Considering buying: tons of questions!

[pachura]

Hello,

I am considering buying Pandora 1 GHz... but before spending 500 EUR, I have tons of questions:

1. What is my priority is a decent Amiga emulation. And by "decent" I don't mean "15 fps, distorted sound, occasional freezes and sprite glitches", but something that would feel almost like the original A500 with 1MB of RAM. So, how good is UAE4All? Will I be able to play Deluxe Galaga, Gods, Speedball II, James Pond 2, SWIV, Moonstone, Lotus III, Alien Breed, Black Crypt, Cannon Fodder, Pinball Illusions, Wolfchild, Ruff'n'Tumble... and other great Amiga games at full speed?

2. Also, I'm interested in DosBox. How good is it? Does it e.g. allow playing Prince of Persia, Fury of Furries, Eye of Beholder without any frame skipping?

3. I've seen that many people overclock their Pandoras. Does this require any physical intervention, or is it done purely in the software? (in BIOS?) I guess overclocked Pandoras have reduced battery lives - but is there any associated danger, e.g. overheating?

4. ScummVM worked very nice on my hacked Nintendo DS; too bad the console did not have enough resolution to display the graphics how they were meant to be. I guess on Pandora it must be perfect? Is the touchscreen precise enough for pointing'n'clicking?

5. By the way, is the DS emulator any good? I mean, Pandora doesn't have 2 screens, right?

6. A general question concerning emulation. Pandora has 800x480 screen; Amiga had 320x256, DOS games - 320x200 (non-square pixels), DS - 256x192. So, emulated games have to be upscaled to fit Pandora's screen. Is it generally done through resampling (with some degree of filtering - bilinear/bicubic)? Or is it "dumb" resizing using the "nearest neighbour" algorithm, resulting in "jaggy edges"?

7. Pandora works on Linux kernel. Is there an access to a regular UNIX commandline where I could execute such commands as ls, grep, ping, telnet, gzip etc. ?

8. How good is Pandora's web browser? I guess it is not in the same league as web browsers found on today's smartphones, but is it at least comparable to the one found in Nintendo 3DS?

9. Can Pandora play standard DivX/XviD 1CD/2CD movies which are commonly found on torrent sites? Typically they are around 608x336, 1000 kbps + MP3 audio.

Thanks a lot!

 

 

 

[DaMummy]

oh you are sooo getting a pandora. congrats on your new toy

 

[Fzero]

Hello. Here you go

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5GjsUIoKLQ

 

[Hồng Thất Công]

@ pachura:  You're born a Pandorian

 

[TrashyMG]

1.) Amiga Emulation is pretty good: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZohikiNTaw

2.) Dosbox is pretty good too, we have a few flavo(u)rs of it floating around.. I'd say the emulation is pretty stable good at 486 speeds although some of the 3D era stuff stresses that out, but luckily there are native ports to most of them (Doom, Duke3d..etc).  Some Videos

3.) Overclocking is generally safe there isn't any overheating or anything..  it's done by software and there is even a nice system tray utility to make it easy to do.

4.) Touch screen on ScummVM works fine for me, I have no issues with any of the games I throw at it.

5.) Drastic was first on the Pandora before it ended up on Android. Exophase the programmer for it is a long time member of this community.. the DS emulator works good on the rebirth and 1Ghz units and for the most part the classic units (256MB,600mhz).. Newer smartphones can crank the graphics a tad higher than the Pandora. However I actually enjoy it better on the Pandora than on my Galaxy S4, mostly because we have a DPad and face buttons and such. There are quick toggle buttons to change from full to split screen or change which screen is dispayed.. It works quite well.

7.) The best thing about the Pandora IMO, It's a linux environment.. so have the command line all the typical utilities.. Limited space on the internal storage so there isn't all the developer tools installed by default.. however Development PNDs can be installed on the SD cards to give up a full compiling environment.. There are some people that have written entire games/applications, compiled it and distributed it all on the Pandora.

8.) We have several web browser, the best IMO is Firefox... it's the straight up desktop version. it's generally up to date with the current release.

9.) Video playback works alright.. it could be better.. Most of what you ask for should work fine. h264 encoded videos can be choppy.

 

[pachura]

Thanks TrashyMG !

 

[ekianjo]

best browser, speedwise, is qupzulla, not firefox.

9. video playback in h264 works fine as long as you dont play high resolution videos.

 

[levi]

I can confirm Lotus 3 works fine.  I've not yet found a version of Lotus 2 that works, but I've not looked very hard for that.

 

[ekianjo]

I can confirm Lotus 3 works fine.  I've not yet found a version of Lotus 2 that works, but I've not looked very hard for that.

Lotus 2 works perfect for me.

 

[comradekingu]

http://pandorawiki.org/Overclocking

http://pandorawiki.org/DOSBox

http://pandorawiki.org/DOSBox_compatibility_list#Prince%20of%20Persia  prince of persia listed as perfect, second game missing, Eye of Beholder "works well"

tested on 0.74, new versions are available, one updated 4 days ago http://repo.openpandora.org/?page=detail&app=dosbox.pickle and http://repo.openpandora.org/?page=detail&app=dosbox-ex-app

http://repo.openpandora.org/?page=detail&app=scummvm.djwillis.0001 has 5 stars, on a general note, both touchscreen and nubs are good for navigation, with the latter being preferable for me, since its more relaxed.

full command line, browser is a lot better than on 3DS

 

[pachura]

Thanks, guys!

