Imagine

[david.dimuro]

I'm a lurker. This is my first and only post.

I have been reading the forum for six months now since I first placed my order. I am impressed by how long this project has been going. I am also not surprise. When I first came across the Pandora my eyes lit up. I had a GP32X but always wished it had a bit more grunt and features. The Pandora does and much more. To me it is a gaming machine first, and from what I have seen on youtube this thing is AWESOME when it comes to emulation. I am already satisfied.

I can only begin to imagine what will happen when it is released. IMAGINE - what it is capable of now is only scratching the surface. Once it is released there will be 4000 potential developers, beta testers and contributors. So I hope to have it soon simply to play MAME, FinalburnALPHA, PicoDrive and SquidgeSNES - my staple gaming diet.

I applaud the developers for making something everyone wants. I do not have the technical know how or business savvy to pull something like this off, and am glad someone else does and DID.

I am so happy and am glad that it is almost complete. All-black (no silk screen) sounds like a great aesthetic choice let alone a prudent one. I'm am counting down the days.

So does anyone else have a great imagination? What do you imagine will happen once it released? I challenge you all to make the last few weeks a positive build-up with inspirational forum posts, that gets the community hyped and eager to contribute.

All the best to the OP team and positive community members,
SL8IT Productions

 

[WizardStan]

Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

 

[rabidpoobear]

great song...

 

[conso]

DCMA takedown

 

[danielliu88888]

how did you manage to acquire a gp32x?

 

[rabidpoobear]

Probably asked Hando

 

[mali]

Nice post, SL8IT

 

[second exodous]

Yeah, when I owned my GP2X I always felt it was almost where I wanted a handheld game system to be: SNES. The Pandora will play all the systems from my childhood and earlier so I'm happy. N64 seems like it might lack a little but I played PS much more than N64 anyway.

I'm actually looking forward to receiving the Pandora in the current state, still rough around the edges. I have to admit, my favorite downloads for the GP2X were the updates, especially the firmware. More users will mean more/faster development even if the dev numbers don't raise simply because of bug reports and people telling the devs what they want.

I think the year following the release will be exciting to say the least.

 

[wermy]

I'm looking forward to seeing what kind of stuff comes out of left field and takes us all by surprise. That's already happened a couple of times with N64 and DC emulation (granted, still in early stages; but who would have thought we'd see them at all?), so I can't wait to see what will come out in the months to come (not to mention after the second batch hits). Exciting times indeed.

 

[MooTheKow]

I think some of you are seriously over-estimating:

1) How many of the 4000 preorders are developers and
2) How many of the people in that 4,000 that are developers are actually going to contribute anything super meaningful.

Not having the Pandora is not some huge insurmountable obstacle that is going to limit people's ability to development work for this project (in fact - I have a hard time seeing anyone doing any actual development work on an actual Pandora as it just would be incredibly impractical). People have had a year and a half of expecting that they would be having a Pandora soon -- if there was actually a large contingent of developers that were going to be creating new software - they'd have already started it well before the Pandora was actually released and we likely would have heard about it by now. So there has been very little stopping people from developing stuff for the last year and a half and yet it's not like we magically have all this great cool stuff waiting. I'm sure there will probably be a handful of people who get all enthusiastic and motivated to actually start making something after they get a Pandora in their hands -- but my guess is that # is going to be fairly small.

Not trying to rain on anyone's parade - but some of you probably should temper your expectations of the software for this thing for quite a long while.

 

[wermy]

I think some of you are seriously over-estimating:

1) How many of the 4000 preorders are developers and
2) How many of the people in that 4,000 that are developers are actually going to contribute anything super meaningful.

Not having the Pandora is not some huge insurmountable obstacle that is going to limit people's ability to development work for this project (in fact - I have a hard time seeing anyone doing any actual development work on an actual Pandora as it just would be incredibly impractical). People have had a year and a half of expecting that they would be having a Pandora soon -- if there was actually a large contingent of developers that were going to be creating new software - they'd have already started it well before the Pandora was actually released and we likely would have heard about it by now. So there has been very little stopping people from developing stuff for the last year and a half and yet it's not like we magically have all this great cool stuff waiting. I'm sure there will probably be a handful of people who get all enthusiastic and motivated to actually start making something after they get a Pandora in their hands -- but my guess is that # is going to be fairly small.

Not trying to rain on anyone's parade - but some of you probably should temper your expectations of the software for this thing for quite a long while.

I disagree with most of what you said. If this were a normal Nintendo/Sony handheld, you'd have a pretty different userbase. I think this device tends to appeal to the type of people who are more likely to be developers, so we'll probably have a lot more devs in our group of 4000 than you would with a random sampling of 4000 DS/PSP users.
Also, I think there are probably lots of experienced developers who are waiting to get their pandora to actually start on projects (I'm one of them -- I've got a couple projects I plan on starting, but it sounds much more fun to have an actual unit to test on, so I'm waiting). Heck, even some of the big developers in the project have said that they were much more inclined/excited to start developing once they received a dev unit (I think Skeezix was one of them). I think you'll be surprised.

