My little Pandora review
- Thread starter ZXDunny
- Start date
Wrath Of Khan
Soul soother...
please elaborate.This thing fucking ROCKS
D.
skeezix
Internal Development
"This thing _Really_ fucking rocks."
Wrath Of Khan
Soul soother...
it sure does.
Link
ithic.com
Dunny,
Stoked you got your unit. Hope it makes your job easier and your nights fly by.
Peace & Pandora,
Link
Stoked you got your unit. Hope it makes your job easier and your nights fly by.
Peace & Pandora,
Link
ZXDunny
Deep avatar
- Joined
- Oct 12, 2010
- Messages
- 2,585
Ok, it's late and I really need to get to bed, but here's a little more detail. I've tried to be reasonable about it, but it's gone 3am and I'm tired and I've been playing with this all night, so if I come across as angry or sarcastic please bear that in mind.
--
It was saturday afternoon (less than 24 hours after I got the email), and my son needed to be taken to college for his Biology revision session. Wouldn't you just know it, the postie arrived just as I was getting in the car
So, after an hour or so - oh, how it dragged - I got home and plugged the little bugger in, intending to let it charge.
Nope, it wasn't having it. It wanted to start up, so I thought "what the hell" and entered the necessary information on the necessary line... And was greeted by the minimenu.
So, first glance - physically... It's quite nice really. The paintjob is quite "rough" to the touch - your fingers won't slip while holding it, and fingerprints don't stand a chance. You can't actually see the rough finish, but it's refreshingly different from the piano-black shininess of the DS. It's reassuringly heavy, but not enough to cause you problems holding it for long periods. The light pipes are bright, but don't out-shine the display at all. The keyboard is lovely.
The screen is heavenly - a matte finish, so it doesn't reflect point light sources. It's crystal clear, and even running XFCE at lowest font size (well, 8-point) it's easy to read. It's got a full 180 degrees viewing angle too, in both axes. The resistive layer for the touch screen is held a fraction above the screen, and gives a small "click" as you press it with the stylus. The accuracy is spot-on, no configuration needed. You'll not need the stylus in mini-menu, but it does make the desktop in XFCE more bearable.
God, we need a better WM on this.
The controls: The DPad is frankly wonderful, and DaveC has come through with style. He may be the most anal bugger on the forums, but he does know his controllers. Nice and clicky, but not too harsh. Diagonals are a breeze, but don't trigger unless you want them to. The face buttons (A/B/X/Y) are nice, though the A button feels squishy - but works just fine. The only niggle is that and the 0 key, which needs a kind of right-wards prod to register anything (which seems to be a problem with more than just my unit judging by friends from other forums that have one).
Meh, I can live with that.
The nubs are nice too - smooth, with a nice springy resistance and no need to "calibrate" like the old ones did. These "just work", as I believe the phrase goes these days. Using the nubs as a mouse is quite a pleasant experience too, though double-clicking with the right nub is hard to do.
The lid does indeed spring open to 180 degrees quite readily, and refuses to stay at 170 degrees (or lower) for long, which is just crap to be honest. This thing needs extra "bumps" to stay open like the DS, and that's quite a huge oversight - I don't play games with the unit held vertically, and it feels like shit having to do so - I'll be adding a small bumper to the hinge to keep it from opening all the way, I think.
So as far as hardware goes, it's gorgeous. Software is another matter though, and to be honest most of it is pants - you can tell we're early in the software development cycle. Most of the functions when called from Minimenu (such as SD mass storage - why can't I access my NAND over USB?) just run their GTK equivalents and that just totally breaks the look and feel of the Minimenu. The Minimenu is obviously just at a beta stage, and has badly aligned text in places, and has tabs that gather like-for-like apps which give no indication that there are more tabs off-screen. There's this huge box to the right which most of the time is just empty space, and is a real waste of time, as it just displays a screenshot (if you're lucky) of the app you've highlighted. Having said that, it works and works well.
