Another Pandora Ripoff? [Pandora Vs Atari Portfolio]

[skeezix]

This is for all those folks who think everyone else is ripping off the Pandora, by virtue of Pandora being a clamshell (and who evidently never heard of a Nintendo GBA clamshell)

For full size, see: http://www.walled.ne...portfolio_1.jpg

Notice the overall design similarity.

Atari Portfolio -- 1989
Open Pandora -- 2010-ish.

Theres 20 years of technology advancement, folks

For the curious, the Portfolio runs at just under 5Mhz and runs a modded DOS 2 if memory serves; due to low res (less than 80x20 columns, uses like 20x8 or something, I forget) it actually lets you pan the screen around, but well behaved DOS applications will (try to) adjust to fit; it runs old text adventures well .. I actually ported Frotz to it awhile back, just for a lark, and runs great

(Yes, Atari made a few PC/DOS machines, actually pretty good ones; Atari was many years ahead of the curve in a lot of ways, and really stupid in many other ways.)

How awesome is that pic though, right?

jeff

edit; thought I'd throw it up on my blog; quoted this post, hope no one minds.

 

[Wrath Of Khan]

Similar alright.Never knew atari made any pc dos machines.Thought the lynx was the only handheld atari.Also didnt commodore make pcs?if memory serves?

 

[skeezix]

Goddamned, old stuff is so big. While I'm digging through retro, more rant

(Lets not talk about radio 'Receivers' of by gone era; besides the fact they were often superior to a lot of stuff you can get nowadays, a giant 1970s receiver with capacitors the sisze of your fist was huge! And laptops that weighed 30 pounds..)

I usually let my little girl fiddle with whatever gear she can find, barring my 'current' stuff; shes not alowed to break my pandora But today I was doing some cleaning and stumbled across a Game Gear, Atari Lynx, GBA (original unlit and a SP lit model) and some other gear.

The Lynx was always big, but I mean .. _Damn_, the thing has thiss little dpad surrounded by multiple inches of plastic in every which way, before it gets to the screen. The thing is huge, and it has to be mostly empty The Game Gear .. fucking huge, the great whale. The GBA and SP are pretty tiny, but those screens are all crap, and thats not even that long ago. Blurry, overbright frontlight.. for shame people of the past!

It reminds me of the Atari 7800 .. here was a beast that they decided needed ot be 10x necesary size, just to 'feel more American' and 'look more impressive'; the thing was _actually_ fully empty inside, bigger than most big VCRs. Bastards

jeff

Edit;

Still, my girl liked The Lion King on Game Gear, and some Kirby action on the GBA SP. Most of the games are just too hard for her, being only 3.5 years old .. action is tough; but shes all over using Kirby to inhale a bad guy and splash him into the next guy

Turbo Express (portable TG16) -- 6 AA's to fire it up? Brutal!

 

[cbox]

Commodore 128 was DOS compatible, I had one. The thing was though, there wasn't much software that ran on it. The 128 had three modes, 64 mode, 128 mode, and DOS mode. I think I had one program that ran in DOS mode. They had a different kind of disk drive compared to PCs and the sectors and such were set up differently, so you couldn't just put a PC disk in there and it would work.

 

[skeezix]

Was CPM not DOS if memory serves; CPM was the OS that DOS is a copy of, really. I'm pretty hardcore retro and all, but CPM was (thankfully) out of my grasp

I bet there wasn't jack all you could run in CPM mode on the 128 ..

But was there even much for 128 mode? Anyone I know who had one, ran the poor thing in C64 mode; there was a few BBS apps and such in 128 mode I know that.

jeff

 

[Wrath Of Khan]

says only 3hours battery life on turbo express on 6 aasedit my niece played gianas return on my pandora she was addicted shes 6 though a little older.

 

[skeezix]

You know whats sort of sad --

When emulation actually _improves_ the thing. I'm an arcade collector, and also an emu author .. those seem opposed in one sense; emulation is great, for carrying around old gear on new gear, and for having the ability to switch games without carrying around giant carts or pcboards... but being inexact, its often better to have the original. Certainly, the original controls add a lot (arcade, say) and sometimes you need the right 'sound' (consider QBert, which had a little hammer knocking on the side of the arcade cabinet; you just can't reproduce that in emulation.)

