Development Bounties

[hedwards]

Buying an emulator seems wrong. It's bad enough using a ROM you have no licence for but to profit from emulating a machine is more dodgy.

That would be why I purchased cartridge readers. I like my retrode, and I've got a couple for the GBA which work well. That being said, even if the source of ROMs were legit there's still a significant risk of being taken to task for encouraging piracy. Which whether or not it was legit would probably cause things to be shut down.

As far as Craig goes, a large part of why he posted this thread was for a reaction. There's dev fund money that he's obligated to dole out in some fashion, and he's right in wanting community input as to how.

Personally, I think it would be a really bad idea to ignore the wishes and feelings of the various developers that have gotten us this far on the software side. Perhaps having them make decisions based upon what the community wants would be the way to go. Or at least let them have some input on how the money gets spent. For lay people and people that aren't involved in writing code for the platform, it's not terribly easy to know what's easy and what's difficult or even what is and is not essential.

 

[Nekura20x6]

Buying an emulator seems wrong. It's bad enough using a ROM you have no licence for but to profit from emulating a machine is more dodgy.

I have a binder that has every gaming CD-ROM I've ever purchased going back to the early 1990's. I also have a box full of Apple II and Commodore 64 software from buying lots of vintage computer equipment at action and flea markets.

I just want to play the stuff I legally own.

 

[may88]

Buying an emulator seems wrong. It's bad enough using a ROM you have no licence for but to profit from emulating a machine is more dodgy.

That would be why I purchased cartridge readers. I like my retrode, and I've got a couple for the GBA which work well. That being said, even if the source of ROMs were legit there's still a significant risk of being taken to task for encouraging piracy. Which whether or not it was legit would probably cause things to be shut down.

As far as Craig goes, a large part of why he posted this thread was for a reaction. There's dev fund money that he's obligated to dole out in some fashion, and he's right in wanting community input as to how.

Personally, I think it would be a really bad idea to ignore the wishes and feelings of the various developers that have gotten us this far on the software side. Perhaps having them make decisions based upon what the community wants would be the way to go. Or at least let them have some input on how the money gets spent. For lay people and people that aren't involved in writing code for the platform, it's not terribly easy to know what's easy and what's difficult or even what is and is not essential.

Buying an emulator seems wrong. It's bad enough using a ROM you have no licence for but to profit from emulating a machine is more dodgy.

I have a binder that has every gaming CD-ROM I've ever purchased going back to the early 1990's. I also have a box full of Apple II and Commodore 64 software from buying lots of vintage computer equipment at action and flea markets.

I just want to play the stuff I legally own.

Didn't say *I* played ROMs I didn't own. Okay maybe Mame - Galaxian (although I have it on a number of "museums" so I'm format shifting I guess). I have been amassing a collection of PSX titles from ebay/Car boots to duly rip and play on the Pandora. These and the homebrew stuff will
keep me busy when I want to use the Pandora to play.

Can't help thinking that the Game industry would do well setting up an Apple AppStore style establishment for selling old titles.
RPM free. Based on the fact that a rip-off version could be found somewhere on the internet then only legit customers would come acalling.
After all, the music industry is almost getting the message after all these years.

 

[Mr.Confuzed]

... just saying that (pretty much) everything everyone has already mentioned so far is and can be done on a laptop. If that's all everyone wants from Pandora, then that is a crying shame.

Why? What can't be done on a laptop?

The advantage here is having fixed hardware (assuming no mods), which is really handy for compatibility and low-level optimizations.

 

[CodeTwister]

We already have the development fund, the question is, who gets it and for what?

IMO it would be more interesting to provide dev devices (a stripped down Pandora without case/battery/whatever) which can be used to work on the device/platform, but avoid the risk of being used for queue skipping. This way, interested developers at higher queue positions can start earlier (and developers who already own a Pandora could be interested in an additional working horse, too). You should run out of cases in a few days, perfect time to construct/ship some of those.

 

[rv6502]

I meant it would be good if the bounty hunters that were going after a bounty were listed so other devs could communicate and collaborate toward a common goal and then I guess split the bounty 50/50 or 33/33/33 or whatever.

ah yes, because nothing motivates someone to work than having their pay cut down to 33%
:blink:

 

[SomeGuy99]

I meant it would be good if the bounty hunters that were going after a bounty were listed so other devs could communicate and collaborate toward a common goal and then I guess split the bounty 50/50 or 33/33/33 or whatever.

ah yes, because nothing motivates someone to work than having their pay cut down to 33%
:blink:

Did you not watch the video?!

 

[joseluisjazz]

there must be a good way to compile a long list of this stuff then vote to make some kind of order for it all

What about http://www.google.com/moderator/ ?

 

[ZarkGhost]

I think that the best could be an optimized librarys to use the whole hardware of the pandora. more easy and optimized base to code better projects will be done under pandora.. And... i think that make an emulator, a game, or an application are more interesting for the codecs, and the codecs will be more enthusiasmed about make these stuff, than make a low level libraries.

After have nice libraries, will be nice make competitions with this money, and/or, set that each year(or one fix period of time), make a poll between pandora owners and give a prize to the best X better projects, if a develop don't accept it, then it will go to the next competition

Sorry for my English

greetings from Spain

 

[rv6502]

We already have the development fund, the question is, who gets it and for what?

I'm available for development, I don't have my Pandora yet tho (I'm somewhere very far down the queue).

I have a lot of ARM & Linux/Posix experience (you can google my name) and I wrote a few x86 & ARM OS kernels.

I have electronic equipment (oscilloscope, digital analyzers, FPGA boards, etc) to work on hardware/software/timing driver issues.

