I Feel Down

[Exophase]

"A comment made by craigx shocked me: Replies #8 onward
80% of developers have done nothing with their hardware, yes 20% are amazing but the stuff I want looks like it was shown on YouTube by some of the 80%

That made me think that maybe developers wanted a free bit of kit.(who wouldn't) Surely the kit should be returned to the OPT and re-distributed to other developers. (Come on OPT grow some balls and get the hardware back)"

I am surprised that OPT, did not get the devs to justify, them having one by by what they would give back to the community.

I say this as I donated to the dev fund, and some of those leeches (so far 80%), better give me a return for my donation. To any sponge reading this get coding or planning now, and redeem yourself (I can understand if you want to get a feel for the system first).

I want a list of these sponges, (name and shame - Craig). I understand Craig, wants to offer the carrot to the devs, but for all the "something for nothings", get the stick out. Nothing worse than an angry disgruntled community.

PS - I feel for you, and all the rest this position.

pfft

I can't speak for everyone else, but I sure as hell wasn't looking for a handout. Quite the opposite - craigix asked me to take a dev unit and I said that I didn't want a board w/o controls. Then a couple months later (September/October 2008) I was out of work and he says he'll pay me if I do work for it (lolz, yeah right) and I said I'd think about it.. no follow up on that any time soon and I got a job shortly thereafter. Some time later I get an e-mail asking me to receive one and I figured I'd take one if they were offering. It turned out I had much less time than I realized; afterwards I only did a little bit on it, then a few months later I sent it out to someone else who said he'd do kernel work. Now I can't speak for what happened to this guy; OP were okay with me sending it so it really isn't my responsibility anymore. But I doubt OP really is losing a lot of value by not having a few boards now, especially since most of them were 128MB of RAM and had other bugs.

Similar thing happened with other people who were too busy to work on it (like Svartalf), they sent it back or sent it to someone else.

I think you should take craigix's comment with a grain of salt anyway, because I think way more than 20% did a substantial amount of work, and very few did absolutely nothing (even if I did some NEON routines for zodttd).... as if people were really that desperate to get a raw board and too cheap to buy a Beagleboard instead, if that's what they seriously wanted. Personally I was utterly delighted to rid myself of it - I was really never excited to receive one in the first place, I just hoped I could be of some use.

 

[Alpha2]

You know, installing Linux is not hard. I used to be wary of that as well, then I got a laptop that crawled under Vista and I installed Linux on it as a dual boot, it was MUCH faster. It's as simple as downloading the ISO from the web, burning it to a disc, sticking it in the dvd drive, setting boot priority to dvd and then it pretty much handles itself. I set it as a multiboot because I figured I'd need Windows for something, but I rarely ever used Windows on that laptop after that.

I havent had enough experience with switching OSs to say it's as easy as people claim to say, I'm just saying that because I've never done it I wouldnt risk the attempt because I dont know the first thing about doing it. I wouldnt even know if the netbook could read the disk from an external drive since it doesnt have a built in optical drive, would it require partitioning the drive? Maybe in the future I might try it but as an average end user type who knows somethings and not others, it's easier for me to buy a device with the OS pre-installed and chop off what I dont need or want.


You know, the one thing I give windows props for is the community of people eager to make it do things that MS never intended out of spite for a huge faceless corporation (well actually it does have a face, Bill's smug shitfaced grin makes me want to pirate something just for the hell of it alone. I think that makes people even more vicious towards windows and trying to rub his nose in it). Maybe that's why things seem quiet around here, there's no rush because the number of people with the ability to push the hardware is so low (not counting the people spending all their efforts on the FW or course, they just dont have the time to do much else) and the need to fight some perceived corporate evil is non existent. There are few goals to reach, no firmwares to hack.

 

[silverspring]

You are wrong on all counts. I regularly use Linux and write shell scripts, as well as C and C++. My comments are all in my opinion - I feel it is good for 8 and 16 bit emulation particularly, however the other things it does has indeed all been done before. It's not that hard to understand. If I say I am not making much use of the Pandora, then I am telling the truth. Do you want me to say I am glued to it 24 hours a day every day when I am not?

It is hard to understand. Why purchase something when you know everything it can be done has been done before, and the only thing you seem to be interested in using it for is, as you said, 8 and 16 bit emulation? Why not get a different device if that's all that you want to use it for?
It doesn't matter to me that whether other devices have done something before or not: the Pandora is the only device which does the collection of things that interests me in a single package available right now.
If your opinion is that it will not be worth very much to you, why did you buy one?

