Our New Machine, Pandora

[imec]

What's the difference between XFCE and Gnome? I thought it was supposedly super memory efficient, hmmm...

 

[Vorporeal]

I don't know if anyone's espoused this yet - Enlightenment, it's supposed to be highly configurable so hopefully everyone can get what they want. :lol:



I thought enlightenment actually needed decent hardware to run PC-wise...not sure trhis would be the wisest use of power/battery life.

No, enlightenment is specifically designed to provide eye candy with minimal hardware requirements. That said, it's also under constant heavy development and in my experience it's unsuitable for day to day use.


DR17, the pre-alpha version, is under heavy development. DR16 is stable and while it doesn't have as much eye-candy as DR17, it works very well and would probably run well performance-wise and function-wise on the Craiginator.

 

[Vorporeal]

(Accidental double post, please delete.)

 

[Exophase]

Why are people starting to recommend that JXD keychain as an alternative to the GP2X?

The GP2X will continue to enjoy a nice life alongside the Craiginator, so don't count it out just yet.

Probably since almost ALL of the top emu coders have left for it. They jumped ship overnight, doesn't take much I guess. I will just keep the GP2X until the Craiginator comes out. I see no point in getting cought up in a handheld like that for me. I can't see playing games with too few buttons in mono on a tiny screen. When the Craiginator is released that silly little thing will be left in the lurch anyway.


Say what? You're paranoid. A lot of emu coders aren't interested in JXD301. The CPU is actually not that great, or at least GCC must not be generating very high quality code.

 

[stormyandcold]

My biggest problem is who's going to code for it?

On gp2x the 1st thing I ever tried was emulation, specifically megadrive and snes. Are we going to have the talent left to port all the emu's etc?

Who's going to write the os?

Will it be x86 compatible?

Maybe I'm just going with the times but having proper x86 compatibility is a big plus for me especially with the big back catalogue of pc games available.

The other concern regarding price, thats why I've pointed out the eee pc, no I dont have 1 but yes, something like that is very appealing especially since the biggest plus is i dont have to rely on coders as the majority of stuff is already out there that i'd like to use.

My dream system would be something of a jack of all trades and right now I want something that I can take with me to gig with while running guitar rig 3 for my guitar.

Unfortunately, I've had the guys over at the forums do a test for me and it would seem that it's not fast enough to do what I want with it...yet.

Latency is around 50-90ms mark. Fine for off-line DAW but useless for live use.

Ofcourse, there are options right now for a hand-held pc that I COULD use to do what I want but it comes at a price...

http://vaio.sony.co.uk/view/ShowProduct.ac...ry=VN+UX+Series

Even then it's still probably not fast enough.

Until hand-held/laptops etc reach minimum of 1.5ghz (preferably 2ghz) I don't think my dream will come true and when it does finally become possible I'll probably be out of the game anyway

btw, am looking forward to see how the craiginator shapes up

 

[Ravnos]

DR16 has been around forever and has aged poorly, IMO. It would work, but honestly I don't think it would be suitable for this device. For starters, its menus depend on which mouse button was clicked, something that doesn't work out very well on a touch screen. Sure, there could be button presses that modify the "click" behaviour, but that is not very intuitive.

If someone wanted to make a port, that's their business but any version of Enlightenment would make a poor choice for the default UI without heavy modification.

 

[Exophase]

Why are people starting to recommend that JXD keychain as an alternative to the GP2X?

The GP2X will continue to enjoy a nice life alongside the Craiginator, so don't count it out just yet.

Probably since almost ALL of the top emu coders have left for it. They jumped ship overnight, doesn't take much I guess. I will just keep the GP2X until the Craiginator comes out. I see no point in getting cought up in a handheld like that for me. I can't see playing games with too few buttons in mono on a tiny screen. When the Craiginator is released that silly little thing will be left in the lurch anyway.


