<in a hurry stream of consiousness, so don't take this for much>
Tell you the truth, with mine .. I've been so utterly busy in every second of the day with either Pandora coding or real work (damn real work is in the way!), that I've not had time to have 'fun' with it
(I mean, I'm a coder through, so I really enjoy coding. Real life is overtiming me tthis last year, and I'm spending as much time iwth my kid as I can.... But we're polishing as much as we can for launch in a couple weeks, so when we're not doing our day jobs, we're all working our tails off. No time for the misses, its Pandora or Work
) I'm pretty vocal (thats how I vent my stress right?
, so you saw two weeks ago I started minimenu, and its 'nearly done' now; I think two weeks ago I built in the ability for pnd-files to support multiple apps per pnd, so Vice can have one pnd but offer up like 5 apps (vic20, c64, etc). I built the 'info' system to pop up install guides or app docs the other day; we've debugged a bug in the pnd system that we found; and how many other things, just in the last week or two?
every day a couple hours work on this or that subsystem. And thats just me .. we're killing ourselves here
notaz and djwillis have had some good progress on wifi, and djwillis got the new opengl drivers and new X drivers couple weeks ago, and they're forever doing patches for this and sorting out that. ED keeps saying he's not a developer but hes scripting and configuring like mad, so I think he's cutting himself short. Craigs working on the store and archive, etc and etc, everyone is busting a nut.etc and so on, I'm not going to list everyone.
That said ..
Pickle and cpasjuste's port of Quake3 is really coming together nicely, as I think you saw a few times. I tried it a few weeks ago, and it was pretty clumsy; tried it a week ago, and its frakking great. Default config isn't there much, so you go to Config -> Move and set the d-pad and left-nub to move and strafe, and right nub to mouse look, and shoulders to fire and jump and suddenly its pretty good. You can't top keyb/mouse for Quake, but pandora is pretty good
Quake3 multiplayer people!
Last night I played Descent 1 (D1x in fact, which is better looking than original Descent), also from Pickle; he didn't have nubs coded up yet, but I rebound the keys so it was the d-pad and some keyb keys, and it was playable.. I beet the first level in no time
I've fiddle with DosBox .. few weeks ago, the old X drivers, I had problems with mouse calibration; new drivers and some guidance form Pickle and Dosbox is pretty usable, and will be great soon. I played a bit of Wizardry 7 and Civ 1 and fiddled with Warcraft 2 again. Dosbox is going to be great.
(Pandora having a keyboard is a huge thing, for me. I'm also a text adventure wanker as you may know, and working on Kronos, etc. Thats coming along nicely. I also have BattleJewels working great, Hatari, and some other stuff.)
Overall I'm quite pleased, and its going to be a great system.
Its a little bulky and heavy (the battery mostly); Theres been a couple gotchas on the case, but mine's prototype and a little different than the final units, so I'm not going to go into it.
I'm a dev, so I don't notice rough edges, and I'm sure there are some on the software; but overall its working really well imho. Video is on software and not hardsware decoding, and I'm okay with that; some peopel will be pissed they can't fire up their latest h264 etc, yet. But as I've accepted current limits (since its partly my faulkt, right?
, I'm okay with those thing.s I know we'll fix it ove rtime as more eyes and hands get on board.
So dont' put it on a high horse.. some rough edges. And its great.,
(And for comparison.. go spend $500 on an Archos 5, its a fantastic device; oh wait, out of the box the damned thing barely works, you have ot patch the living hell out of it, to get it to work; and it still crashes every 10 minutes
Apple makes a polished first impression on people, but you get that polish because they restrict the heck out of it
jeff