IMO it would be more interesting to provide dev devices (a stripped down Pandora without case/battery/whatever) which can be used to work on the device/platform, but avoid the risk of being used for queue skipping. This way, interested developers at higher queue positions can start earlier (and developers who already own a Pandora could be interested in an additional working horse, too). You should run out of cases in a few days, perfect time to construct/ship some of those.

yeah, I could work with that: a no-nubs-failed-board to work with or something like that, then I'd ship back the dev device once I get my working Pandora.

my friend got his (he was one of the guys F5-ing on preorder opening day ) and I got to try it at @party2010 and saw that a lot of software fixing needs to be done, the device itself rocks btw, congrats, trying it made the wait even harder

 

[Dead1nside]

I think some money should go towards getting a hold of the source for the nubs, opengl es drivers and anything else thats closed. And perhaps, a group of developers for Pandora exclusive games.

Not a bad idea. The more we can open it up, the better. It seems that if the drivers were open, then there would be perhaps overall greater benefit to masses of games and emulators out there.

Craig, I really think you should be consulting the main developers, so far, of the Pandora software, don't do it in public if necessary, but I respect their views on this. I contributed to the dev fund, after my initial order, because I wanted it to be used in a way that would benefit the software developers -- do it in consultation with them, please.

 

[SomeGuy99]

I don't get some of these requests:

Isn't the hardware acceleration already working? We have Open GL ES, and Open GL wrappers.
Don't we already have Mplayer etc. playing video and music back just fine? I even tried VLC and it's perfectly functional.

So using Neon would save us some battery life, but we already have a ridculously long one already! I play music out the speakers for 8-10 hours straight.

Flash I can understand, but all this 'hardware and video acceleration' stuff leaves me stumped. Am I missing something?

 

[MonkeyChops]

I meant it would be good if the bounty hunters that were going after a bounty were listed so other devs could communicate and collaborate toward a common goal and then I guess split the bounty 50/50 or 33/33/33 or whatever.

ah yes, because nothing motivates someone to work than having their pay cut down to 33%
:blink:

well obviously if someone wanted the whole bounty to themselves they wouldn't work with other devs. But if others worked together and beat you to the bounty then you'd be getting 100% of nothing instead of 33% of something with a lot of wasted time and effort on your part. It was just an idea, devs working together is apparently not worth it to you. You being a dev and me not, you'd know better.

 

[WizardStan]

Isn't the hardware acceleration already working? We have Open GL ES, and Open GL wrappers.
Don't we already have Mplayer etc. playing video and music back just fine? I even tried VLC and it's perfectly functional.

We need the DSP (which is already working, reportedly, in the next kernel update) in order to decode h264 video larger than 480p. I think it may even be struggling with 480p.

 

[SomeGuy99]

Isn't the hardware acceleration already working? We have Open GL ES, and Open GL wrappers.
Don't we already have Mplayer etc. playing video and music back just fine? I even tried VLC and it's perfectly functional.

We need the DSP (which is already working, reportedly, in the next kernel update) in order to decode h264 video larger than 480p. I think it may even be struggling with 480p.

Isn't that higher than the Pandora can render? I thought the screen was widescreen SD? You guys want to watch hi def video on a handheld... in SD resolution? Cool.

 

[MDave]

I don't get some of these requests:

Isn't the hardware acceleration already working? We have Open GL ES, and Open GL wrappers.

Flash I can understand, but all this 'hardware and video acceleration' stuff leaves me stumped. Am I missing something?

I'm talking about opening the source code for the drivers, because it seems that the current drivers are the bottleneck in mupen64plus. That means it's not optimized, and would benefit everything that uses the 3D hardware. WiFi drivers I think are closed too?

 

[WizardStan]

Isn't that higher than the Pandora can render? I thought the screen was widescreen SD? You guys want to watch hi def video on a handheld... in SD resolution? Cool.

A lot of videos you download off the internet are coming in HD quality now. If we can't play them at the ripped quality, they need to be re-encoded as they do on the PSP and iPhone. That's a timely waste.

 

[WizardStan]

WiFi drivers I think are closed too?

You think wrong. It was, but compatible open source one was found and inserted into the kernel.

edit: wifi driver, singular.

 

[SomeGuy99]

I don't get some of these requests:

Isn't the hardware acceleration already working? We have Open GL ES, and Open GL wrappers.

Flash I can understand, but all this 'hardware and video acceleration' stuff leaves me stumped. Am I missing something?

I'm talking about opening the source code for the drivers, because it seems that the current drivers are the bottleneck in mupen64plus. That means it's not optimized, and would benefit everything that uses the 3D hardware. WiFi drivers I think are closed too?

Really? How?

I thought it was the recompilation engine etc. that would be the bottleneck? It's hardly rendering more than Quake3 surely?

 

[hedwards]

Didn't say *I* played ROMs I didn't own. Okay maybe Mame - Galaxian (although I have it on a number of "museums" so I'm format shifting I guess). I have been amassing a collection of PSX titles from ebay/Car boots to duly rip and play on the Pandora. These and the homebrew stuff will
keep me busy when I want to use the Pandora to play.

Can't help thinking that the Game industry would do well setting up an Apple AppStore style establishment for selling old titles.
RPM free. Based on the fact that a rip-off version could be found somewhere on the internet then only legit customers would come acalling.
After all, the music industry is almost getting the message after all these years.

I know, my point though was that somebody would inevitably play games that they didn't own. And theoretically paying to develop the emulator could open up liability to industry law suits for the OPT. Not saying that I agree, just that it's a risky move.

And I know that GoG for one is considering doing just that. Purchasing a license to release those old timey games along with the DOS and Windows ones. In fact they've got a poll up right now asking what systems people are interested in them trying to add to their collection.

Personally, I've got a love hate relationship with GoG. I just hate the way they tempt me with so much awesomeness.