Say what? You're paranoid. A lot of emu coders aren't interested in JXD301. The CPU is actually not that great, or at least GCC must not be generating very high quality code.

 

[coldfish]

Why does the craigenthingy need a physical keyboard if it has a touch screen?
In fact, you could probably emulate fairly usable analogue sticks too?

Too many buttons = clutter.

You wanna play ZX spectrum or amiga with a stylus? Cos I don't.



Not particularly, but I dont want to fumble with a keyboard with tiny keys either.

An on-screen board is far more elegant than a tiny "real" board, it can be easily reconfigured to suit the application (ie Amiga specific/labeled keys in Amiga emulation), it costs a lot less to produce if youre building in a touchscreen anyway, and it makes the final product less ugly/cumbersome.

Neither is a perfect solution, but unless youre going to lug a fullsize Speccy or Amiga keyboard around...

 

[A_SN]

No you don't get it. By we, I don't mean me and a couple of friends, I mean we, the community. It's one thing for Craig to go this is what is best, but that would only suit Craig himself.

lol, the community, riiight. Look, that GP2X Standards thing is a failure as in nobody in the community gave a fuck about what it said. It had no fucking impact. You can do it again with the Craiginator but still no one will give a fuck about it.

Now, why should Craig know better than us and decide better than us? Because he has the vision, and that's something only geniuses can understand. When you've got the vision, you know just what you want, you know where you're going, you know how to make your vision become an awesome reality, you see much further than anyone. People suggest things, make comments, but you dismiss them because they're off the mark, they're too short sighted, and they never understand what your vision was like until you're done with completing everything related to it.

That's why Craig knows better, he decides how the hardware is going to be like, how the (built-in) software is going to be like, and how the basic experience for the user will be like. That's why his input and guidelines are essential, for us to allow ourselves to participate in prolongating this experience in a consistent and awesome way in our programs. Now excuse me, I'm off to meditate on Zombo.com

 

[Exophase]

My biggest problem is who's going to code for it?

Probably a lot of people the same people who code for GP2X.

On gp2x the 1st thing I ever tried was emulation, specifically megadrive and snes. Are we going to have the talent left to port all the emu's etc?

Not to be disrespectful, but it doesn't actually take too much talent to port an emulator.

Who's going to write the os?

TI has been working on Linux for OMAP, there's a site for it (sorry, don't have the link right now).. I assume craig and team will be working on stuff in that area too.

Will it be x86 compatible?

No. The performance to power utilization ratio is much worse for x86. It's also more expensive, and there aren't really a lot of great x86 SoCs to pick from.

Maybe I'm just going with the times but having proper x86 compatibility is a big plus for me especially with the big back catalogue of pc games available.

You're going to have to go with emulation instead then.

The other concern regarding price, thats why I've pointed out the eee pc, no I dont have 1 but yes, something like that is very appealing especially since the biggest plus is i dont have to rely on coders as the majority of stuff is already out there that i'd like to use.

I sure am really tired of hearing about the Eee... If it makes you feel better it'll probably cost less than the Eee.

My dream system would be something of a jack of all trades and right now I want something that I can take with me to gig with while running guitar rig 3 for my guitar.

So get a laptop. You don't need a handheld for standalone things like that. Go get your precious Eee

Unfortunately, I've had the guys over at the forums do a test for me and it would seem that it's not fast enough to do what I want with it...yet.

Oops, spoke too soon! "Yet"? What do you think, that that software is actually going to get faster so it can run on low end x86 laptops? That's the good thing about highend ARM hardware is that the developers have been using slower versions, not faster ones. So they have actually been trying to write high performance code.

 

[imec]

No you don't get it. By we, I don't mean me and a couple of friends, I mean we, the community. It's one thing for Craig to go this is what is best, but that would only suit Craig himself.

lol, the community, riiight. Look, that GP2X Standards thing is a failure as in nobody in the community gave a fuck about what it said. It had no fucking impact. You can do it again with the Craiginator but still no one will give a fuck about it.

