Give The Dev A Pandora!

[PokeParadox]

Ok A new thread was needed because things had stagnated in the old one. Basically the donation drive idea is too complicated to do legally, so the next best thing is to get this donated Pandora into the hands of someone that will actually do some neat things with it.
The current poll options are what we have managed to get together in the Win A Pandora thread.

Franxis has been removed from the listings since he has informed me he is currently too busy, which is fair enough.
If you would like to be removed from the candidates, please let me know... likewise if you want someone worthy to be added, state your case here.
The idea is to find a suitable home for this Pandora such that it benefits the community.
Votes are public to prevent foul play as much as possible. And please note this poll is to gauge what you think, the "winner" will not be decided on poll results alone!

PS you are welcome to discuss who you think should get the Pandora and why in this thread.

Peace!

As suggested, I'll try to break down a little who's who.

Smoku: From what I see he's currently hacking away at the N900 port of UAE4All. He has no interest in buying another gadget, but having a Pandora would perhaps give him more drive to spend a bit more focus on it to improve Amiga emulation and possibly other things.

Ari64: Shouldn't need much introduction, brought a dynarec for N64 to the table out of nowhere one day, now we have pretty decent N64 emulation. IIRC only has a BeagleBoard so maybe a Pandora would help? Who knows?

Tinnus: Has worked on the GFX aspect of PSX4All since it was originally released on GP2X and is currently hacking away to bring us lovely smooth crisp GLES2 GFX acceleration. AFAIK he currently rolls with the GLES2 Emulator...

Dflemstr: Has given us "The Box" PND repo system and some interesting GUI/Menuing ideas... I don't know at all if he has a Pandora ordered or not.

Laurant: QEmu + WINE = very interesting!

iPrice: I'll let him say it:

I'm a Wiz/GP2X dev (I've freely donated B'lox!, Balloonacy, Dicey, Drench, Guru Logic Champs and SantaMania and something else I can't remember right now, with lots in the pipeline) and haven't got a Pandora

TheGoodDoktor: A while back was interested in bringing us a DreamCast game port... that was a Commercial project.

Hdonk: Hacking away at getting Flash working for Pandora

SiENcE: The guy behind the snes9x4Dingoo from which skeezix ported snes9x4Dingoo4Pandora.

Cameleon: Helped me kickstart PandoraPanic! from the very early stages, understand some of the zany internals of my coding styles and therefore Penjin, etc. Has been doing some neat stuff with 3D recently. Has been a good friend to me since my uni days.

Note: Hitnrun removed since he already HAS a Pandora!

 

[Vitel]

Where is the option "I don't know who there guys are and what they do."?

 

[Jumpman]

Franxis would have been my first choice, but I know he has certain issues, so I figured he can't be included(I love your MAME on GP2X Franxis, you rock)! Don't some of the guys on that list already have a Pandora?

I would personally like a unit to go to whomever can port DAPHNE to the Pandora! I'm sure many great things will come from many great programmers over the next few years, but DAPHNE is something that may or may not appeal to the masses, so some insentive is needed.

Chris

 

[mali]

Right now I can't decide, cause those are all excellent suggestions. The most exciting project for me might be Qemu+WINE from Laurent, I think. I have to admit that I'm not that much interested in game/emulator development. The UMPC part is more important to me, so dflemstr would be a good decision, too. I'll have to think about it a bit longer and hope the nominees describe themselves a bit more in this thread

 

[Trip]

Dflemstr would be my first choice but I don't know what projects some of the others are planning?
I'll vote when I have more info

 

[zx-81]

Where is the option "I don't know who there guys are and what they do."?

+1

edit: btw i know some good coders at work who would be pleased to code and to port stuff on the pandora.

 

[WizardStan]

I would have advised asking these developers if getting a free Pandora would actually help them, or if they even want it, before creating the list. I'm picturing some developer receiving a Pandora out of the blue and feeling obligated to work on whatever it is to try and "live up" to the free Pandora. I don't know about you, but as soon as I feel in any way obligated to do something, it stops being fun. If it's not fun, they might actually be LESS motivated to work on it. Plus they may not be at a point where having a Pandora early will really save a lot of time. If this were a prototype and we were 6 or more months away from release, sure I bet someone could take advantage of that, but how many of these developers are supposed to be expecting to actually receive theirs next month anyway?

edit:

Where is the option "I don't know who there guys are and what they do."?

+1

It's at the bottom, the button labeled "Show Results"

 

[PokeParadox]

I would have advised asking these developers if getting a free Pandora would actually help them, or if they even want it, before creating the list. I'm picturing some developer receiving a Pandora out of the blue and feeling obligated to work on whatever it is to try and "live up" to the free Pandora. I don't know about you, but as soon as I feel in any way obligated to do something, it stops being fun. If it's not fun, they might actually be LESS motivated to work on it. Plus they may not be at a point where having a Pandora early will really save a lot of time. If this were a prototype and we were 6 or more months away from release, sure I bet someone could take advantage of that, but how many of these developers are supposed to be expecting to actually receive theirs next month anyway?

edit:

Where is the option "I don't know who there guys are and what they do."?

