New Pandora Owner... new story :)

[Yorta]

Hey everybody !


I'm new on the forum, but i've been following the project for 2 years and a half now. I received a pandora a week ago(ebay refurbished one, but i also ordered from batch 1 and i'm waiting for my email notification ). I thought i could share my overall feeling with you here :


//// Story ////


So, i discovered the pandora 30 months ago, on a french geek website (i'm french by the way,so sorry for my bad english ). I immediatly fell in love with it. I won't tell you what happened next, you all know the story When preorders started again, i think it was around january-february 09, i took the opportunity to order one.


A week ago, i was chillin' on ebay, and i typed out of curiosity "Open Pandora". That's how i found the auctions, and decided to buy another one I thought i might give it to my sister once i receive my "true" pandora


/// Overall Impressions ///


Ok, let's get this straight once for all: THIS IS A FU**ING AMAZING MACHINE! It's so so so so cool, so many things (video/audio player, gaming machine, etc...) ALL IN YOUR POCKET !!


HARDWARE: it's actually pretty awesome ( and it's refurb ! ). I have the bezel and the weird "A" button. My nubs both work fine, which get me to the first questions Mr. CRAIG:


DID YOU USE "OLD" OR "NEW" NUBS FOR THE EBAY REFURBISHED PANDORAS???


CAN YOU PLEASE POST A YOUTUBE VIDEO ABOUT HOW TO SAFELY OPEN YOUR PANDORA AND HEAL THE POOR A BUTTON ??


SOFTWARE: i get a weird feeling about this. It's a very complete machine, but you have to do tons of little stuff to really enjoy it (pnd/hotfix/codecs/wifi/etc... ). I actually think that it's part of this tiny machine's charm. Getting all the potential out of this tiny beauty is quite a pain in the a*s, but it's SO MUCH WORTH IT ! You can see in the "help"section that i'm struggling with the neogeo emulator ( WTF is this BIOS directory??? ). But overall it's pretty amazing, the emulation performance is outstading. I have ONE COMPLAIN here, and i don't know how to express it. Let's say that all the emulators are not "harmonized", or missing a common GUI. Sometimes you launch the emulator, then it opens a navigator to choose the rom (SNES for example). Sometimes it launches a GUI in which you have to find the path to your roms (PICODRIVE for example). Which leads me to my third (and last) question:


HOW ABOUT A COMMON GUI FOR EVERY EMULATOR???


I also noticed that each emulator has its own "menu controls". I don't now where to find each ! It would be nice to have a common way to access the emulator menu or quit it !


// CONCLUSION //


A MILLION THANKS to all the OP Team. You guys are my true heroes. I really hope that you will sell millions of this beauty ( and i'm sure you can ). Kudos to all of you! The happiest man in France owes it to you

 

[Wrath Of Khan]

Glad you are enjoying your pandora.Hope they fix the A button problem soon though.

 

[Eridger]

Just so you know, the wonky 'A' button will likely work itself out after a few weeks of use. After that it'll behave normally. If it doesn't after a while, then yes, you may need to open it.

 

[second exodous]

A unified emulator GUI is a pipe dream as all these emulators are programmed by different people and there is no guidelines on what a emulator GUI should be. You get used to it over time and if you're like most people then you'll only use 3 at a time anyway. What we need some talented programmer that can write a GUI that can unify the emulators we have right now and maybe make it good enough to where other emulator programmers will want to write new emulators that work with this GUI. Pipe dream I'm guessing but dreaming is nice.

 

[sebt3]

CAPS = shouting, and we dont realy like being shout in our face... (at least me)


all the emulator have different UI because all these have a past and use different technologies. It would be a pain to code a common UI for all of these, but if realy want one. Go ahead, code it.

 

[Yorta]

CAPS = shouting, and we dont realy like being shout in our face... (at least me)

My bad, i used this to make allmy questions clear, so people can easily read them. I'm pretty sure some people don't want to read the whole "pandora rocks" speech

 

[Tickles]

What's up with your A button? I got a refurb too with an A button that stuck a little and a B button that felt spongier than the others.


