Bored Already?

[Viral18]

I spent most of my life in mid-Wales

Now that explains everything. You have my sympathy.

LMAO! I'm not sure which of several possible put-downs that could be, so I'll play the innocence route and say: Thanks for the sympathy... it was horrible there... so barren and lacking in Internet... :unsure:

[Edit- It wasn't the language that bothered me (derogatory language evolves so fast 'fucking shite' is like 'hell' 50 years ago now ) it was the attitude of impatience about the emulators being worked on. He was like a man who strolls into a restaurant and gets angry at how long the food takes when the meal was on the house for some reason <_< (Okay, my analogy was crap...)]

 

[SomeGuy99]

I spent most of my life in mid-Wales

Now that explains everything. You have my sympathy.

LMAO! I'm not sure which of several possible put-downs that could be, so I'll play the innocence route and say: Thanks for the sympathy... it was horrible there... so barren and lacking in Internet... :unsure:

My brother grew up in Wales. I think it scarred him for life!

 

[Dunny]

Hmm.

Let me think about this before I jump in.

[You wait. Time Passes. Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold.]

Okay. To my mind, and let's bear in mind that my Pandora hasn't even been built yet, let alone shipped, so this might all be complete bollocks:

Let's leave out your linux hackers for the moment. Those guys totally get the Pandora, and love to screw around with the OS and stuff, doing cool things that leave us, your average bods, thinking "Why?" - you can ignore those guys, the Pandora is right up their street, and we're not interested in those guys for the moment.

The Pandora is not a device for everyone. It's not for the guy who bought a DS-Light and a bagful of games who likes to just open it up, insert a cart and play. That will (probably) never work. It's possibly more geared at the guy who bought an R4 (or similar) cart and puts his own games and homebrew on there, but maybe not even him. It's possibly more accessible to the guy who jumped through hoops to get his homebrew onto his PSP. It's more technical than that. It's for the guy who bought a GP2X, loved it despite its failings, who played with the directory structure, got things on his SD card just so, and wanted a similar device with the faults fixed and a bit more power. Someone who isn't shy of configuring things himself. Maybe compiling something from source code occasionally, perhaps with a little editing of said code by himself - but that's not mandatory.

Problem is, quite a few people were led to believe (rightly or wrongly, intentionally or not) that this would be as easy to use as a DS. It was gonna be all "open" and "mod-able" and their emulators would be just a quick re-compile away for amazing performance. Which is, clearly by now, bollocks. "but it's only been out for a month!" we hear you cry - yeah, that's true - so where is our chrono-trigger at 120fps? Our silky-smooth PSX emulation? Our fullspeed Amiga emulation with amazing screen display? Those were demo'd a year before it was finished.

Problem is, to my mind, that all that will come, in time - this time next year we'll be wiping the floor with most other emulator platforms. Homebrew will totally rock. But a lot of people who are into their mainstream handhelds just don't get why the things they expected to happen haven't happened yet.

That was probably a little disjointed, but that's my opinion. It'll get there, but most folks want it like yesterday - like they get with their mainstream consoles. They certainly weren't expecting to have to piss around with config files to get the sound working.

When I started work for the place I work in, a guy asked us at induction: "How many of the complaints we get from the public are actually valid complaints?"

We guessed - 60%, 20%, 80% - but the answer was "all of them. 100%. If someone complains, then there is someone who perceives a problem. And if that happens, then we haven't communicated effectively and although they've got the wrong end of the stick, we failed to make sure they didn't. And we should be fixing that."

At the time, I thought it was a load of bullshit, but I can see in these forums that there's a problem with Paddy's perception of what the Pandora actually is. And it's us, as a forum, that have led him to believe that the Pandora will be something from the start that it will only be in 6 months time.

Cor, do I go on a bit, or what?

D.

 

[Azure]

Add me to the list of people that's gotten a little bored with the Pandora already. I guess my expectations were elsewhere while I was waiting the past couple years. I'm just a little disappointed that I still don't have my TV-Out cable (and that the controls didn't live up the hype), and I guess I expected a bit more software wise (as in more stable & faster internet browsing; being able to smoothly watch my videos without overclocking; SNES emulation with centered screen, scaling options, and more accurate sound emulation; and I guess the big one, full-speed PSX emulation with more accurate sound emulation). I'm sure a lot of these will come in time, but in the mean time my Pandora is simply a very expensive and very large mp3 player

 

[Viral18]

^(Dunny)
You basically just explained exactly what I was thinking perfectly, thankyou.