I tend to buy many things. I regularly use around 10% of my purchases, with the other 90% being shelved. I do also have a GP32 and PSP which don't get used much, but the Pandora is better with respect to 8 and 16 bit emulation simply because of the screen, and that was one of the primary reasons for purchasing it. I suspect many many people have bought, or are in the process of receiving their Pandoras for 8 and 16 bit emulation. The problem is simple: despite the better screen, the gameplay is no better. I feel people will be expecting the Pandora to be an incredible device when they finally receive it after all this time, but once they do get it they will wonder what the fuss was about. Does this make any sense? I know people buy things for the sake of it, me being included to an extent.

It's quite simple in that humans like buying things, especially gadgets, but the love is soon lost. The Pandora to me was meant to be a device for playing retro games - it sort of got my interest back in the memories I have of the old days. Whilst following the Pandora, I hardly played old games on either the GP32 or PSP as I was saving the experience for the Pandora. But now when I play an old game, it's sort of like "bah, this game is not the way I remembered it. It was fun back then, now it's just bah". I suspect many people will feel the same.

 

[Viral18]

I tend to buy many things. I regularly use around 10% of my purchases, with the other 90% being shelved.

Can I have your shelved stuff? XD

It's quite simple in that humans like buying things, especially gadgets, but the love is soon lost. The Pandora to me was meant to be a device for playing retro games - it sort of got my interest back in the memories I have of the old days. Whilst following the Pandora, I hardly played old games on either the GP32 or PSP as I was saving the experience for the Pandora. But now when I play an old game, it's sort of like "bah, this game is not the way I remembered it. It was fun back then, now it's just bah". I suspect many people will feel the same.

I dunno, I think there's more than just nostalgia to retro games -I'm probably younger than a lot of you guys, so my 'nostalgia' period ranges across the Game boy colour, N64 and PS1 period, with a few earlier Dos exceptions from when I was younger still. I now play a lot of much earlier games than I grew up with, purely because it's a different type of gameplay that is unique and interesting in comparison to a lot of modern games. Old RPG's tend to be much more involving, and theres much more attachment to the characters than in a lot of modern games. I've read from a few people that the retro stuff isn't as good when you get past the nostalgia, but I loooove a lot of 80's-90's games I wouldn't have even experienced before -and the Pandora's just such a great platform for trying older games for the first time

 

[shillbert]

I think we have a nice selection of emus/games/apps already. Certainly enough to keep most people busy, and enough to make it worth buying a pandora. I think this is the first week since I got mine (May 29th) that there hasn't been anything new released.

At the moment I'm sitting on these forums hitting refresh and reading every new post. The only rest-bite was seeing new YouTube video's of emulators. And I haven't seen anything new in a while.

No wonder your feeling frustrated...Take a break, forget about it for a while. I mean blimey you don't even have one on pre-order!

If seeing some youtube vids would really make you feel better I'm sure I could put something together. Was there something in particular?


edit: did that last sentence rhyme? it wasn't meant to..

edit2: I think I just wrote a Haiku!

edit3: dammmn now that rhymes too!

edit4: Arrrrrgh sub edit: (I take it back, that last one didn't rhyme after all.)

Thats very kind of you, I posted a list here: Link of the stuff I'd play.

 

[silverspring]

I have the exact opposite view to Prometheus regarding my Pandora. It arrived a couple of weeks ago and I have hardly used it.

I'm in a similar situation. I can't take it to work and I haven't been on any long journeys (when I haven't been driving) to effectively use it.

I really want to develop for the Pandora but a lack of ideas and more so motivation are making it hard. Anybody got any tips on improving motivation?

This is exactly the problem. There are no new ideas, simply because everything has been done a million times over. Take a look at the various games on Linux which one could port. Play them on your Linux system and see how many of them hold your interest for very long. You'll find it hard to be very motivational about porting a game which has you bored to tears after half an hour.
It's the same with PC games - everything produced is a re-hash, only much worse that the original. What do people say again.... "You can't beat the original".
It's like trying to reinvent the wheel... you can't

 

[Lingman]

Sigh.

I'm somewhere around 1200-1300 in the queue, and no idea when it's going to get here. You know what? I'm not worried. I know that Craig and the rest of the team are working as hard as they can to get us a good product, as fast as they can.

I'm a gadget guy. I've got one of everything. (or so it would seem some days). Retro emulation? I've got all the old consoles/computers. (I've got 1.5 rooms devoted to this). I've got all the current systems (well, don't have the camera capable DS units, but I do have several DS systems, etc.)

At home, I run windows 7, vista, XP and OSX. If I need unixy stuff, I drop down to a terminal on the macbook. I do use Linux at work some days, but not as often as before. Portable compute devices, ipod touch and ipad meet those requirements in general.

