Release Pandafe - great launcher - roms & native games as first citizens - finally experiencing it!


porg

Active Member
Joined
Oct 6, 2008
Messages
792
Location
Vienna, Austria
Dear nuhrin,

It is really AWESOME — I mean it in the true sense of the word not in the inflationary youth language use —

to experience roms and native games both as equalized first citizens!!!

This is a true breakthrough in Pandora user experience, now that I had some time since a year or so for Pandora stuff,

namely setting Pandafe and the folder/genre scheme up and then really EXPERIENCING it!

The Pandora interaction design concerning "launchers" until then was very conservative and unoriginal, because it simply followed the implementation model. Driven by engineers, not by design thinkers. @skeezix, @EvilDragon & Co: I appreciate MiniMenu, at least aesthetically and functionally a bit richer than the XFCE start menu (totally conservative and even in that regard fails in the category clustering it performs, and lacks an "all" list) but honestly, conceptually MiniMenu was not very daring.

The user had to follow this scheme:

  • Go through the mental effort of deciding whether your intended game is native, or from an emulated platform 1 or 2 or 3,…
  • Open a certain Emulator X
  • Open a browsing dialogue — if it's well designed, you start where you stopped last time, at least
  • Then you eventually reach your game.
This approach was everything but user centric!

Because the gamer, especially the casual one, thinks "I want to play game A" or I want to play a X genre game". Those technical barriers shall not be a burden to the gamer! If you have the need to "play a game from machine Y", then yes, this is still possible in Pandafe. Until Pandafe this was the ONLY use case covered!!!

Now I can finally use my Pandora as always intended:

  • rationality off —> minimum time & effort spent on managing & handling the device!
  • fun on —> instant access of the games, maximization of the little leisure time available!

Of course the interface is yet very minimal (text only (but good typography!), potential for way more features (some already in the issue tracker) i.e. more view options, at the same time navigation & handling must be kept simpl. But these are details compared to the large leap forward Pandafe means to the Pandora!

I am telling you: The Launcher is THE first point of contact for the Pandora users. Very essential for the UX!

Congratulations nuhrin!
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I agree with porg. Pandafe does not get anywhere near the attention it deserves.

The only thing that would still be better, would be an combination of PNDManager and Pandafe that lets you download and launch native games and (legal) roms in a unified way.
 
I suggest it doesnt get the attention Porg wants because most of us are used to starting emulated games from the respective emulator. For oh, say, the past 20 years..
 
I would like to try it, but i am waiting until i can add a screenshot for every game i add in PandaFe.

Hoping to see that feature soon.

Even more awesome would be if i can make a screenshot while playing a game, and having that shot automatically show up in PandaFE!!
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I suggest it doesnt get the attention Porg wants because most of us are used to starting emulated games from the respective emulator. For oh, say, the past 20 years..
Sure, and that makes conceptually about as much sense as having 3 different music players: one for .mp3, one for .ogg and one for .flac. Those are completely different codecs after all.

If emulator writers didn't have to worry about users expecting a front-end, they could just make a command-line emulator and let the universal launcher worry about rom navigation stuff. It would save them some time, and it would save users the trouble of getting used to different file selectors, which may or may not have the kind of sorting and search features they want.
 
I too would need some sort of screenshot/snap/tile ability but looking forward to trying it. No updates since last year has it been abandoned?

Sent from my XT1032 using Tapatalk
 
I do use Pandafe frequently for starting my emulated games and I like it a lot. But I only use the program to launch games with inbuilt configuration and haven't tried to fiddle with a completely new emulator: Just adding a new emulator program is easy but when it comes to run emulators with special arguments (Amiga) it gets difficult. I was surprised that that there aren't more configs to share for all the big emulators but maybe most users are happy to use Pandafe just as it is without digging deeper, like me.
 
Back
Top