Now, why should Craig know better than us and decide better than us? Because he has the vision, and that's something only geniuses can understand. When you've got the vision, you know just what you want, you know where you're going, you know how to make your vision become an awesome reality, you see much further than anyone. People suggest things, make comments, but you dismiss them because they're off the mark, they're too short sighted, and they never understand what your vision was like until you're done with completing everything related to it.

That's why Craig knows better, he decides how the hardware is going to be like, how the (built-in) software is going to be like, and how the basic experience for the user will be like. That's why his input and guidelines are essential, for us to allow ourselves to participate in prolongating this experience in a consistent and awesome way in our programs. Now excuse me, I'm off to meditate on Zombo.com


The more times the lie is told, the more likely they are to believe it. We shall cleanse the world of mankind's one disease and ensure a bright future for the Aryan race. Hail Hitler, hail Hitler, hail Hitler.

 

[moxie]

An on-screen board is far more elegant than a tiny "real" board

Nope. No tactile feedback at all = Bad.

 

[moxie]

The more times the lie is told, the more likely they are to believe it. We shall cleanse the world of mankind's one disease and ensure a bright future for the Aryan race. Hail Hitler, hail Hitler, hail Hitler.

I feel the need for a TelcoLou-ish "FAIL!"-picture. Involving Hitler. And feces.

There are problems with community-driven standards:

1) The community needs to have the device first, to figure out what works and what doesn't. To get the feel for the buttons, the button placements, the accessability of i.e. simultaneous key presses or touchscreen fiddling whilst operating the controls. The feel of the keyboard, those kind of things.

Then, the community needs to argue pointlessly in forum threads for about 2-3 months, calling each other things like "You analog hitler you" and bemoaning that the position of the headphone jack makes it impossible to use as an emulator for the SFX-9000B console, which absolutely requires that
the console can be held at at 37 degree angle whilst standing on the head.

By then, either all the devs have given up and gone their separate ways again, with their own preferred control schemes and directory structures, or nobody has been devving at all and the console is dead from lack of software.

2) Community-driven standards means the community must agree. I leave it up to you as a mediator to make, say, DaveC agree with, say, Orkie or AtomicThumbs.

Now, it's not like we're talking about the plans for world domination here. It would be a recommendation or a hint sheet - "Ok, methinks that if you have no very compelling reason to do otherwise, I think it'd be peachy if left trigger+select brought up the menu, and if you made /programs/games the default install dir". I'm not sure if they're needed (then again, I'm one of the few taht actually reads the READMEs), but if they are and are to stand a chance to be used, they need to be available from the first day, not half a year later when the community has beaten itself to exhaustion over the relative merits of /bin/games versus /usr/local/apps.

 

[God Ginrai]

I don't know if there would be any copyright issues with doing this, but using the design for the menu from Altimit Mine OS from the .hack//GU Games would probably work really well on this system. Someone would have to code it from scratch tho', but it would be worth it, IMHO.

Here's a vid with the Altimit Mine OS, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cgs9vH4RG40

I found that with a quick search on Youtube, I'll see if I can find a video that shows the menu part for more than a couple of seconds later.

-God Ginrai

 

[zaoin]

This can be done in Craiginator?

http://tabletblog.com/2007/11/free-palmos-...a-internet.html

 

[Squidge]

This can be done in Craiginator?

http://tabletblog.com/2007/11/free-palmos-...a-internet.html



A Palm Emulator? Sure. Don't expect to run that particular version however as even if it's compiled for the same processor architecture, I'm betting the screen or input routines will need changing. So... we'd need source code to port it.

 

[Null]

Nope. No tactile feedback at all = Bad.

It can be added, though I think that it's unlikely it will be added to the Craiginator (additional costs etc).