But after digging out some of my old gear I'm getting less tolerant; I used to just love some of this stuff, or be blinded to the flaws because it was just so awesome, especially in its time. But looking back now ..

Aside form being _huge_..

Game Gear -- a crap screen; one of those LCDs thats 'brightness' and 'tint' was controlled by the angle you looked at it; seriously. And batteries good for 2-3 hours, so you had to buy a huuuge battery pack, on top of an already huge machine.

Turbo Express (TG16, PCEngine handheld) -- super crap screen; tiny little screen, but also 'blurry' .. ie: its less resolution or something than the CRTs it was replacing (but you could runm real TG16 games on it, not portable-versions of them), so text was unreadable, and anythign using a patterned texture would shimmer like mad. Battery life like 3 hours on 6 AAs.

Atari Lynx -- now, this was a pretty masterful machine with a great screen (big, good colours, and atually a pretty nice screen); but huge device. Also a battery life of 3-4 hours. Unique in that you can flip the machine over and hit a switch to rotate the screen.. left handed friendly!

GameBoy -- just crap, really.

Emulation improves these guys. Suddenly the size is managable, the screens are 100 times better, no worry about batteries running out just like that .. I've been too busy with having a kid and working on pandora and my own games, and real work etc, I've just not dug these out in years, and I gotta say .. wow, they still rock, but damned if I'm not more inclined to just fire up the emus


Handy .. oh good, someone (maybe me? I forget ) ported Handy to pandora, yay!
TG16 -- Exophase, c'mon, get off your rear!


jeff

 

[Prometheus]

Jeff, I hate to tell you this, but the Game Gear has a brightness dial on it.

But yeah, seriously though, time hasn't been kind to the then-unavoidable limitations in the technology of that bunch, has it? My eyes are thankful that screen technology has moved on. :lol:

 

[Wrath Of Khan]

even the original gameboy advance didnt have that great a screen.They Brightened all the colours in super streetfighter
so it would look better on the screen.

 

[Esn]

Neat video.

I wonder if it's possible to receive TV signals on the Pandora via some USB add-on. (I guess it's ATSC these days?)

 

[Wrath Of Khan]

watching turbo grafx 16 games on youtube.Looks like lots of really cool games were on it.exophase bring it on.

 

[dewc]

At the time, the Turbo Express and its super cool active matrix tft screen was one of the best on the market. Sure it's bad now . Still love the damn thing for what it is.

Regarding to original GBA, did anyone else besides me get the afterburner kit which added front lighting to the unit? Worked pretty well, but damn hard to put on properly.

I love how emulation improves these portables.

 

[Wrath Of Khan]

At the time, the Turbo Express and its super cool active matrix tft screen was one of the best on the market. Sure it's bad now . Still love the damn thing for what it is.

Regarding to original GBA, did anyone else besides me get the afterburner kit which added front lighting to the unit? Worked pretty well, but damn hard to put on properly.

I love how emulation improves these portables.

never had the afterburner kit just a plain gba.Finished final fight and metroid fusion under a direct light.seems silly to have to do that now.

 

[DaveC]

watching turbo grafx 16 games on youtube.Looks like lots of really cool games were on it.exophase bring it on.

There were allot of awesome Turbo games. Just do a youtube search of Dracula-X, Gates of thunder, Lords of thunder etc. These had some of the best sound tracks ever.

You can play the Wiz version of Temper through Ginge, it is not as smooth as it could be as it is not running native, but it is much better than nothing and it is looking like that is all we will get.

You know whats sort of sad --


Game Gear -- a crap screen; one of those LCDs thats 'brightness' and 'tint' was controlled by the angle you looked at it; seriously. And batteries good for 2-3 hours, so you had to buy a huuuge battery pack, on top of an already huge machine.

