Depressing

[clyborg]

Why does OPT even post status when nothing has been shipped for months.

The sad thing is about posting status is everyone is in an outrage because the only pandora info is nub status(again?!?!?), board completion (I thought this was done?), new case colors (WTF?), and who is ebaying(Sad? And why? Bored, poor quality, old tech, not as advertised?) but no pandoras shipped. It also seems like all the devs are gone or lost interest in wasting there time on a device with less than 500 userbase (minus the defective units). I don't blame them. It also worries me because I ordered this device because of who was developing for it, only Skeezix is left. I did not know Pickle when I ordered, but he has earned 200% respect...I just hope to used some of his apps.

The IControlPad seems to be getting more attention than the Pandora because the demand is must higher than the Pandora. Think about it, the IControlPad will be using the same nubs as the pandora. How will this delay the release of the pandora? I suspect alot, because OPT is losing focus on who supplied R&D cash for them. We did not support both products, just the pandora! Stop giving us empty promises, and focus your time and manpower on what WE ordered.

Also, WTF is wrong with Craig....every other post his does is how his car blew up, van blew up, tv blew up, fell off is roof, fell of his toliet, etc, so on, etc. ED is trying real hard to be positive, but the rest of the OPT posts make his efforts look bad.

Like I said, I'm not trolling.....I'm just disappointed about everything related.

Sad.

ps - sorry for poor spelling and gramar....just one major f-ing rant!

 

[sebt3]

who is ebaying(Sad? And why? Bored, poor quality, old tech, not as advertised?)

Some sell it as it is not the most powerfull handheld of the world.... (those didn'ty care about the pandora in the first place)
Some did see this as a PSP remplacement (which is not, as we wont see many commercial grade stuff)
Some were here only for money
etc, etc...
If you're sticking with us and you didn't buy the wrong device. You'll be pleased. This is the device some of us have wetted their pans for.

It also seems like all the devs are gone or lost interest in wasting there time on a device with less than 500 userbase (minus the defective units). I don't blame them. It also worries me because I ordered this device because of who was developing for it, only Skeezix is left. I did not know Pickle when I ordered, but he has earned 200% respect...I just hope to used some of his apps.

Who else did you wanted to see around ? (honest question)
Myself I would have loved tinnus and zod more active around. But life is life....

 

[Pleng]

I feel you. 2 years ago we had talks of full speed Playstation emulation, videos of Dreamcast at almost playable speeds, and promise of a load of music making apps from TorPor.

What we have nealry 24 months down the line is horrifically slow (even at 900Mhz) PSX emulation, a Dreamcast emulator that's been totally abandoned, and it looks like TorPor has lost interest in porting his apps in favour of using an iPad.

There is not even a decent full screen multi tasking GUI for the system. I've had to hack together my own solution to get anything that really fits the system - but it unfortunately it needs to be clocked at 700+ all the time to make it usable.

Don't get me wrong I love my unit. But it's feeling increasingly like it's going to be used for little more than megadrive/snes emulation, watching videos on planes, and the occasional bit of browsing and chatting... all bar the last two were just as easily achievable on my Dingoo

(edit: the splitting of the forums hasn't helped either, as each side now appears even less busy than before)

 

[Schnatterplatsch]

Depressed? I'm kinda depressed... And I have a pandora h34r: My f****** left nub is broken, the threads of 2 of my cases screws are broken (Too hard treatment while assembling I suppose. Or have it been the too long screws Craig mentioned?), my shoulderbuttons are stuck, my screen wobbles and my pandora lies on my desk, I'm not using it. Just because it is scrap at the moment and I don't want it to be more scrap. I'm a little fearing, that it won't be usable again before the summer, or if even.

BUT: Before the nub broke it was great! I'm not annoyed about NotFullspeedPSX, things will change if the production ever gets stable. Theres already a really great amount of software and the people seem indeed much more willing to spend their time on the pandora, even at this early state, than they are on the WiZ or the Caanoo.

So, lets look into the future. It's definitly a project worth supporting. (...and let's hope its going a little better soon. Just that OP doesn't die on hardattack)

 

[Pleng]

Well I don't know what's going on with the Wiz/Canoo. I gather they have better PSX emulation than us though?