 

[MooTheKow]

I disagree with most of what you said. If this were a normal Nintendo/Sony handheld, you'd have a pretty different userbase. I think this device tends to appeal to the type of people who are more likely to be developers, so we'll probably have a lot more devs in our group of 4000 than you would with a random sampling of 4000 DS/PSP users.
Also, I think there are probably lots of experienced developers who are waiting to get their pandora to actually start on projects (I'm one of them -- I've got a couple projects I plan on starting, but it sounds much more fun to have an actual unit to test on, so I'm waiting). Heck, even some of the big developers in the project have said that they were much more inclined/excited to start developing once they received a dev unit (I think Skeezix was one of them). I think you'll be surprised.

Well, I sincerely hope you're right but I've stopped holding my breath that it's going to be as great of an experience as I thought it was when I pre-ordered back on day one.

 

[wermy]

Well, I sincerely hope you're right but I've stopped holding my breath that it's going to be as great of an experience as I thought it was when I pre-ordered back on day one.

Yeah. I can see where you're coming from, and it's probably a more prudent view to have; you're more likely to be satisfied with whatever does come out. I've just seen too many eager, and experienced sounding devs on here to not think that awesome things await.

 

[Exophase]

Moo; The big thing isn't really a practical limitation, it's all motivation. It's hard to work on something intended for a platform when you don't get the immediate gratification of running it on that platform. Most Pandora stuff probably won't be that Pandora specific but I think this will still hold. Plus, people will want to get a better feel for what options they have and where the capability ceilings will be before they start making any big plans. I still feel like I don't have a great grasp on what some of the handicaps will be in say, OpenGL ES 2, because no matter what you know about the hardware some things come down strongly to driver implementation.

On the other hand, it hasn't stopped some projects like Pandora Panic.

WizardStan; I always felt that that song was really offensive ;p

 

[WizardStan]

I think some of you are seriously over-estimating:

1) How many of the 4000 preorders are developers and
2) How many of the people in that 4,000 that are developers are actually going to contribute anything super meaningful.

Originally, almost all of them. Quick history lesson (just the overview): the GP32 and GP2X had problems. A subset of the purchasers formed a community up that worked together to solve those problems. That community then went on to "create" the Pandora. There's been a lot of cancellations and orders from outside the community, so let's say that only a quarter of the orders are from the original community: that's 1000 highly dedicated individuals. The remaining 3000 also include a lot of developers of as yet unknown talents.

Not having the Pandora is not some huge insurmountable obstacle that is going to limit people's ability to development work for this project (in fact - I have a hard time seeing anyone doing any actual development work on an actual Pandora as it just would be incredibly impractical). People have had a year and a half of expecting that they would be having a Pandora soon -- if there was actually a large contingent of developers that were going to be creating new software - they'd have already started it well before the Pandora was actually released and we likely would have heard about it by now. So there has been very little stopping people from developing stuff for the last year and a half and yet it's not like we magically have all this great cool stuff waiting. I'm sure there will probably be a handful of people who get all enthusiastic and motivated to actually start making something after they get a Pandora in their hands -- but my guess is that # is going to be fairly small.

There have been a lot of developments. How can you even begin to suggest there hasn't been? We do have a lot of great and cool stuff waiting. I'm not sure what you're trying to get at. Anyone who is waiting for their Pandora is waiting because they want to test their programs on the Pandora, not because they want to develop on it (with some exceptions).

 

[mali]

Several devs from the maemo community preordered, too.

 

[Karel Jansens]

I'm one of the 4,000. I'm not a developer, I'm pretty much fed up with betatesting and by now I feel I contributed plenty by giving the team my money for free for what will turn out to be close to 18 months.

I just want to get something that works. Way back Nokia did a similar thing with their web tablets; I bought a 770 on the promise that "the community" would fix everything. And while a lot was done, in the end I basically had to buy the new N800 to get most stuff working; and even today the N800 still hasn't an A2DP BT stack and development on the Diablo OS has all but halted because Nokia wants people to buy the N900.

So excuse me for taking scenarios about the all-saving Community with a little grain of salt. If it happens, fine, but don't assume it will just happen. And I seriously hope the team will not rely on this magical thing to occur and just sit and wait.

Oh, and I'm getting pretty tired of guilt-tripping everyone with the "poor developers doing everything for free" horse excrement. Every single preorderer gave their money to the project, so we are entitled to whine. We paid our whine-dues.

 

[wermy]

Oh, and I'm getting pretty tired of guilt-tripping everyone with the "poor developers doing everything for free" horse excrement. Every single preorderer gave their money to the project, so we are entitled to whine. We paid our whine-dues.

But, with few exceptions, they ARE all doing it for free, for which we should be grateful. It would be like you buying a car (that, granted, might not run all that well to begin with, so let's say it's a reasonably nice used one ), and then having mechanics working for free to fix it up for you. Yes yes, there are flaws with this analogy, but the idea of having experts in a given field (who could be paid quite well if they spent their time elsewhere) are doing stuff for free, for us, still stands.

 

[WizardStan]

If you're so worried that there won't be support, why not cancel your first batch order and wait for the second batch when you can make a decision based off of real world information, rather than "what-if"s on either side?

 

[mali]

Karel is a grumpy guy, but he did much promotion for the Pandora so he payed his duty and is allowed to moan, imo.
Not that I agree with him, but I accept his opinion