Turbo Express (TG16, PCEngine handheld) -- super crap screen; tiny little screen, but also 'blurry' .. ie: its less resolution or something than the CRTs it was replacing (but you could runm real TG16 games on it, not portable-versions of them), so text was unreadable, and anythign using a patterned texture would shimmer like mad. Battery life like 3 hours on 6 AAs.

Atari Lynx -- now, this was a pretty masterful machine with a great screen (big, good colours, and atually a pretty nice screen); but huge device. Also a battery life of 3-4 hours. Unique in that you can flip the machine over and hit a switch to rotate the screen.. left handed friendly!

GameBoy -- just crap, really.

Emulation improves these guys. Suddenly the size is managable, the screens are 100 times better, no worry about batteries running out just like that .. I've been too busy with having a kid and working on pandora and my own games, and real work etc, I've just not dug these out in years, and I gotta say .. wow, they still rock, but damned if I'm not more inclined to just fire up the emus


Handy .. oh good, someone (maybe me? I forget ) ported Handy to pandora, yay!
TG16 -- Exophase, c'mon, get off your rear!


jeff

Yeah Game Gear. Pure crap. The screen was so blurry and the thing ate batteries faster than anything.

Turbo Express - yeah the native resolution was less than the real hardware producing all kinds of ripple, and it ate a gross of batteries in an hour. Now the Wiz is the ultimate Turbo Express.

Yeah I have the original Lynx, it is like a cross between a portable and a skate board. Steve-M portd it to the Pandora but it is kind of chuggy still and suffers from massive SDL screen tearing. It appears abandoned. Maybe someone will get the source and fix it up a bit? Skeezix

Then there is the Nomad. Small blurry screen with a refresh rate measured in minutes. Play Virtua racing and you get literally 15 minutes of battery life.

Ps all of these backlit color LCD used FLUORESCENT BULBS to light them! White LEDs weren't invented yet! That probably explains the terrible battery life.

 

[jonjandran]

Then there is the Nomad. Small blurry screen with a refresh rate measured in minutes. Play Virtua racing and you get literally 15 minutes of battery life.

Ps all of these backlit color LCD used FLUORESCENT BULBS to light them! White LEDs weren't invented yet! That probably explains the terrible battery life.

Just let me do my mods on it for you

http://www.racketboy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=17415

 

[Wrath Of Khan]

yup lords of thunder has really cool music,wish modern music in games could be like this.just listened on youtube.

 

[Aurekana]

Funny you post that; I have a Casio Cassiopeia sitting on my shelf, idle, waiting for a possible guts replacement whenever I get around to finding a correctly sized replacement LCD: http://www.pdastock.com/Casio-Cassiopeia-A-10-675.html

Fits nicely between the Atari and Pandora at ~10 years old, preceded traditional PDA-style handhelds in Casio's lineup.

 

[torpor]

Great thread skeezix! I too have my Atari Portfolio(s) still in my heart, and often next to my Pandoras, since my kid loves to type on the Portfolio keyboard .. click click ..

I used to use my Portfolio as a development machine! Back in those days I was working on Unix systems (still am, shee-it) coding entirely in C, and I had a port of my company products in Turbo C 2.0 on the Portfolio, so I could make edits and tweaks and stuff (data importers/massagers, mostly) mid-flight between customer sites. I also wrote games for it, it was a cool homebrew scene for a while (search for PGAMES.ZIP in the Portfolio archives) .. I booted my Portfolio recently and was pleasantly surprised that everything is still there, still working just like it used to .. only problem I have now is finding a PC with a Parallel port so I can transfer software ..

Anyway, if you want some homebrew for your Portfolio, go find PGAMES.ZIP .. I even bundled the sources, if I remember correctly, so you could compile onboard even then, BOLLOCKS!

 

[Gruntfuggly]

I fitted an afterburner kit to my GBA - it was pretty awesome till the GBA got dropped and killed the display...

I still play my Lynx - great machine. Wouldn't dream of running it on batteries though...

I'm really hoping somebody takes up Lynx emulation on the P.

 

[Qwertyuiop]

Neat video.

I wonder if it's possible to receive TV signals on the Pandora via some USB add-on. (I guess it's ATSC these days?)

Mcobit already did it on the other boards.