XFCE is... well, it's XFCE and the less said about that, the better. There are far better WMs out there and hopefully we'll see them ported at some point. A lot of the time you can't see the close buttons at the bottom of the windows, and with no way to scroll the screen it makes things unusable until you figure out that ALT is not SHIFT for moving windows (by searching GP2X forums for posts made a year ago), and the whole thing is just totally non-obvious. Not for the faint of heart or the non-linux-zealot.
Games then.
I downloaded a few PND files (which is more up to date? the archive at Openhandhelds, or the Pandora App-Store?), the first of which was firefox 3.6 because Aurora is shite and can't render the Pandora app-store. I had to resort to another blast on the forum search function - and then the Pandora Wiki - to see how PNDs work... and where to put them. The default download location is on NAND, which ain't good.
Firefox works well, though, and is impressive. Well, I say it works well - it worked once and then the PND couldn't be found. While it was running, I downloaded the latest hotfix and the codec pack and installed those. PNDs worked properly after that, and firefox showed up in the menu as it should do (I had to launch it with pnd-run at first). After hotfixing, things are definitely looking up. Well, apart from the right nub, which constantly keeps forgetting that it's meant to be a mouse button.
Having gotten patched, and having a decent browser installed, I went after games. prBoom was first, and it looks lovely on that screen. No music though... I recalled that the GP2X version used timidity, so I went looking for a PND of that. No luck. I found an old link on the pandora bug-tracker, but that was dead. There were some interesting tips though, so I downloaded the timidity tar.gz, and extacted it to /usr/share/timidity, with the config in /etc/timidity and Doom got music. God, that was non-obvious. It's the sort of thing that should be in the OS to start with, IMO.
No Quake yet, it's not ready. Quake 2 and Quake 3 are, but I wish I'd not bothered - IOQuake 2 freezes the Pandora hard after a few minutes of play, which requires the battery to be unseated to reboot (it seems to disable the reset switch). IOQuake 3 fails to run at all. Quake 3 NanoGL runs and looks amazing, but has serious control issues - either the right nub mouselooks way too fast, or (if you turn down the mouse speed) way too slow, and gets slower the further you push the nub. Frustrating. Don't use the left nub to move, either - you'll get stuck in one direction until the game decides you've had enough. No matter what speed the mouse is set to, it's almost impossible to hit menu items with it too. I have high hopes that now that a few more people have Pandoras, these issues might get fixed. Possibly.
What else? Picodrive is amazing, as always. GPSP is very good, even for a Wiz app, and plays GBA games at full speed with no issues that I have found so far. GnuBoy runs lovely also, and is great fun. The Snes emulator is nice, but only supports one file type, so I have to rename all my roms FUSE is well known for being one of the best Spectrum emulators there is, and it shows. A handheld speccy with a keyboard? MMMmmmm.
MAME4ALL runs very well indeed. I'm lucky enough to have a unit that overclocks to 900Mhz with ease, so even the most demanding games are silky smooth. Must try Mame 106 soon.
PSX-ReARMed is nice, but it doesn't run R-Type Delta so I've not tried any other games on it. Ari64's Mupen runs nicely - very near to fullspeed at 500MHz, and great for Mario64 (the only N64 game I'm interested in) at 600MHz. The controls are nice too, analogs working very well. I can't comment on the PSX emulator's controls, as I've not been able to try them yet - and as R-Type Delta only needs the DPad/Buttons, it doesn't need analog controls at all.
D1X is obviously a very quick port, and makes no use of the nubs in a sensible manner (doesn't appear to move/strafe on left, rotate on right - but I may be missing a configuration option).
Amiga4All is great, but the UI sucks balls. Multiple choice questions before I get to insert a disk? I think not. I may have to rectify this one myself.
I installed the GnomeGames, as I like a game of solitaire now and then - but it polluted my mini-menu with many copies of itself in all sorts of categories, so the PND went in the trash sharpish.
The games are fun, the emulators are fun, the OS is dire. Not the underlying engine - PNDs are detected and work fine. The Wireless works very well. The whole underlying architecture is very well written, but the desktop/minimenu experience is inconsistent, and will benefit from some attention when the bugs are ironed out. The minimenu, although it does the job, could be much better and not waste space on unimportant screengrabs. And it could let me decide where an icon should go in the tab list if I disagree with the tab it thinks it should be in. I suspect I could change that by editing the PXML, but how the hell do I do that? Oh, more web searching then!