So why am I getting one? Cause it's got features that none of those devices have, all in one unit. I'll probably stick gcc on the second card, and use it for building testing out software before I deploy it to my main web sites. Being able to play games on it is a nice bonus. Having a pocket sized device I'll likely be able to run wireshark on is invaluable.

Have I been concerned that this was a scam? Never. not once. It's sometimes frustrating not having the new toy to play with, but to be honest, I've got plenty of others to keep me amused while I wait.

Keep on slogging Craig (and company). Despite the detractors, we believe.
Dan.

 

[WizardStan]

It's quite simple in that humans like buying things, especially gadgets, but the love is soon lost. The Pandora to me was meant to be a device for playing retro games - it sort of got my interest back in the memories I have of the old days. Whilst following the Pandora, I hardly played old games on either the GP32 or PSP as I was saving the experience for the Pandora. But now when I play an old game, it's sort of like "bah, this game is not the way I remembered it. It was fun back then, now it's just bah". I suspect many people will feel the same.

The question still stands: why did you buy a Pandora then if that was all you were interested in? Why not something more suited to the purpose like the Wiz or Dingoo? You've basically bought a pickup truck simply for driving to the corner store and are saying that you can't think of any reason someone would want that much room. Meanwhile I'm carrying one piece of lumber at a time in my dinky little car wondering when my pickup truck is going to arrive.
In short, you've apparently bought the wrong device for your needs and are projecting that overpurchase on the community at large.

 

[Alpha2]

I tend to buy many things. I regularly use around 10% of my purchases, with the other 90% being shelved. I do also have a GP32 and PSP which don't get used much, but the Pandora is better with respect to 8 and 16 bit emulation simply because of the screen, and that was one of the primary reasons for purchasing it. I suspect many many people have bought, or are in the process of receiving their Pandoras for 8 and 16 bit emulation. The problem is simple: despite the better screen, the gameplay is no better. I feel people will be expecting the Pandora to be an incredible device when they finally receive it after all this time, but once they do get it they will wonder what the fuss was about. Does this make any sense? I know people buy things for the sake of it, me being included to an extent.

It's quite simple in that humans like buying things, especially gadgets, but the love is soon lost. The Pandora to me was meant to be a device for playing retro games - it sort of got my interest back in the memories I have of the old days. Whilst following the Pandora, I hardly played old games on either the GP32 or PSP as I was saving the experience for the Pandora. But now when I play an old game, it's sort of like "bah, this game is not the way I remembered it. It was fun back then, now it's just bah". I suspect many people will feel the same.

That might be more an issue of you placing your hopes more on the nostalgia you hope to feel rather than a perception of usefulness. While I personally do hope to play a lot of old games on it and am hoping for improvements to PS1 and N64 emulation, that's not the entirety of what it can do for me. I can write short stories or papers on the go with it, take notes, read books, listen to podcasts, watch (ripped) dvds, websurf, etc... all on a device that fits in my pocket unlike my 10 inch netbook. Now sure you can say just get a smartphone, for some people that probably IS the best option. Personally I cant afford to pay 100 bucks a month on a websurfing phone. It might do more than just have internet access, but are the other things it does really worth the extra expense? Not really, but that's just me. I pride myself on being an educated consumer, if there's something better I can buy for cheaper I would, it simply isnt that way for the uses outlined above.

I would and HAVE told anyone that looks at a pandora to seriously look at what they want to do, if it fits those criteria then great but dont force yourself to BELIEVE you want it just to justify it. For some people it's nearly the perfect device for others maybe they should or could have found something else better with a bit more time. That's why I personally got angry about the "I'm canceling" threads. If those people spent more time thinking about what they wanted and how long they were willing to wait for it they wouldnt be posting angsty junk posts that don't help anyone or contribute to a worthwhile conversation. I can sum up why half those people canceled; poor consumer awareness. If it's not for you to be able to wait for improvements, if you're a "gotta have it NOOOW" personality and you can only see it as a game machine, get out now sell your preorder and move on to something else until it is what you want and maybe then there'll be enough of them that you can buy it and then have it be "exciting" to you. (not specifically to you Silverspring, just a general suggestion to anyone thinking this particular way.)