My brother grew up in Wales. I think it scarred him for life!

Yeah me too

 

[SomeGuy99]

Nice post Dunny.

I only got into the whole hacking side of the Pandora because:

1) Stuff seemed to be happening slowly. If I wanted features and programs, I'd have to go get them
2) I had some moderate Linux ability - enough to learn more, thanks to the guys in this community

I'm having fun with the hacking, but it's not what I bought a Pandora for. I'm kind of a sad twat, but it would please me no end if the development around these parts was kicked into a higher gear. I'm not impatient or anything, but at least one new application a day would be lovely.

Think about it... there are 25,000+ apps in the Debian repositories. At one application a day, that would take nearly 70 years to get a PND of every one.

Making a PND needs to be piss easy, like a Windows GUI easy. Then myself, Paddy and other eager beavers could start stockpiling the appstore at a stupid rate.

Things will pick up when more Pandoras are out there... but that seems to be an all new drama for those people.

 

[Iorgy77]

I'm bored of waiting... does that count?

 

[Barnaby]

I'm bored of reading people talking about their experiences of the Pandora. I want to join in too dammit! I haven't owned an MP3 player in two years because I've been waiting, so even if it turns out to be an expensive MP3 player for a few months, that's perfectly fine for me! It's a shame though. I ordered it just as I started college. I had 1 1/2 hours of journeying each way to college. I really could've done with the Pandora. I finish college next week. Hopefully I'll have it for the summer holidays though...

My brother grew up in Wales. I think it scarred him for life!

Yeah me too

Me three. And I'm still stuck here. I wonder how many Pandorians are in Wales?

 

[Dunny]

I only got into the whole hacking side of the Pandora because:

1) Stuff seemed to be happening slowly. If I wanted features and programs, I'd have to go get them
2) I had some moderate Linux ability - enough to learn more, thanks to the guys in this community

I'm pretty much the same. In the time between manufacturing starting and me not getting a Pandora, I've been installing Slack and messing with KDE. I know all this "just works" in windows, but trying to get linux to render fonts properly is really good fun (and I've not managed it yet). It's because of all this playing that I'm gonna get more out of the Pandora than just emulators. Mind you, at least by the time I get mine the PSX emulator will be better!

I'm having fun with the hacking, but it's not what I bought a Pandora for. I'm kind of a sad twat, but it would please me no end if the development around these parts was kicked into a higher gear. I'm not impatient or anything, but at least one new application a day would be lovely.

Think about it... there are 25,000+ apps in the Debian repositories. At one application a day, that would take nearly 70 years to get a PND of every one.

Making a PND needs to be piss easy, like a Windows GUI easy. Then myself, Paddy and other eager beavers could start stockpiling the appstore at a stupid rate.

Things will pick up when more Pandoras are out there... but that seems to be an all new drama for those people.

You speak truth.

I'm bored of waiting... does that count?

Damn right. There's Pandoras on fucking ebay for god's sake. Where the hell is mine? And which pillock decided that people who ordered more than one would get them all at once? Surely for a new device where supply is gonna be restricted it makes sense to get as many people one pandora as you can, to get the software base up and running? People with more than one (or maybe two) are obviously not gonna be developing more than one app at a time with them. Why not just say "yeah, you can order ten - but your remaining units will be moved to the end of the batch"? I think that would have been quite acceptable, and would have cut down on the number of units appear on ebay, which it has to be said is causing some dismay amongst the community. There's nowt wrong with flogging your panda[1], but the decent thing would have been to at least minimise the possibility that some people are only in it to re-sell them.

D.





[1] (C) 2010 Innuendos'R'Us Ltd.

 

[SomeGuy99]

It makes for a weird music player though. The size of it gives me flashbacks of tape playing Walkmans.

No, really. When I went back to using my Ipod Shuffle I just thought 'Holy jesus, this thing is teeny! How do they make it so small?!' like I'd never used it hundreds of times before... :lol:

You should know that I still have portable cassette players lying around, and... uhm... do use them occasionally!

 

[CoLDSToRAGE]

 

[Azure]

It makes for a weird music player though. The size of it gives me flashbacks of tape playing Walkmans.

Hah, indeed it does! But as my last mp3 player just died, my Pandora is all I got (so it's better than nothing). I definitely plan to get a replacement player as I need some reasonable degree of portability & ease of use in an mp3 player

 

[Viral18]

I had 1/2 hours of journeying each way to college. I really could've done with the Pandora. I finish college next week. Hopefully I'll have it for the summer holidays though...

Those were the good old days... wasting an hour and a half of our lives per journey... If you had your Pandora you would've been less sociable!

Me three.

Me four. Oh wait I already went. B)

I've heard a lot of people saying that smooth PSX emulation isn't there, which while true, I don't think it's far off. I can run a few ISO's fullspeed with sound with it (sometimes sacrificing some frames ) and they're definitely playable. Mupen64 seems to be being treated as the 'Crysis' of the Pandora at the moment with not much success at playability, but there are still some games that run very well. At the moment Super Mario 64, Banjo Kazooie and Star Fox (of the games I've tried) are playable with sound (frameskip of course, but it's not all that noticeable in the portable form factor).

[Edit- Typo]

 

[SomeGuy99]

^ Both of those emulators have sound issues. I need to point this out, for Pandoraless people who might be misled.

 

[Viral18]

^ Both of those emulators have sound issues. I need to point this out, for Pandoraless people who might be misled.

Sorry, I should have pointed that out. I generally disable the sound plugin in Mupen64, though the only sound issue I can think of in psx4pandora is the lack of CD audio?
I seem to get pretty good sound and visuals in mupen64 with frameskip=2, and halving the framebuffer settings again. Banjo Kazooie (a personal favourite ) seems to actually almost run fine at 500mhz like this! (I'm playing it as I type) It's choppy but still under my definition of almost playable XD. [Actually just noticed some massive slowdowns, then it runs fine for a bit then slowdowns]

 

[SomeGuy99]

Mupen64 is already running pretty well for some games yeah, it's just the sound skipping that stops it being playable for me.

Once that's done, and I send my Pandora back in for one with a working nub - I'm gonna hit Mario 64 hard like it's 1997.

 

[Prometheus]

though the only sound issue I can think of in psx4pandora is the lack of CD audio?

XA audio and the audio in FMVs will either change pitch wildly (NTSC) or be slightly-too-slow and juddery (PAL). Streamed audio often speeds up and slows down with the game it's coming from. I've only come across one game (Tail Concerto, NTSC-J) where the FMVs were unaffected by this, and those FMVs are the only time I haven't had any sound issues (that game's music was still affected, however, and its title screen music failed to play at all).

And now I sound like my compatibility list entries.

 

[SomeGuy99]

And now I sound like my compatibility list entries.

I bet yours looks like this.

 

[Azure]

though the only sound issue I can think of in psx4pandora is the lack of CD audio?

XA audio and the audio in FMVs will either change pitch wildly (NTSC) or be slightly-too-slow and juddery (PAL). Streamed audio often speeds up and slows down with the game it's coming from. I've only come across one game (Tail Concerto, NTSC-J) where the FMVs were unaffected by this, and those FMVs are the only time I haven't had any sound issues (that game's music was still affected, however, and its title screen music failed to play at all)

^ Yup, these were the sound issues I was talking about with psx emulation; these can make some games not quite so fun to play (FF7, in my case, which also has some general slowdowns & minor graphical glitches here and there).

 

[Viral18]

Thanks Prometheus, I actually didn't notice :s I've only tried a few psx games because of the file size and transfer time from my pc to card (bloody camera sd writer).

@Someguy99- with some settings tweaks and a high clock I can sometimes get away with running some n64 games without the sound issues.

@Azure- Odd, I've been playing FFVII and haven't noticed too many problems, and I know that game like the back of my hand. I'll have to play some more, I obviously wasn't paying enough attention