So to sum up? The hardware is great. Not brilliant like a Nintendo or Sony product (and we weren't expecting perfection, were we? No, Mr Rothwell, we were not, no matter how many delays you encountered), but it's solid and comfortable, and the components are high-quality except for the ones that don't work right (I'm looking at you, Mr A button, and Mr Zero key), but these are minor niggles. Oh, and the right shoulder button is a bit funny. It clicks down twice, and only the second click registers. You have to push it quite hard. I suspect badly trimmed plastic.
The software available is largely quick ports with little to no polish so far. I can fix a few of those issues myself though, so no love lost. What there is in the archives is impressive. I do hope nobody bought this who has no linux experience, because you are going to hate the OS if you did. You can't just pick it up, download a game and play - you have to hunt around the web for instructions on how to get the file you downloaded (if you can find it) installed first.
All that said, we're still very early on in the Pandora's life and things will almost certainly pick up in the software dept. There's some extremely talented people out there working on this for little to no reward so it's perhaps unfair to pick holes. Being a developer myself, I can see why there are holes to pick, and it's perfectly understandable - but people with no real developing background will find it... well, shoddy, I suppose.
And as handhelds go, it's one of the best I've found. And it's fucking good fun to boot.
I may post pics tomorrow, but let's face it, you've all seen a pandora by now. Many thanks to all those that have been involved, you've made my January, you really have.
D.
--
It was saturday afternoon (less than 24 hours after I got the email), and my son needed to be taken to college for his Biology revision session. Wouldn't you just know it, the postie arrived just as I was getting in the car
So, after an hour or so - oh, how it dragged - I got home and plugged the little bugger in, intending to let it charge.
Nope, it wasn't having it. It wanted to start up, so I thought "what the hell" and entered the necessary information on the necessary line... And was greeted by the minimenu.
So, first glance - physically... It's quite nice really. The paintjob is quite "rough" to the touch - your fingers won't slip while holding it, and fingerprints don't stand a chance. You can't actually see the rough finish, but it's refreshingly different from the piano-black shininess of the DS. It's reassuringly heavy, but not enough to cause you problems holding it for long periods. The light pipes are bright, but don't out-shine the display at all. The keyboard is lovely.
The screen is heavenly - a matte finish, so it doesn't reflect point light sources. It's crystal clear, and even running XFCE at lowest font size (well, 8-point) it's easy to read. It's got a full 180 degrees viewing angle too, in both axes. The resistive layer for the touch screen is held a fraction above the screen, and gives a small "click" as you press it with the stylus. The accuracy is spot-on, no configuration needed. You'll not need the stylus in mini-menu, but it does make the desktop in XFCE more bearable.
God, we need a better WM on this.
The controls: The DPad is frankly wonderful, and DaveC has come through with style. He may be the most anal bugger on the forums, but he does know his controllers. Nice and clicky, but not too harsh. Diagonals are a breeze, but don't trigger unless you want them to. The face buttons (A/B/X/Y) are nice, though the A button feels squishy - but works just fine. The only niggle is that and the 0 key, which needs a kind of right-wards prod to register anything (which seems to be a problem with more than just my unit judging by friends from other forums that have one).
Meh, I can live with that.
The nubs are nice too - smooth, with a nice springy resistance and no need to "calibrate" like the old ones did. These "just work", as I believe the phrase goes these days. Using the nubs as a mouse is quite a pleasant experience too, though double-clicking with the right nub is hard to do.
The lid does indeed spring open to 180 degrees quite readily, and refuses to stay at 170 degrees (or lower) for long, which is just crap to be honest. This thing needs extra "bumps" to stay open like the DS, and that's quite a huge oversight - I don't play games with the unit held vertically, and it feels like shit having to do so - I'll be adding a small bumper to the hinge to keep it from opening all the way, I think.