+1

It's at the bottom, the button labeled "Show Results"

I see your point, but this is an open discussion, no one is going to just "magically receive" a Pandora without knowing about it! This is really to drum up some more names and give an idea who I should be contacting. You can see I've stated that anyone not wishing to receive this Pandora can have their name removed from the listing.

 

[davidgro]

I think getting Qemu working is interesting even outside of combining it with Wine (which would be a major bonus): many of the "It's Linux, but closed source and x86" or "Linux and open source, but uses a lot of x86 assembly" applications could be answered (so long as they aren't too CPU intensive)

 

[jdbye]

I say give it to Laurent. His project has the highest usefulness.

 

[MonkeyChops]

^+1

does he have one on order though? will he keep the chain going?

 

[Sphinxter]

Dflemstr should certainly be rewarded for his most excellent app store.

 

[WizardStan]

I thought the donated Pandora was supposed to go to someone to encourage further work on Pandora software, not as a reward for something already done.
Just ebay the thing! Use the money towards a coding contest.

 

[mali]

^ It was openly discussed in the other thread. It's too late for changes now, I suppose.

 

[fusion_power]

Interesting poll, decissions, decissions... need some time.

I would vote for one that helps the Pandora at all, i.e. optimized Drivers, speed improvements, stuff that can take advantage in many different programs, not just one...

Hm... oh, and did I missed something since the last "WINE will NEVER run onto the Pandora" discussions? :huh:

P.S.: What is actualy "QUEMU"? h34r:

 

[mali]

^ Hey Fusion, we just had a thread on the German forums about it
Let me check if I can find the thread on gp32x..
edit:
http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/55312-wine-working-on-n900-maybe-pandora/

 

[Tempel]

I'd like to point out that one of iprice's projects was Zomb'd, which he was working on with Mr.Gonzo. He's a crazy artist who had bunch of things in the pipeline, but seems to only rarely check back in on this community. So if a Pandora goes to iprice, the boost that that might give to Zomb'd could in turn draw Mr.Gonzo back, thereby giving us two cool guys working hard.

But on the other hand, Laurent's QEMU+Wine is super cool and highly specialized, so it seems less likely that someone else would be willing and able to do it instead.

So I'm not going to vote yet. I think it would be nice if some of the nominees could say a few words about what they're working on.


PS: fusion_power: QEMU is a processor emulator. The idea is that it would, in a sense, give us a virtual x86 processor in the Pandora. With that, we could use Wine to run Windows games. It wouldn't be the fastest thing ever, but I think it's generally expected to be more efficient than DOSBox, allowing for slightly newer Windows (and closed-source Linux) games to be playable.

 

[WizardStan]

Hm... oh, and did I missed something since the last "WINE will NEVER run onto the Pandora" discussions? :huh:

P.S.: What is actualy "QUEMU"? h34r:

QEMU is an x86 emulator. Not like DosBox which emulates the DOS system, but a complete x86 barebones emulator with the ability to translate applications on the fly. You can use it as a virtual machine and install a completely different operating system onto it, or use it in user mode where it can load an application and translate it's code on the fly. It'd be especially useful for running x86 Linux games and applications on the Pandora.
In that way, in theory, QEMU can "run" WINE and translate the Windows system calls into Linux system calls. Together, they make it possible to run Windows games on the Pandora. A proof of concept was already created, and it was slooooooow, but it worked kind of.
WINE+QEMU is often brought up in the "Pandora cannot run Windows" threads as a suggestion of how the Pandora *could* run Windows games, but the consensus is that it will never be fast enough to play the games the people asking if it can run Windows (or WINE) want to play (ie, World of Warcraft, or any other game made since WinXP) so it's usually downplayed in those threads.
With WINE+QEMU, we might expect some Win95 era games to play, maybe, eventually. I wouldn't expect much more beyond that but I've got nothing but gut instinct to really back that up.

edit: wrote too much h34r:

 

[Unfathomable Depths]

That was hard.

If anyone was doing work on hardware accelerated SDL they would have got my vote. In the end it went to Ari - simply awesome work. I really didn't think we would see any sort of N64 emulation on the Pandora for a long time.

 

[Weevil]

Topic reminds me of this post

I am up for donating to get gn0stic a pandora. Anyone else? I honestly think he is the only hope for P-UAE, UAE4ALL is just too incompatible and missing too many features.

Anyway donating the Pandy to a dev seems a fair use for it so I'll be voting one of these days.