I think the 'software will get better with time' argument is getting a bit old now. When did the first units arrive? February? March? Something like that anyway. That's 8 months to see, for example, a rewrite of the infamously missing GFX plugin for psx4pandora (though I'm not at all convinced that the graphics rendering is the actual bottleneck anyway). We've had hundreds of 'quick ports' thrown at us with the promise that later down the line somebody will pick it up and refine it. The only things I've seen being refined to any extent were SNES and Amiga. And they seem to have stopped now. I don't care for quake but I gather that people are upset because the versions ported are unplayable with the Panda's built in controls.

I just am starting to get the horrible feeling that we're going to end up with a vast quantity of awkward ports and unflattering emulators.

 

[Wolfsclaw]

Been depressed about this as well...

Quake 3 doesn't even seem to work online yet (and the nubs seem to react wrong), the dreamcast emulator was never released, the playstation emulator is okay, but far from being as good as promised two years ago, the N64 emulator is nice but development seems to be on hold, there is no and probably never will be any unique trophy-achievement online system like it had been wildly discussed, HD vids playback possibility & flash still did not happen, thanks to Craig a split community and worst of all.... I most likely won't be having my Pandora in January for long trips on an airplane as I fly to the US for my holiday.
That really, really sucks. And don't bother saying to me "You'll probably have yours shortly after Christmas!" - Nope. Not going to happen. No matter what OPT says or thinks, I don't see why we won't have another two-months delay, it has happened probably 25 times so far and it will happen again, that's a fucking sure thing.

Oh well.

 

[Exophase]

(though I'm not at all convinced that the graphics rendering is the actual bottleneck anyway).

Emulating graphics in software takes CPU time, unless you have it done on the DSP. So if you don't do it things will always be faster because you can't do anything else simultaneously. Now, that doesn't mean that doing it in OpenGL ES 2 will actually be faster, because there could be a lot of CPU time spent managing GPU state in the drivers.

Nonetheless, the big draw there is enhancement, not speed. I agree that Pandora is fast enough to handle a purely software PS1 emulator that's very well optimized. Using NEON for GTE and GPU emulation is especially helpful.

PS1 emulation on Wiz/Caanoo sounds like it's not performing as well as some may have anticipated.

 

[Pickle]

It also seems like all the devs are gone or lost interest in wasting there time on a device with less than 500 userbase (minus the defective units). I don't blame them. It also worries me because I ordered this device because of who was developing for it, only Skeezix is left. I did not know Pickle when I ordered, but he has earned 200% respect...I just hope to used some of his apps.

Hopefully in a couple months there will be a good chunk of units out there.
Also you have no clue what and who are doing things on the pandora. So to say Skeezix might be the only dev doing something is bogus. It takes time to port or write programs and most do it in the shadows as not to be nagged or expected to deliver something.
I know it sucks and I probably going crazy if I still hadnt received hardware by now, but all you can do is wait. OP really has something special with this, I once they start arriving most are going to be glad they did.

 

[Pleng]

(though I'm not at all convinced that the graphics rendering is the actual bottleneck anyway).

Emulating graphics in software takes CPU time, unless you have it done on the DSP. So if you don't do it things will always be faster because you can't do anything else simultaneously. Now, that doesn't mean that doing it in OpenGL ES 2 will actually be faster, because there could be a lot of CPU time spent managing GPU state in the drivers.

Nonetheless, the big draw there is enhancement, not speed. I agree that Pandora is fast enough to handle a purely software PS1 emulator that's very well optimized. Using NEON for GTE and GPU emulation is especially helpful.

PS1 emulation on Wiz/Caanoo sounds like it's not performing as well as some may have anticipated.

Well you know a lot more about these things than me, of course. All I'm saying is with all the games I've tried, a 50% increase in CPU speed makes little or no difference to the speed of the game. That, couples with the weird behaviour noted here leads me to believe that there is something other than the graphics rendering which is causing problems with the emulator in question.

 

[Jumpman]

Yeah, at this point there is a lot of people on both sides of the Pandora delay fence. Those who received their unit months ago, and have had many problems, and those who have not gotten a unit at all.

I received mine within 30 days of release, and my left nub just went down a few weeks ago. I'm still behind the team and this project, as I still use it all the time, and find it to be a wonderful device, that is very unique and very community minded. I'm hopeful that all the bumps in the road will be smoothed over with the new shipments due to arrive soon.

So yes, I will have to ship my unit in for repeairs at some point, but I'm looking forward to so many more customers who will get their Pandora, and all the great works that will begin to sprout up.