So as far as hardware goes, it's gorgeous. Software is another matter though, and to be honest most of it is pants - you can tell we're early in the software development cycle. Most of the functions when called from Minimenu (such as SD mass storage - why can't I access my NAND over USB?) just run their GTK equivalents and that just totally breaks the look and feel of the Minimenu. The Minimenu is obviously just at a beta stage, and has badly aligned text in places, and has tabs that gather like-for-like apps which give no indication that there are more tabs off-screen. There's this huge box to the right which most of the time is just empty space, and is a real waste of time, as it just displays a screenshot (if you're lucky) of the app you've highlighted. Having said that, it works and works well.
XFCE is... well, it's XFCE and the less said about that, the better. There are far better WMs out there and hopefully we'll see them ported at some point. A lot of the time you can't see the close buttons at the bottom of the windows, and with no way to scroll the screen it makes things unusable until you figure out that ALT is not SHIFT for moving windows (by searching GP2X forums for posts made a year ago), and the whole thing is just totally non-obvious. Not for the faint of heart or the non-linux-zealot.
Games then.
I downloaded a few PND files (which is more up to date? the archive at Openhandhelds, or the Pandora App-Store?), the first of which was firefox 3.6 because Aurora is shite and can't render the Pandora app-store. I had to resort to another blast on the forum search function - and then the Pandora Wiki - to see how PNDs work... and where to put them. The default download location is on NAND, which ain't good.
Firefox works well, though, and is impressive. Well, I say it works well - it worked once and then the PND couldn't be found. While it was running, I downloaded the latest hotfix and the codec pack and installed those. PNDs worked properly after that, and firefox showed up in the menu as it should do (I had to launch it with pnd-run at first). After hotfixing, things are definitely looking up. Well, apart from the right nub, which constantly keeps forgetting that it's meant to be a mouse button.
Having gotten patched, and having a decent browser installed, I went after games. prBoom was first, and it looks lovely on that screen. No music though... I recalled that the GP2X version used timidity, so I went looking for a PND of that. No luck. I found an old link on the pandora bug-tracker, but that was dead. There were some interesting tips though, so I downloaded the timidity tar.gz, and extacted it to /usr/share/timidity, with the config in /etc/timidity and Doom got music. God, that was non-obvious. It's the sort of thing that should be in the OS to start with, IMO.
No Quake yet, it's not ready. Quake 2 and Quake 3 are, but I wish I'd not bothered - IOQuake 2 freezes the Pandora hard after a few minutes of play, which requires the battery to be unseated to reboot (it seems to disable the reset switch). IOQuake 3 fails to run at all. Quake 3 NanoGL runs and looks amazing, but has serious control issues - either the right nub mouselooks way too fast, or (if you turn down the mouse speed) way too slow, and gets slower the further you push the nub. Frustrating. Don't use the left nub to move, either - you'll get stuck in one direction until the game decides you've had enough. No matter what speed the mouse is set to, it's almost impossible to hit menu items with it too. I have high hopes that now that a few more people have Pandoras, these issues might get fixed. Possibly.
What else? Picodrive is amazing, as always. GPSP is very good, even for a Wiz app, and plays GBA games at full speed with no issues that I have found so far. GnuBoy runs lovely also, and is great fun. The Snes emulator is nice, but only supports one file type, so I have to rename all my roms
FUSE is well known for being one of the best Spectrum emulators there is, and it shows. A handheld speccy with a keyboard? MMMmmmm.MAME4ALL runs very well indeed. I'm lucky enough to have a unit that overclocks to 900Mhz with ease, so even the most demanding games are silky smooth. Must try Mame 106 soon.
PSX-ReARMed is nice, but it doesn't run R-Type Delta so I've not tried any other games on it. Ari64's Mupen runs nicely - very near to fullspeed at 500MHz, and great for Mario64 (the only N64 game I'm interested in) at 600MHz. The controls are nice too, analogs working very well. I can't comment on the PSX emulator's controls, as I've not been able to try them yet - and as R-Type Delta only needs the DPad/Buttons, it doesn't need analog controls at all.