 

[silverspring]

I dunno, I think there's more than just nostalgia to retro games -I'm probably younger than a lot of you guys, so my 'nostalgia' period ranges across the Game boy colour, N64 and PS1 period, with a few earlier Dos exceptions from when I was younger still. I now play a lot of much earlier games than I grew up with, purely because it's a different type of gameplay that is unique and interesting in comparison to a lot of modern games. Old RPG's tend to be much more involving, and theres much more attachment to the characters than in a lot of modern games. I've read from a few people that the retro stuff isn't as good when you get past the nostalgia, but I loooove a lot of 80's-90's games I wouldn't have even experienced before -and the Pandora's just such a great platform for trying older games for the first time

It might be an age thing for some. For me, early 30s, most of the old games are pure rubbish. Moving an awful pixelated mess around the screen is no fun at all. You probably remember them as great games from your childhood however and thats why you want to try them out again to recapture the memories of it all. Problem is, it's never that good second time around and in most cases it's not the actual game you remember, but more about what you were doing at that time in your life, hence getting back to the nostalgia thing.
To be fair, it doesn't so much matter if it's an old game or a modern game, like they always say, 99% of everything is pure crap. 1% is a gem.

 

[tony11]

To be fair, it doesn't so much matter if it's an old game or a modern game, like they always say, 99% of everything is pure crap. 1% is a gem.

I don't agree with that, one persons crap is another persons gem, how can you throw a statistic around like that?

 

[silverspring]

That might be more an issue of you placing your hopes more on the nostalgia you hope to feel rather than a perception of usefulness.

I think you do have a point on the whole nostalgia thing. But I do think a lot of people will be buying a Pandora thinking it will offer them the world - retro games, music, videos, browsing the web, and be dissappointed when they find the retro games are no longer fun, the screen is too small for serious video watching (movies, films), likewise with the web.

Is the Pandora a cult in itself however?

I'm really hoping it's not just me feeling this way, it's just that there was a lot of build up hype over the years, and now it's here the community it crawling and you could cut a knife throught the current atmosphere.

 

[centus]

Mali, posting here because I know you'll be reading it...
Sorry about that loss, but they DID play better this time...

Better luck next time. (You still get to crush Uruguay)

 

[mali]

^ Yep, Spain was simply better, I respect that

 

[Sarlix]

Thats very kind of you, I posted a list here: Link of the stuff I'd play.

OK man I'll see what I can do. Keep in mind though that I have a 35kb upload speed and Video camera thats not really a video camera. :-/


Here are some I previously uploaded.



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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAqhG4KCbhY

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

 

[SomeGuy99]

I'm really hoping it's not just me feeling this way, it's just that there was a lot of build up hype over the years, and now it's here the community it crawling and you could cut a knife throught the current atmosphere.

Gruso burning out just says it all.

I think the Pandora makes a nice video player though... that it does do well.

 

[silverspring]

To be fair, it doesn't so much matter if it's an old game or a modern game, like they always say, 99% of everything is pure crap. 1% is a gem.

I don't agree with that, one persons crap is another persons gem, how can you throw a statistic at it like that?

But in relative terms the statistics don't lie. I agree about one persons crap being another persons gem, but statistically it's the same 99%/1%, just different crap/gem.

 

[Prometheus]

That might be more an issue of you placing your hopes more on the nostalgia you hope to feel rather than a perception of usefulness.

I think you do have a point on the whole nostalgia thing. But I do think a lot of people will be buying a Pandora thinking it will offer them the world - retro games, music, videos, browsing the web, and be dissappointed when they find the retro games are no longer fun, the screen is too small for serious video watching (movies, films), likewise with the web.

Is the Pandora a cult in itself however?

I'm really hoping it's not just me feeling this way, it's just that there was a lot of build up hype over the years, and now it's here the community it crawling and you could cut a knife throught the current atmosphere.

This is your opinion, though. It does not mean "the Pandora is a cult" - it means you might have outgrown the things you once liked, or that your requirements don't fit into 800x480.

 

[SomeGuy99]

This is your opinion, though. It does not mean "the Pandora is a cult" - it means you might have outgrown the things you once liked, or that your requirements don't fit into 800x480.

FTFY

 

[WizardStan]

But in relative terms the statistics don't lie. I agree about one persons crap being another persons gem, but statistically it's the same 99%/1%, just different crap/gem.

I disagree as well. As soon as one person likes something, it is no longer crap. If so much as one person garners justified* enjoyment out of something, then I am happy for that person, even if I don't like that particular whatever it is. Not everything is designed for you, and just because you don't enjoy something doesn't mean it is unworthy of existence. To that end, I've found it is actually the opposite: 99% of the stuff out there is enjoyable in some reasonable way to some person, while only 1% is pure crap.

*I specify "justified" because there are some people that just don't know any better. There are a few games with bugs or bad design that people either enjoy because they find the bugs and bad design hilarious and therefore it's an ironic enjoyment, or because it is one of the few games they've actually played.