Pickle, you rock, and are one of the community members who make the Pandora shine. Thanks to you, and all those guys/gals who use their spare time to help build software and promote this wonderful device.

Chris

 

[Exophase]

Well you know a lot more about these things than me, of course. All I'm saying is with all the games I've tried, a 50% increase in CPU speed makes little or no difference to the speed of the game. That, couples with the weird behaviour noted here leads me to believe that there is something other than the graphics rendering which is causing problems with the emulator in question.

One of the traps for PS1 emulation on handhelds is that lots and lots of timing hacks have been done throughout the years, this has been the case for psx4all and is a phenomenon that is repeating with pcsx4all. On the one hand, PS1 emulators don't tend to handle dynamic stalls like cache misses and wait states from memory regions or bus arbitration, so if you run it optimistically it'll have a lot more spare CPU time than a real PS1. So it's sensible to kick it down somewhat, and emulators give baselines around 2 clock cycles per instruction. But on the other hand, the emulators we're talking about have let you tweak down this value to give less and less CPU time to the game as part of a guessing game of underclocking the emulation in order to make it faster. In the cases where you're not giving the game enough CPU cycles to get all of its stuff done it's going to feel slower than it should even though the emulator thinks it's running at full speed and is even throttling it down to keep it from running too fast.

A good indicator is if the music runs full speed but the game feels sluggish then the game is probably being cycle undercut. It's rare for a game to run out of CPU cycles playing music (especially if it has audio synthesis or streaming CD/XA hardware like PS1 does), because music playback usually happens asynchronously from the rest of the game. If the music is too slow or breaks apart then it means that the emulator doesn't have enough time to handle the game and overclocking the host CPU should actually improve it.

In psx4all's case you should be able to change those values. I suggest doing that.

If all else fails it can be another bug/inaccuracy in the emulator.

 

[EvilDragon]

Why does OPT even post status when nothing has been shipped for months.

I guess that's because most people want to know why it hasn't been shipped.

The IControlPad seems to be getting more attention than the Pandora because the demand is must higher than the Pandora.

How is that getting more attention?
At the official boards, there's a lot more posting going on in the Pandora section than in the iCP section.
The Pandora currently gets one video per day while all we can do is wait for the finished nubs and then to be put on the boards-

Think about it, the IControlPad will be using the same nubs as the pandora. How will this delay the release of the pandora?

It won't. The Pandora will get the nubs first and after that the iCP.
2000 nubs are on the way to Texas whereas the iCP is still waiting for them.

Stop giving us empty promises, and focus your time and manpower on what WE ordered.

If you take a look at my posts, the videos I do, the support I give, I think it can be said that I focus all my manpower on the Pandora.
But what else can we do?
Craig prepared all the cases he could so far. I am waiting for the next LCD cables to solder.
The nubs are in production and we can't do anything there, we can just wait for the company to finish them.
Same for the boards.

So what exactly are you expecting us to do right now?

Yes, the delays are depressing, but there is nothing we can do right now but to prepare everything and wait for the companies to finish.

Like I said, I'm not trolling.....I'm just disappointed about everything related.

I can understand us. But you can be sure the team doesn't feel better about that.

What we have nealry 24 months down the line is horrifically slow (even at 900Mhz) PSX emulation,

Well, if you take a look at my video, you can see that a lot of games run fullspeed with sound at 800MHz.
The WIZ PSX emulator runs fullspeed at 500MHz on the Pandora (it doesn't do that on the WIZ or Caanoo), but with Ginge it has sound issues.
The sourcecode for that emulator is bound to be released christmas, so that would mean fullspeed with sound for a lot of games at stock speed on the Pandora.

I know of another PSX emulator for the Pandora in the works... a more compatible one.

Well I don't know what's going on with the Wiz/Canoo. I gather they have better PSX emulation than us though?

Yes and no. Technically, the emulator is better. But the WIZ / Caanoo has not the horsepower, most games run slower on the WIZ / Caanoo than with our current emulator.
As soon as the sourcecode is out, Pandora will have a way better emulator.

I think the 'software will get better with time' argument is getting a bit old now. When did the first units arrive? February? March? Something like that anyway. That's 8 months to see, for example, a rewrite of the infamously missing GFX plugin for psx4pandora (though I'm not at all convinced that the graphics rendering is the actual bottleneck anyway). We've had hundreds of 'quick ports' thrown at us with the promise that later down the line somebody will pick it up and refine it. The only things I've seen being refined to any extent were SNES and Amiga. And they seem to have stopped now. I don't care for quake but I gather that people are upset because the versions ported are unplayable with the Panda's built in controls.