D1X is obviously a very quick port, and makes no use of the nubs in a sensible manner (doesn't appear to move/strafe on left, rotate on right - but I may be missing a configuration option).
Amiga4All is great, but the UI sucks balls. Multiple choice questions before I get to insert a disk? I think not. I may have to rectify this one myself.
I installed the GnomeGames, as I like a game of solitaire now and then - but it polluted my mini-menu with many copies of itself in all sorts of categories, so the PND went in the trash sharpish.
The games are fun, the emulators are fun, the OS is dire. Not the underlying engine - PNDs are detected and work fine. The Wireless works very well. The whole underlying architecture is very well written, but the desktop/minimenu experience is inconsistent, and will benefit from some attention when the bugs are ironed out. The minimenu, although it does the job, could be much better and not waste space on unimportant screengrabs. And it could let me decide where an icon should go in the tab list if I disagree with the tab it thinks it should be in. I suspect I could change that by editing the PXML, but how the hell do I do that? Oh, more web searching then!
So to sum up? The hardware is great. Not brilliant like a Nintendo or Sony product (and we weren't expecting perfection, were we? No, Mr Rothwell, we were not, no matter how many delays you encountered), but it's solid and comfortable, and the components are high-quality except for the ones that don't work right (I'm looking at you, Mr A button, and Mr Zero key), but these are minor niggles. Oh, and the right shoulder button is a bit funny. It clicks down twice, and only the second click registers. You have to push it quite hard. I suspect badly trimmed plastic.
The software available is largely quick ports with little to no polish so far. I can fix a few of those issues myself though, so no love lost. What there is in the archives is impressive. I do hope nobody bought this who has no linux experience, because you are going to hate the OS if you did. You can't just pick it up, download a game and play - you have to hunt around the web for instructions on how to get the file you downloaded (if you can find it) installed first.
All that said, we're still very early on in the Pandora's life and things will almost certainly pick up in the software dept. There's some extremely talented people out there working on this for little to no reward so it's perhaps unfair to pick holes. Being a developer myself, I can see why there are holes to pick, and it's perfectly understandable - but people with no real developing background will find it... well, shoddy, I suppose.
And as handhelds go, it's one of the best I've found. And it's fucking good fun to boot.
I may post pics tomorrow, but let's face it, you've all seen a pandora by now. Many thanks to all those that have been involved, you've made my January, you really have.
D.
Gerix
Active Member
- Joined
- Jan 25, 2010
- Messages
- 767
- Age
- 37
I just want to point out that your review is the same number of words as your title. And if you ignore the emoticon and sig, it's shorter on a character-by-character basis.
I like it.
Edit: Ok, you've elaborated a little bit.
I like it.
Edit: Ok, you've elaborated a little bit.
Last edited by a moderator:
When the nub is in mousebutton mode (which is default for right nub), press LEFT for LEFT mousebutton, RIGHT for RIGHT mousebutton, DOWN for MIDDLE mousebutton and UP for DOUBLECLICK
Makes things easier, pressing two times left for a doubleclick is hard, yes. Pressing up is easy
whynodd
Member
- Joined
- Sep 20, 2008
- Messages
- 262
Set both nubs to joystick mode in the pandora system, start d1x or d2x and configure the controls by yourself in the game, also select joystick there and zero deadzone. (don't use the emulated nub-mouse because in joystick mode its way more precise). The nubs have deadzones themself so any additional deadzone is not good. Which axis does what in the game is up to you.
Another thingies: D1x has a small input lag (for me a showstopper), D2x not.
Good configuration could be like that:
left nub: forward/backward/leftstrafe/rightstrafe
right nub: aiming up/down/left/right
shoulders: shooting primary and secondary
dpad and facebuttons: Upslide/Downslide/Banking, how you feel comfortable while dogfighting.
Btw: F1 is help, F2 for ingame option menu. Save and load is Alt+F2, Alt+F3, a bit awkward to type these but possible.
Just try it. For me as a descent fan, d2x (configured like this) plays how it should be played on a handheld.
Sure, its not perfectly preconfigured but its a very good port. I'm half through d2 with a one-nub-Pandora.
