora-specific issues may be addressed to Steve Maddison <steve@cosam.org>
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December 9th, 2008, 23:00 Posted By: wraggster
SteveM has posted some beta releases for the Pandora Console, as of writing the only folks who will be able to test are some lucky devs
This is pretty much a straight compile of FUSE (and the libraries it depends upon) for Linux on the ARMv7 Cortex-A8. A couple of small hacks were made so that the configuration file (renamed from .fuserc to config.xml as not to be hidden) and other files (located under the "share" directory) can be found relative to the current directory, as required by the PXML system.
The executable is dynamically linked and all required libraries can be found in the "lib" directory, so setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH should allow these to be found at runtime.
Pandora-specific issues may be addressed to Steve Maddison <steve@cosam.org>
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December 9th, 2008, 22:40 Posted By: wraggster
SteveM has posted some beta releases for the Pandora Console, as of writing the only folks who will be able to test are some lucky devs
Frotz on Pandora
================
This is a straight compile of Frotz for Linux on the ARMv7 Cortex-A8. The executable is dynamically linked and requires the "nucurses" library, which
is included in the "lib" directory, should this not be available elsewhere.
Pandora-specific issues may be addressed to Steve Maddison <steve@cosam.org>
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December 7th, 2008, 18:03 Posted By: wraggster
News from wesbrown18
Thought I'd show you guys what I was working on today for the Pandora project -- at the moment, I'm working on sussing out the minimal multitasking interface based on feedback from the other developers. I figured that those of us anticipating the Pandora would like to see some tangible progress.
This is using the Matchbox window manager, which has been used to great success on the Nokia line of appliances. It's minimal, it's designed for a touch screen, and it displays windows in full screen, and does not get in the way of the user.
I'm also working from the Pandora version of gmenu2x, with some further modifications by me to support multitasking.
This is a video capture of gmenu2x launching, firing up the Amiga emulator, and then while Workbench 1.3 loads, Ultima 4 is fired up. Then we check on the progress of Workbench 1.3.
Caveat: This was captured on my development machine, not on the Pandora hardware itself. Actual performance may differ, but the Pandora does have a lot of oomph to it. Additionally, there are some funny frame-jump issues when xvidcap is overtaxed.
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