Pandora Units Revealed
April 19th, 2010 by CrusaderEngadget is reporting that a photograph of mass-produced Pandora open-source handheld game console units has appeared online:
You can follow the production of these first systems at the Pandora developer blog.
I’ve yet to own a Linux-based handheld (hell, my Linux laptop has been retired as of a month ago); of those that have, which would you recommend? Were the game libraries available to you compelling? How was battery life, the screen, etc.?
April 19th, 2010 at 8:45 pm
Ordered mine about 6 hours after they started, thought I might have it by Christmas, now I am hoping by end of May. I was hoping to have a small game ready to port by then but other things have come up.
I have a GP2X but other than hacking touchscreen support into Ultima 7, which turned out to not work well anyhow, I have not done any development with it. I do know the GP2X has a custom SDL version (mainly key mappings) but the Pandora will support the standard SDL. If the game you want to play uses SDL_*, does not use OpenGL (but can use OpenGL-ES), and is open source there is a good chance a compile later (on the Pandora itself if you want) you will be playing the game. There is more details about games/hardware that work in the wiki which I am too lazy to look up right now.
April 20th, 2010 at 12:29 am
I hope they build WiMax into the thing.
April 20th, 2010 at 11:11 am
Hardware been finalized, there is no WiMax.
April 20th, 2010 at 11:13 am
Oh and mine been pre-ordered for a while.
April 20th, 2010 at 11:20 am
There is a full USB2 (not USB 1.1) port you can put whatever you want on it.
April 22nd, 2010 at 2:29 pm
Does Pandora contain any proprietary software on board (say, drivers)? I’d definitely buy it if its software is fully free. Very nice piece of hardware.
April 22nd, 2010 at 11:10 pm
I don’t believe anything is Proprietary software wise.
Actually all the source code specific to the Pandora is available http://git.openpandora.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi
April 25th, 2010 at 10:36 pm
Can’t wait to see Quake2 on this. Quake2 has so many graphics porting paths that it is a far superior engine than Quake1, Quake3, Doom3, and Doom4. There should be more overhaul work so everything works through the Quake2 engine. It should be the model engine of all games no matter what.