Last edited by a moderator:
skeezix
Internal Development
For minimenu specific stuff, I'm (slowly) on it -- I'm working now on DaveC's requests for 'implied category/tab by directory location' and 'keeping appdata in same place as pnd' (both are if desired of course.) You can override PXML using a .ovr file (which is documented in the wiki, but who looks there?), but the checkbox to make it so you can categorize by directory probabyl will help people. I will be writing an ovr editor, but I keep forgetting., (I want the ovr editor separate to minimenu so it'll work for xfce and all other environments.. pnds work with all standard desktop environments.)
But you do bring up a very good point -- since we want all config options/etc to work in all environments (who has time to write everythign 2+ times?), xfce and minimenu and other DE's all use the same tools; it makes sense to me, but it does 'uglify' things ..'
_Should_ minimenu use minimenu specific apps in some cases, so that we have a minimenu version of setitng this or that? Just sounds like 'too much work to me', but maybe its a good idea.
Theres a bunch of things I've been debating putting into minimenu, but resisting so as to avoid making a whole pile of changes to it now (to support dialog boxes in skins etc), but could be neat. But its a lot of work to do everythign 2+ times ... *shrug*
Honest review, fair enough; really, it shows that minimenu was originally written in a couple days .. "we need a simple game-console menu, and we're maybe shipping a week" so its not designed perfectly; what can you do?
If you have some specific requests, please post 'em; Every once in awhile I post a 'fish' to get some comments about minimenu, but usualyl don't get too much action cept from DaveC and I dont' want a DaveC-monoculture thing (ie: we need>1 persons input to get sensible input; so far much of the app is DaveC's input alone.) I figure, once more units get out, we can get more 'first impression' feedback .. first impressions are often way more honest than later ones when people 'get used to how it works'.
jeffphone
-- I'm working now on DaveC's requests for 'implied category/tab by directory location' and 'keeping appdata in same place as pnd' (both are if desired of course.) You can override PXML using a .ovr file (which is documented in the wiki, but who looks there?), but the checkbox to make it so you can categorize by directory probabyl will help people. I will be writing an ovr editor, but I keep forgetting., (I want the ovr editor separate to minimenu so it'll work for xfce and all other environments.. pnds work with all standard desktop environments.)But you do bring up a very good point -- since we want all config options/etc to work in all environments (who has time to write everythign 2+ times?), xfce and minimenu and other DE's all use the same tools; it makes sense to me, but it does 'uglify' things ..'
_Should_ minimenu use minimenu specific apps in some cases, so that we have a minimenu version of setitng this or that? Just sounds like 'too much work to me', but maybe its a good idea.
Theres a bunch of things I've been debating putting into minimenu, but resisting so as to avoid making a whole pile of changes to it now (to support dialog boxes in skins etc), but could be neat. But its a lot of work to do everythign 2+ times ... *shrug*
Honest review, fair enough; really, it shows that minimenu was originally written in a couple days .. "we need a simple game-console menu, and we're maybe shipping a week" so its not designed perfectly; what can you do?
If you have some specific requests, please post 'em; Every once in awhile I post a 'fish' to get some comments about minimenu, but usualyl don't get too much action cept from DaveC and I dont' want a DaveC-monoculture thing (ie: we need>1 persons input to get sensible input; so far much of the app is DaveC's input alone.) I figure, once more units get out, we can get more 'first impression' feedback .. first impressions are often way more honest than later ones when people 'get used to how it works'.
jeffphone
Link
ithic.com
Wonky A Button huh D?
Welcome to that club. I think the problem is the backside of the A in the mold. It isn't separating properly and leaves debris. If you rip it open at some point to fix your R shoulder (might need a shave or a screw loosened) a nice sharp flatpoint screwdriver may help get the excess plastic out of your A button, you should be able to feel it with the screwdriver as it isn't even or smooth.