Tactile feedback for touchscreens

Tactile feedback for touchscreens 2

 

[PokeParadox]

The more times the lie is told, the more likely they are to believe it. We shall cleanse the world of mankind's one disease and ensure a bright future for the Aryan race. Hail Hitler, hail Hitler, hail Hitler.

I feel the need for a TelcoLou-ish "FAIL!"-picture. Involving Hitler. And feces.

There are problems with community-driven standards:

1) The community needs to have the device first, to figure out what works and what doesn't. To get the feel for the buttons, the button placements, the accessability of i.e. simultaneous key presses or touchscreen fiddling whilst operating the controls. The feel of the keyboard, those kind of things.

Then, the community needs to argue pointlessly in forum threads for about 2-3 months, calling each other things like "You analog hitler you" and bemoaning that the position of the headphone jack makes it impossible to use as an emulator for the SFX-9000B console, which absolutely requires that
the console can be held at at 37 degree angle whilst standing on the head.

By then, either all the devs have given up and gone their separate ways again, with their own preferred control schemes and directory structures, or nobody has been devving at all and the console is dead from lack of software.

2) Community-driven standards means the community must agree. I leave it up to you as a mediator to make, say, DaveC agree with, say, Orkie or AtomicThumbs.

Now, it's not like we're talking about the plans for world domination here. It would be a recommendation or a hint sheet - "Ok, methinks that if you have no very compelling reason to do otherwise, I think it'd be peachy if left trigger+select brought up the menu, and if you made /programs/games the default install dir". I'm not sure if they're needed (then again, I'm one of the few taht actually reads the READMEs), but if they are and are to stand a chance to be used, they need to be available from the first day, not half a year later when the community has beaten itself to exhaustion over the relative merits of /bin/games versus /usr/local/apps.


Exactly.

@A_SN: I never said that I would want to do another standards site, but as the post I quoted it makes sense to prepare these things early so we don't have a mish-mash of control-schemes, ROMs in every directory except /roms/ and so forth.
GP2X Standards was launched for the simple fact that at that time many users were complaining about such problems, and some of the things that were proposed did actually feed their way into apps... obviously not yours... but it was useful to some people, at least to get them thinking more clearly about usability of control schemes, etc. Unfortunately Tripmonkey_uk managed to brick his 2x and lost interest in maintaining the site, but what can you do? I'm not trying to pimp my own site, or whatever you seem to be thinking (Someone mentioned the Standards site, so I linked them, it's that simple...) and it seems you are just looking for a target to vent some steam... I dunno. But the main point is, I do think we should try to find "best fit" guidelines(I'm well aware that you can't please everyone...) as soon as we know the layout of the controls, etc.

EDIT: PS I also read the readmes.

 

[Firefox]

This can be done in Craiginator?

http://tabletblog.com/2007/11/free-palmos-...a-internet.html



A Palm Emulator? Sure. Don't expect to run that particular version however as even if it's compiled for the same processor architecture, I'm betting the screen or input routines will need changing. So... we'd need source code to port it.


There's always POSE, which will emulate 68000-based Palms.

 

[icurafu]

...

If you lump UMPC, MIDs and handheld gaming devices together, ofcourse, you'll get the performance you require from a UMPC first.

Just go to http://www.umpcportal.com/ and read about the new devices. At the moment, if you're looking for more than 3 hours, there is only the AMD geode, VIA VX700 and the McCaslin. None of these are what you want. Wait a year and you'll see the AMD bobcat, VIA VX800 and the Menlow which will be a lot closer to what you're looking for.

The EEE is a crappy 900GMA laptop, with underclocked CPU (630MHz) and underclocked GPU to give it more batterey life. It's not aimed at games at all. It's an arts students laptop, so they can pretend they are doing homework while bringing it to beaches and cafes. It's ok for some retro games, but the 2GHz wonder machine you are looking for is a dozen generations away for the budget user. For the UMPC market, you'll need to wait a couple of generations.