As for the video, I don't care that much about H.264, but was only interested if I could play commonly-pirated XviD .AVI movies without having to reencode/downsize them. Judging by the hardware parameters, it should not be a problem.

And, one more question: what is the ideal SD card speed for Pandora? Class 6? Class 10? I guess too slow card can affect the general performance of the console, but investing in a Sandisk Extreme Pro SDHC 95Mb/s would probably be an overkill...?

Thanks!

 

[comradekingu]

SD compatibility list on wiki. If you get them from dragonbox along with the purchase of a pandora they have a rebate.

Also check out formatting SD cards, on the wiki.

"SD cards perform much better when the partitions are aligned correctly, starting at 4MB"

Anything from class 4 upwards can work, i guess there is no reason to go below that anyways. The faster "extreme deluxe lux"-cards often have just good sequential burst speed, rather than anything else.

If you get into random IOPS all sd cards do quite badly.

 

[sebt3]

And, one more question: what is the ideal SD card speed for Pandora? Class 6? Class 10? I guess too slow card can affect the general performance of the console, but investing in a Sandisk Extreme Pro SDHC 95Mb/s would probably be an overkill...?

SD class are about write speed. and all you want and need on a pandora is a sdcard that can be read fast. Most of the time a class 10 is slower reading than a class 6. Compare read speed not class

 

[comradekingu]

That is wrong.

SD class n (1,2,4,10, etc) are read and write, sd nX like (200X) is just dubious and is just a peak under ideal conditions of who knows what.

http://static.usenix.org/events/fast/tech/full_papers/Kim.pdf As this shows random reads vary greatly, irregardless of class.

That is the most important metric for OS use, and write speed isn't unimportant either. If you run into random and fragmented writes and they are just plain slow thats going to be annoying the amount of times you invariably run into it.  In the link its actually the class 2 card that outperforms the others in this respect.

TL;DR the cards from dragonbox are known to work and have the most device specific testing done to them.

 

[pachura]

TL;DR the cards from dragonbox are known to work and have the most device specific testing done to them.

Thanks. Do you know which brand are they?

 

[Fzero]

Samsung and Polaroid

https://www.dragonbox.de/en/21-accessories

 

[_wb_]

In any case you won't get read or write speeds above ~15MB/s on the Pandora, even if the card itself is faster. Of course that speed is more than enough in practice.

Judging from your questions, you really need to get yourself a Pandora. You won't regret it.

 

[Klumpen]

These questions tell me, that there finally is a newbie that sits exactly in the niche OpenPandora was made for.

Most of the last guys seemed to be better off with the other stuff that is flying around, but here we have a winner.

 

[pachura]

OK, some more questions then!


1. I'm a bit confused when it comes to the storage (even after reading the related articles on Pandora's Wiki).
I understand that the operating system - Angstrom - is stored in NAND memory, while SD cards are used to store executables (.PNDs)

and data (game ROMs, saved memory states, mp3s, videos etc.). Even the configuration files should be stored on the SD. Is that right?

I've read somewhere that you can also put the whole operating system on the SD card and boot from it...

what are the advantages/disadvantages of such solution?


2. And then, the partitions. I used Linux a few times, but've never set it up. Assuming I'll get the 512 MB model,

would I really need to have a swap partion? The article on the Wiki says it could reduce the lifetime of the SD card

as it will be very often read/written to. Shouldn't 512MB of RAM be enough for the basic usage and emulators?


3. Let's say I put the ext2 filesystem on the SD. When I connect Pandora to my Windows machine using the USB cable,

will I see its contents as "removable storage" and be able to access the files? The alternative would be to format the card to FAT32

so I could use it directly with Windows, but I guess FAT32 is not the best choice for a Linux machine...


4. Are there any essential accessories I should get? Replacement battery, screen protector, carry case, stylus?

What about the WiFi stick - is the built-in module so bad? If I get good WiFi reception on my 3DS in my whole appartment,

I guess it should be OK?


5. Is there any possibility of getting the 1 GHz model in black? I know I can order spare parts of the black case,

but I'm really bad at manual operations/DIY, I'll probably destroy the whole console trying to replace its casing ;(

6. What's SuperZaxxon? It's Pandora's BIOS/bootloader, right?


Thanks!

 

[slaeshjag]

1) Yes, the PND's that don't put config files on the SD card either have a good reason to do so, or that they are broken.

2) Not really. If you notice programs start crashing for no apparent reason, it could be because you run out of RAM. In that case, it's worth trying a swap file.

3) No. Windows can't hande ext*. The possible work-arounds is to either install a ext driver for windows, or to enable the SSH server and transfer files over network, preferably USB-networking (Linux can emulate a network card over USB.)

4) The WiFi is a bit of a hit and miss. It even varies between system versions. You could try using the internal wifi, but most likely it'll either be slow or not work right at all. You could be lucky though.

6) SuperZaxxon in the name of the Linux distribution.