It doesn't have anything to do with time, but with people.
With 4000 users you have a lot more devs than with 900 users.
Also, devs tend to code for systems with more users.
So software will mature with more devs, not with more time.

However, the current devs have done A LOT of cool things already.
I see a lot more useful software on the Pandora than on the WIZ / Caanoo currently.

The devs that made the SNES / Amiga emulators did what they could. Not every dev is a crack at some things. I can port some things, but not really code.
So I can only work on a project until I have no idea how to improve it.
It's the same with SNES / Amiga.
But as soon as more users have the Pandora, there will be more devs which means that software will more likely be improved way faster.

I know our worst enemy are the delays. And I really wish we didn't have them.
But as you could see with Schnatterplatsch's post: The nubs die. If we continued to produce, the Pandora project would've been dead. The only way to continue was to fix the nubs first.
That took a long time, since those things can't be developed within a month. They need prototyping, testing, etc. until they work.

That's why we posted the status updates. To show you that something is actually happening. To tell you the reasons why things slowed down.

I'd love to have all units properly delivered long ago, but it didn't happen. I still think the scene will surely come alive once the next units, with proper nubs, ship.

 

[skeezix]

It seems obvious to me that as more devs get in, more software comes out. Right now there _is_ a limited number of devs with units (and non-devs with units , so theres a bottleneck on how much can get done; we've gone over that before, but the summary is -- quick ports are one thing (and easier ad thus more able to be done by more people), and there are 'involved ports', and theres new software; new takes _by far_ the great involvement .. coudl take a person or two months to years to produce something, depending on the size of the project. I know my latest game has been eating up a lot of time, and I'm on several rewrites of the client as I adjust how I want to approach it ..so I'm several months in, with a few people (got a musician pumping out soundtrack, and an artist), and we're nowhere anywhere near ready to show anything.. these things take time.

(I'm tempted to fall back on a much smaller game project and use the same soundtrack, so I can get something to show that muchfaster; I have to say, looking at another 4 months to get something showable is killing me .. too large a project

But say there are 20 active devs (total guess, could be 5, coudl be 50); if 5 are doing 'larger projects', thats a 25% reduction in visible stuff going on; looks bad, but its not, its actually healthy.

It _sounds_ to me like we might be getting some good news soon from the production standpoint (yes, finally), but its hard to say .. obviously anything is correctly weighted in a 'believe it when we see it' light right now,but from the murmurs and long hours put in by everyone, it does sound lke we might be coming around the corner soon. We'll find that out pretty darned soon

I can bet too that some of the devs with units are just not bothering right now .. I know for me, when I'm looking at my monster project -- if it was 'pandora only', then would I want to invest a yea of life into it at this point? It's better to go small, or for large.. go cross-platform to make it worth it'; so this artificially reduces your dev pool a little .. 'malaise' I think its called.

Lets hope we get some good news really really soon (it may happen, or maybe the norm :/), and we'll go from there. If we can get another 1000 or 2000 units out soon, things will be up and up all over the place,

jeff

 

[Exophase]

I know of another PSX emulator for the Pandora in the works... a more compatible one.

Oh man, I wanna know more about this :a

 

[EvilDragon]

I know of another PSX emulator for the Pandora in the works... a more compatible one.

Oh man, I wanna know more about this :a

Sorry, I am not allowed to tell more about this.
You might see some information about that soon.

 

[Exophase]

Yeah, I don't say much about things I work on either. I'm surprised it's even okay for you to mention it at all.

 

[Wolfsclaw]

Didn't ED mention already Zodttd works on a new port of pcsx4all?
-> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VHL68kDHb8

 

[skeezix]

yeah Exo, wheres Temper Just needed a UI didn't it? C'mon, you perfectionist

jeff

 

[Pleng]

Yeah, I don't say much about things I work on either.

Queue another 'what secret project is Exo working on now?' thread

Maybe this discussion between Ed and Exo is an in joke and Exophase is actually working on the new PSX emulator? Ha! You so nearly had us fooled!

 

[naples39]

Exophase is actually working on the new PSX emulator

Confirmed. Awesome.