The A button fixed itself within a day but I took it apart to get the B button feeling the same as the others.


It's pretty easy to do; just take the back cover off, lift the board a little (anti-static wristband recommended ) and remove the offending button. The problem's caused by a glob of plastic inside the button, just scrape that out, re-assemble and you're done. Remember not to over tighten the screws as well.

 

[Anihil8ion2199]

@ Yorta: Thanks for the review! A common GUI would be nice, but from someone who had no Linux knowledge two years ago, and self taught themselves Xubuntu and Dingux on the Dingoo, a different GUI for each emulator is completely learnable...

 

[Pickle]

if the emulator can be run from command line then my picklelauncher can run it, thats about as common frontend as your going to get

 

[maplesugarlover]

Can picklelauncher run mame and mess ?

 

[rabidpoobear]

A unified emulator GUI is a pipe dream as all these emulators are programmed by different people and there is no guidelines on what a emulator GUI should be. You get used to it over time and if you're like most people then you'll only use 3 at a time anyway. What we need some talented programmer that can write a GUI that can unify the emulators we have right now and maybe make it good enough to where other emulator programmers will want to write new emulators that work with this GUI. Pipe dream I'm guessing but dreaming is nice.

I might look into this. I'll have my pandy in about a week or two. I have a masters in Computer Science and one of my research focuses was human-computer interaction and usability, so that's probably what I'm going to focus on first for Pandy. I enjoy making stuff easier for other people to use. Which are the most popular emu's right now? N64, NES, SNES, Genesis?

 

[Asiyura]

I might look into this. I'll have my pandy in about a week or two. I have a masters in Computer Science and one of my research focuses was human-computer interaction and usability, so that's probably what I'm going to focus on first for Pandy. I enjoy making stuff easier for other people to use. Which are the most popular emu's right now? N64, NES, SNES, Genesis?

To me the most popular emulators are Amiga, SNES and NeoGeo or Mame.


I proposed to try to unify the GUI myself, when my Pandora will be in my hands.


But since I'm at the end of the first batch and have lots of projects that eat away my time…


Moreover you seem far more qualified for this than me

 

[rabidpoobear]

I do have lots of other projects as well though.


Perhaps we can collaborate on it!

 

[DaMummy]

as long as you credit the crap out of the original authors of said emulators, this sounds like a good idea, we dont want blue protomans thinking that you wrote the emulators

 

[- Theo -]

as long as you credit the crap out of the original authors of said emulators, this sounds like a good idea, we dont want blue protomans thinking that you wrote the emulators

...or wrote the games :lol:

 

[rabidpoobear]

Sure, I have no problem with giving credit where it's due.


I hreally need a pandora though so I can see what the state of the emus are right now. What I'd really like to do is take a popular emu like the SNES one and branch it and make it so that at least all config and gui can be hooked to read their values from a separate process over a standard api. just as a proof of concept. and that way in the future any emu authors could just comply with the api and not have to write any GUI or config file / rom management / file launching code, etc. I'll have to see what sorts of settings and gui things we have currently in the emus, and come up with a good idea of what a good subset of all that functionality would be.


next week. i'll make a thread once i get some idea as to what i'm doing.

 

[Anihil8ion2199]

I wish you guys the best of luck in the execution of this project. Can't wait to see it!

 

[Asiyura]

LukeVP, I would be glad to work with you on unifying the look and feel of Pandora's emulators.


It's more motivating to work in a team than alone.


But we're obviously missing the main part to start to work : our Pandora

DaMummy, I never meant to make a new GUI and erase every traces of the original dev.


In fact, when I first thought about revamping those GUI, I was planning to add an "about [name of the emu]" button.


That about would show a list of every contributors and add me at the end of the listing : "GUI by KodeIn".


Now, since LukeVP and I are going to work together, we will talk about the best way to credit everybody (including ourselves).

 

[Wrath Of Khan]

This sounds like a good idea.Anything that makes using emulators easier is a very good idea,and standardisation is important for ease of use.

 

[rabidpoobear]

When my pandora gets in and I start playing around with this I'll set you up an account on my repo... Do you prefer git or svn?