As for someone not experience with Linux command line, I find the OS a little shoddy, not a fan of minimenu for the same reasons you mentioned, too many tabs. I need to just boot into XFCE and be over it. I use the Pandora button and DPad to navigate my way around XFCE much more nicely than the nubs. Nubs become necessary with adjusting CPU speed etc which is a bummer. I'm trying to preserve my nubs until I get a backup unit because I'm sure they are going to shit the bed eventually. I think you are right regarding downloading and finding your way around for a complete NOOB, I hacked my iphone after learning how to do so from a 5 year old on YouTube. Then learned my way around MAC OS which doesn't make the Pandora look too foreign compared to Winbloze.
Going to start a new thread about Wonky A Buttons
Welcome to that club. I think the problem is the backside of the A in the mold. It isn't separating properly and leaves debris. If you rip it open at some point to fix your R shoulder (might need a shave or a screw loosened) a nice sharp flatpoint screwdriver may help get the excess plastic out of your A button, you should be able to feel it with the screwdriver as it isn't even or smooth.
As for someone not experience with Linux command line, I find the OS a little shoddy, not a fan of minimenu for the same reasons you mentioned, too many tabs. I need to just boot into XFCE and be over it. I use the Pandora button and DPad to navigate my way around XFCE much more nicely than the nubs. Nubs become necessary with adjusting CPU speed etc which is a bummer. I'm trying to preserve my nubs until I get a backup unit because I'm sure they are going to shit the bed eventually. I think you are right regarding downloading and finding your way around for a complete NOOB, I hacked my iphone after learning how to do so from a 5 year old on YouTube. Then learned my way around MAC OS which doesn't make the Pandora look too foreign compared to Winbloze.
Going to start a new thread about Wonky A Buttons
Anihil8ion2199
Member
- Joined
- Nov 4, 2010
- Messages
- 369
Thanks for the review ZXDunny!
I hope the forum search turns up this post when I get my Pandora, 'cos it'll be the first thing I look for. I bought D1&2 from GoG.com specifically to play on the Pandora. Shame about the input lag on D1, though, but I do actually prefer D2. Watching the intro brought back memories! Really looking forward to playing it to destruction!
Good, honest review ZXDunny. I'd hoped there would be a little less hackery involved in getting the Pandora up and running, but don't mind that there is. Ultimately, it's more the arsing around getting things to work that entertains me, rather than the working emulators. Funny, that, and entirely contradictory to my GP2X experiences. I spent more time optifying (moving stuff from the limited space /root into the mahoosive /opt) stuff on my N900 than I did using it.
Sugar_Kane
Could crush a grape
That is a pretty good review, pretty much what I was expecting. I'm pretty much expecting to have to do quite a bit of hackery to get things working when I finally get mine, and I've only ever used ubuntu for about two weeks once, so I'll be essentially learning to wipe my own anus again trawling for guides on how to do basic things, and obviously asking stupid questions on our beloved forums.
Anyway, good, honest review although I was expecting more swears from you, dunners.
Anyway, good, honest review although I was expecting more swears from you, dunners.
SNESFAN
Retro game fanatic
I had said something originally about this exact thing. I was assured that the lid will stay open by it's self. I said that's all good, but please put notches in it like the nintendo ds. They said they were not needed. This was when they were redesigning this particular part because of the lcd ribon or something like that, but I specifically brought it up, and they acknowledged it, and disregarded it. So that's on them.
oh well
top notch review though, still can't wait for mine.
Having it the hinge able to go to a full 180 is a pretty stupid idea anyway. Using a 3/4 hinge would've been a hundred times better. Still, long live op
Bosbeetle
Terminally lost
Not at all its the most comfortable position, the pandora plays like a gameboy when the lid is fully opened.
darfgarf
Well-Known Member
i don't understand why people are complaining about the hinge, 180 degrees is perfect for viewing angles and wrist angles (as a young person, already getting r.s.i/other problems, this matters a lot), though of course everyone is different in how they view things like that i guess
pretty nice review overall, it's honest at least, our little pandoras are a little rough around the edges, but in a chuck norris kind of way, not the falling apart junk kind of way
pretty nice review overall, it's honest at least, our little pandoras are a little rough around the edges, but in a chuck norris kind of way, not the falling apart junk kind of way
