2 Quick "size" Questions

[JerryG20]

Hey everybody I have 2 quick questions that have been on my mind recently about the pandora:

1. Has the dimensions of the Pandora been changed? I remember that it used to be said that it's size was in between that of the DS Lite and the old, fatty DS. The Pandora, excluding the thickness dimension, was supposed to be smaller than the original DS. However, newer videos posted by craigix doesn't show this. It looks like the Pandora's dimensions have increased?

2. Kind of a different size question, but the screen used with the Pandora is the same dimensions as the PSP screen right? So that means classic 4:3 or non-widescreen games on the Pandora will look smaller on the Pandora compared to the GP2X or GP32?

Thanks alot for your time.

 

[lulzfish]

Pandora: 3.687 in. by 2.212 in.
The GP2x screen is 2.8 in. by 2.1 in.

Pandora: 800 by 480
Gp2x: 320 by 240

So, the pixels will be doubled, there will be some black bars on the side, and the games will look just a little bit bigger.
Should be fine.

 

[Poem58]

I can't wait to see this screen. Lulz, the pixels will actually be more than Quadrupled!

320x240+320x240
+
320x240+320x240

That would only be a 640x480 resolution. I have never owned any of the Internet tablets or Archos devices so I have only my imagination to work with here. As impressed with the PSP's 480x272 as I was, the extra pixels here just seem awesome to me. I see the Youtube vids and am happy to see how crisp the word processing app was that Craig used. I know that in person, this is only gonna look better. Again, dream device feature thumbs up!

 

[fischju2000]

Here is a size comparison between the PSP and Archos 605, which has the same screen as the Pandora: http://www.kennyham.com/images/archos605-size.jpg

840x480 is a lot of space, it makes almost every webpage viewable without any horizontal scrolling.

 

[JerryG20]

To clarify I am talking about physical size (physical dimensions of what is actually displayed from the game, measured in cm or inches, not pixels) of the screen. I know that we are getting like 4x as many pixels as the PSP screen and stuff, but I was wondering if the physical size of, say, a SNES/GENESIS game running on the Pandora screen will be smaller than the size of a SNES/GENESIS game running on the GP2X.

 

[lulzfish]

No, the screen is actually a little bit taller than on the GP2x.

So games will be bigger, as long as the developer remembers to use pixel doubling.

 

[Poem58]

Sorry Lulz, I didn't mean to come off as if I were correcting you or anything..I see you mentioned pixel doubling. I just wanted to emphasize just how much pixels we have here. It's sweet! I remember reading a long time ago that people were complaining about the resolution as this many pixels would be bad for gaming! Yet running as a desktop at 320x240 wouldn't be so hot either. My pocket PC though was 240x320. Not horrible I guess but still this resolution makes me smile. Glad we got more yard to our real estate.

 

[lulzfish]

I was replying to Jerry since I didn't seem to answer his question right the first time.
I don't know why anyone would think higher resolution is bad... You can always use less pixels in software, but you can't make a low resolution screen higher in software.

 

[craigix]

Hey everybody I have 2 quick questions that have been on my mind recently about the pandora:

1. Has the dimensions of the Pandora been changed? I remember that it used to be said that it's size was in between that of the DS Lite and the old, fatty DS. The Pandora, excluding the thickness dimension, was supposed to be smaller than the original DS. However, newer videos posted by craigix doesn't show this. It looks like the Pandora's dimensions have increased?

Thanks alot for your time.

It's the same, there is a video I posted where i have them next to each other, it's called something like 'complete, working pandora demo'.

 

[sadata]

Hey everybody I have 2 quick questions that have been on my mind recently about the pandora:

1. Has the dimensions of the Pandora been changed? I remember that it used to be said that it's size was in between that of the DS Lite and the old, fatty DS. The Pandora, excluding the thickness dimension, was supposed to be smaller than the original DS. However, newer videos posted by craigix doesn't show this. It looks like the Pandora's dimensions have increased?

Thanks alot for your time.

It's the same, there is a video I posted where i have them next to each other, it's called something like 'complete, working pandora demo'.

What the? You're supposed to be working on a black Pandora video. Get back to work!

 

[gp2.eXe]

Hey everybody I have 2 quick questions that have been on my mind recently about the pandora:

1. Has the dimensions of the Pandora been changed? I remember that it used to be said that it's size was in between that of the DS Lite and the old, fatty DS. The Pandora, excluding the thickness dimension, was supposed to be smaller than the original DS. However, newer videos posted by craigix doesn't show this. It looks like the Pandora's dimensions have increased?

Thanks alot for your time.

It's the same, there is a video I posted where i have them next to each other, it's called something like 'complete, working pandora demo'.

What the? You're supposed to be working on a black Pandora video. Get back to spraying!

There, fixed it for you.

 

[christo930]

Sorry Lulz, I didn't mean to come off as if I were correcting you or anything..I see you mentioned pixel doubling. I just wanted to emphasize just how much pixels we have here. It's sweet! I remember reading a long time ago that people were complaining about the resolution as this many pixels would be bad for gaming! Yet running as a desktop at 320x240 wouldn't be so hot either. My pocket PC though was 240x320. Not horrible I guess but still this resolution makes me smile. Glad we got more yard to our real estate.

Scaling the screen only looks good with whole scales, fractional scales look horrible and that is why most emulated systems will have black bars on the screen. For many of the games, the whole screen won't be usable unless you don't mind fractional scaling and I don't think you will.

Chris

 

[Exophase]

Scaling the screen only looks good with whole scales, fractional scales look horrible and that is why most emulated systems will have black bars on the screen. For many of the games, the whole screen won't be usable unless you don't mind fractional scaling and I don't think you will.

Chris

A lot of people are relatively fine with fractional scaling. Whole scaling is preferable, but fractional is generally regarded as not nearly as bad if you use bilinear filtering. Even better would be if the DSP is capable of employing bicubic filtering in real time/60Hz. Seems like a good thing to play around with. Bicubic shouldn't need more bus bandwidth than bilinear or even nearest neighbor, so it'd be down to number crunching. The display controller also has an upscaler which provides 5-tap FIR filtering, which is probably superior to bilinear as well.

As far as height goes, the number of lines are 2x that of GP2X. So whatever problems you have with height scaling on GP2X you'll have here, except Pandora has more options for 3x scaling, which would be 1.5x on GP2X. For instance, consider Gameboy: 144 pixel height can't be multiplied by 2 and fit in 240 lines, but it can be multiplied by 3 and fit in 432 lines, leaving considerably less border space on the top and bottom.

The left/right sides will be more prone to borders, but since this is a wide screen display it's a pretty moot point. In essence, that area is there if you need it, not a loss if you don't. In other words, a 640x480 display with the same height would have no size advantage.

 

[lulzfish]

Isn't the DSP more like for audio?
I would just apply a GLSL fragment shader to a texture containing the screen data.

Bam, SGX-accelerated interpolation of your choice.

Edit: For 2D games, it would just look too weird and ruin everything. With 3D games, you can get away with this better since the textures are already interpolated a lot. I wouldn't mind fractional scaling on like a PS1 game.

 

[Tinnus]

Edit: For 2D games, it would just look too weird and ruin everything. With 3D games, you can get away with this better since the textures are already interpolated a lot. I wouldn't mind fractional scaling on like a PS1 game.

Just to remind people that scaling artifacts for PS1 will be kinda moot with the hardware-accelerated GPU because there will be an option to render at double the resolution natively

 

[White Flame]

Here's a pic I took a while ago, with a N800 next to a standard pixel size 24" LCD monitor, showing pretty much a 1:1 pixel correlation.