Aethix
Member
- Joined
- May 8, 2009
- Messages
- 110
- Age
- 33
So I got my Pandora a few weeks ago, and I love it. I've had some time to play around with it, and decided to share my thoughts and ask a few questions for more advanced use.
First of all, the Pandora is great. I haven't had any problems with the buttons or the battery falling out of position. Both of my SD card slots work perfectly. I've basically had no reason to even think about sending my Pandora back. I love playing all of the old games I've never had a chance to play either by being born to late or not being born in Japan. Playing just about anything on the Pandora is incredible fun. The device fits perfectly in my hands, and my Nintendo DS feels to small and flimsy after I've held the Pandora.
The case is a bit snug around the Pandora, but I managed to fit it in quite nicely by putting the Pandora in the case backwards, with the SD card slots of the Pandora facing the hinge of the case. It works out nicely when I do that.
I only have a few minor criticisms that I feel I should point out. As has been previously mentioned, there is quite noticeable ghosting, but it is usually fairly easy to ignore, and I imagine I'll stop noticing it completely after a few months. The face buttons felt a little too far apart at first, but I'm quickly getting used to that as well. My only real complaint about the case is that I like rest my hand against the top segment of the case when using the touch screen, and the sharp bottom corner kind of digs into my hand.
I've also found that the Pandora's 256MB of RAM is not really enough for the device. So this leads to my first question: I want to use RAM swap--is a Class 10 SD card (write speed 18 MB/s) sufficient for this, or should I use a USB thumb drive instead? I'm also planning to use the extend utilities, so would I even see any difference in performance using a Class 10 SD card (write speed 18 MB/s) over a class 6 SD card (write speed 15MB/s)?
One more question: I've occasionally experienced some problems when I had the Pandora overclocked to 800MHz. The application I was using would slow down by a very noticeable amount. When I tried to exit the application properly, the window would disappear but the icon for the program would remain on the taskbar. This happened to me twice playing Zelda RotH and once playing SNES9X4P. All three times were under Hotfix 4. This hasn't happened to me when using the Pandora at 720MHz. Is this a sign that overclocking to 800MHz is unstable for my Pandora or is it a software-related issue of some kind?
In summary, the Pandora is a wonderful device with only a few minor flaws, and I would recommend it to anybody.
Edit: I just remembered this, but does anybody know of any application to decompress *.ecm files on the Pandora, or that might be available in Python or Java?
First of all, the Pandora is great. I haven't had any problems with the buttons or the battery falling out of position. Both of my SD card slots work perfectly. I've basically had no reason to even think about sending my Pandora back. I love playing all of the old games I've never had a chance to play either by being born to late or not being born in Japan. Playing just about anything on the Pandora is incredible fun. The device fits perfectly in my hands, and my Nintendo DS feels to small and flimsy after I've held the Pandora.
The case is a bit snug around the Pandora, but I managed to fit it in quite nicely by putting the Pandora in the case backwards, with the SD card slots of the Pandora facing the hinge of the case. It works out nicely when I do that.
I only have a few minor criticisms that I feel I should point out. As has been previously mentioned, there is quite noticeable ghosting, but it is usually fairly easy to ignore, and I imagine I'll stop noticing it completely after a few months. The face buttons felt a little too far apart at first, but I'm quickly getting used to that as well. My only real complaint about the case is that I like rest my hand against the top segment of the case when using the touch screen, and the sharp bottom corner kind of digs into my hand.
I've also found that the Pandora's 256MB of RAM is not really enough for the device. So this leads to my first question: I want to use RAM swap--is a Class 10 SD card (write speed 18 MB/s) sufficient for this, or should I use a USB thumb drive instead? I'm also planning to use the extend utilities, so would I even see any difference in performance using a Class 10 SD card (write speed 18 MB/s) over a class 6 SD card (write speed 15MB/s)?
One more question: I've occasionally experienced some problems when I had the Pandora overclocked to 800MHz. The application I was using would slow down by a very noticeable amount. When I tried to exit the application properly, the window would disappear but the icon for the program would remain on the taskbar. This happened to me twice playing Zelda RotH and once playing SNES9X4P. All three times were under Hotfix 4. This hasn't happened to me when using the Pandora at 720MHz. Is this a sign that overclocking to 800MHz is unstable for my Pandora or is it a software-related issue of some kind?
In summary, the Pandora is a wonderful device with only a few minor flaws, and I would recommend it to anybody.
Edit: I just remembered this, but does anybody know of any application to decompress *.ecm files on the Pandora, or that might be available in Python or Java?
Last edited by a moderator:
