Pandora Review by Gamester81

[_wb_]

Can I assume you mean you've just downloaded 30GB of PNDs?

Are there even 30 GB worth of PNDs? If you count all versions of everything, then maybe.

He should have used Pandafe to launch all that stuff, instead of double clicking Desktop shortcuts in Thunar with the stylus. That must be about the least convenient way to launch stuff (actually no, running /usr/pandora/scripts/pnd_run.sh from the terminal, without using tab completion, that would be worse).

 

[SNESFAN]

Just makes the Pandora seem very under developed.

Lots of people just want a turn on & play device with minimal tinkering.

That's the way the Pandora is though. For those that take the time to learn how to set everything up its not clunky or under developed. Very much on the contrary.

But for a newb or someone that just wants to play a emulator they're going to have issues. Honestly I'm surprised he got everything setup and working as far as he did.

First 3 min in I was thinking... yea, this is gonna be fun to watch :snicker:

I love my Pandora but its a long way from polished in regards to ease of setup, regardless of how user friendly you guys say it is. This review is a perfect example of in what my opinion would happen if you handed a "normal person" a Pandora that wanted to play retro games.

Stuff like yoshis packs and unified front end loaders are great steps in the right direction for those types of people.

A problem that this guy didn't mind so much that has kinda bugged me for years is the lack of a unified style of in game menu. The launcher has solutions but in game it's a toss up if you can remap buttons or what does what. The topic keeps getting brought up but no solution is ever found.

My reccomendation if I had to give one is to recode all available emulators with pcsx/notaz's menu system, change the specific menu options to match the system functions of the system being emulated but use that framework. but just doing that alone would go a long long way in regards to the overall polish of the system.

 

[Ian J]

Doesn't paint the system in a good light though.

Can I also add (looking at the comments on the video) I'm getting sick of people saying that the hardware is outdated.

It's not like systems we are emulating are getting faster (SNES, PSX, C=64 etc.) if people want to emulate a PS2 or a Dreamcast then good luck finding something comparable to the Pandora that will fit the bill.

 

[andmaz777]

It's definitely not pick up and play - perfect for people wanting the best controls and mature emulation but the average gamer wants to just turn it on and play.


But then we must remember that at the cost level we are not going to sell to many average gamers and what we have is presently unique.

 

[vcoleiro1]

I thought it was an ok review, I wouldn't get concerned over it.

If you remember he did start a thread asking for help setting up his emu's.   So it wasn't from a complete I loaded some emu's and here is a demo.  What was seen was after a little help - Obviously he could have done with more.

 

[Binary]

30gb to get those desktop icons, what is this guy on about?

He probably means using the built in SD card format software. I used it and it left me about 2 gig free of a 32 gig memory card before i'd actually put anything on it! I just reformatted it on my pc instead.

 

[Ian J]

I just wish people would watch ED 's 1 video per day. The video on setting up your SD card is all you need to get you going.

Problem though, just watched the video now and it points to older sites for PND's.

Maybe that could be changed by ED.

Sent from my GT-I9300 using Tapatalk 2

 

[urjaman]

He probably means using the built in SD card format software. I used it and it left me about 2 gig free of a 32 gig memory card before i'd actually put anything on it! I just reformatted it on my pc instead.

Poor timing. It used to be broken, is fixed now (if you need to format on the pandora again, upgrade the OS first from the menu if you have bare 1.52 installed).
And why do people need to use a formatter to create 3 folders? I mean SDHC cards (upto 32G atleast) come with a FAT32 filesystem already. I wouldnt see a need to format it if I suddenly needed to use one on the pandora...

 

[Ian J]

I really think we need to push the device to the more mainstream user.

Saying it's a niche product is always going to keep it that way, if we want it to succeed and pave the way for Pandora 2 we need to make it more user friendly.

Yes it's a premium priced product but so are apples products (spit) and they sell.

The PNDManager is definitely a step in the right direction.

Maybe the 1st run boot up sequence should include the option to format an SD card (if required) and then run the PNDManager to get the user started.

Just my 2 cents.

 

[ekianjo]

I really think we need to push the device to the more mainstream user.

Saying it's a niche product is always going to keep it that way, if we want it to succeed and pave the way for Pandora 2 we need to make it more user friendly.

Yes it's a premium priced product but so are apples products (spit) and they sell.

The PNDManager is definitely a step in the right direction.

Maybe the 1st run boot up sequence should include the option to format an SD card (if required) and then run the PNDManager to get the user started.

Just my 2 cents.

There's too much to do to improve the device to make it "mainstream friendly", and too little time/people working on it. Just porting software already takes significant time as you know. 

And this is coming too late in the development of the Pandora. The Pandora still has great years ahead of it but this is not the future anymore - the Pandora 1 is going to stay a niche market because there's no-one who is going to pay this price and expect the device to be hard to use. And this is definitely harder than using a tablet or a smartphone, for many, many reasons. 

Plus, the fact that Pandora is a computer and not a smartphone/etc is awesome in itself. It's a hacker friendly device. It's not made for everyone. You don't need to be mainstream to survive and be successful in your own way. And anyway there's no production capacity enough to support it if it went mainstream, so let's not try to oversell it either because you would reach a bottleneck extremely quickly with hte current supplier. 

 

[thatgui]

I think he did a good job, taking his "boundaries" into consideration. He is just a gamer, and nowadays even some chinese rippofs provide a more polished user experience for emulators than the Pandora. Unlike this tweeterguy (which seemed to always miss is "Android experience") he actually tried to get into using the Pandora and had some fun with it.

One thing I would critize is that the review actually consisted of 5min in the beginning and 5min at the end - everything else was just emu showoff.

Saying it's a niche product is always going to keep it that way, if we want it to succeed and pave the way for Pandora 2 we need to make it more user friendly.

Yes it's a premium priced product but so are apples products (spit) and they sell.

The problem here is that apple spend A LOT money on user experience (a whole lot more than the whole Pandora project as brought up - cost wise). They have a whole army of motivated people that act in concert.This is a community driven project (at least software wise), with some devs staying all a long, and some devs just beeing her for a while, which sole motivation is that they want to develop something for the Pandora. Hoping to achive something similiar to Apple is just closing your eyes to reality.

 

[Neelix]

Saying it's a niche product is always going to keep it that way, if we want it to succeed and pave the way for Pandora 2 we need to make it more user friendly.

Yes it's a premium priced product but so are apples products (spit) and they sell.

The problem here is that apple spend A LOT money on user experience (a whole lot more than the whole Pandora project as brought up - cost wise). They have a whole army of motivated people that act in concert.This is a community driven project (at least software wise), with some devs staying all a long, and some devs just beeing her for a while, which sole motivation is that they want to develop something for the Pandora. Hoping to achive something similiar to Apple is just closing your eyes to reality.

It's also, I believe, inherently impossible to enforce such uniformity on a truly Open system. Once you start enforcing rules regarding how things have to be done the system is no longer truly open.

Apple can make the user experience very consistent because they control everything they possibly can. It's very much a closed system.

- Neelix

 

[PowerGod]

I like how he catalogued his games I have only messy folders

Using the Desktop folder to scroll the programs is something I never tought

Anyway the review was not bad, but all the "PC" part was left hidden.

 

[frostfall]

Some simple things could be done to help newbies configure there pandora...

On the first boot up, the installer should ask the user if he wants to create the pandora folder on the SDCard and tell him repo.openpandora.org exist and that's the main (but not exclusive) source to find software (prevent the use of old emulator downloaded who knows where)...

Maybe also a the pandora could be delivered with a sheet of paper with importants url, like the wiki....

I think the most difficult part for newbies is that the pandora is delivered with no documentation at all and that you have to search everything by yourself...And most of the time the best answers are on a forgotten thread on the forum. This is counter intuitive. At least the user should be aware that the forum is a very important part of information for the pandora

 

[Neelix]

SuperZaxxon  1.52 does actually come with a quick start guide linked from the desktop which provides all this information.

There is also tool, on the system menu to create the folders for you + format the card if needed.

- Neelix

 

[klapse]

How about a menu shortcut to a script (zenity) called "Prepare SD Card" that tests the card for a supported filesystem, then makes the app dirs if they are missing?


Perhaps use an intro text like this


"This script will prepare a SD card for installation of Pandora applictions (PNDs). Insert the SD card you wish to install pandora applications to, then click OK to continue, or Cancel to abort."


EDIT: didnt know there was already such a tool, thanks Neelix

 

[SNESFAN]

Saying it's a niche product is always going to keep it that way, if we want it to succeed and pave the way for Pandora 2 we need to make it more user friendly.

Yes it's a premium priced product but so are apples products (spit) and they sell.

The problem here is that apple spend A LOT money on user experience (a whole lot more than the whole Pandora project as brought up - cost wise). They have a whole army of motivated people that act in concert.

This is a community driven project (at least software wise), with some devs staying all a long, and some devs just beeing her for a while, which sole motivation is that they want to develop something for the Pandora. Hoping to achive something similiar to Apple is just closing your eyes to reality.

It's also, I believe, inherently impossible to enforce such uniformity on a truly Open system. Once you start enforcing rules regarding how things have to be done the system is no longer truly open.Apple can make the user experience very consistent because they control everything they possibly can. It's very much a closed system.- Neelix

Enforce would be very bad. But if someone took it upon themselves with the source code of each emulator and "fixed" or rebranded each emulator to a unified look and feel would be a good solution. Most if not all the older system emulators haven't been updated in quite some time so you could go as far as to say they are in their "final" status so having to keep up on updates shouldn't be hard.

I'm sure even saying that it would be a incredible amount of work is an understatement though.

A step further might even include a script or a single .pnd that installed the emulators to nand as a binary instead of seperate .pnd files. Similar to the codec pack. So all you had to do was open the unzipped ROM directly or use a front end that tied it all together sort of like retroarch but with the best performing ports of each platform.

It can also just stay the way it is... and it probably will stay the way it is. Trying to fight the learning curve on a device where 30% of its users are developers, and a pool of users under 10k is kinda pointless. Knowing that, just the fact that it wasn't all like; when you turn it on and all you get is a blinking cursor on a terminal, is amazing to me.

Is the work involved worth the effort of making it look more attractive from the outside? I don't know.. I'm happy with the way it is now, but I'm not ignorant in the way of computers and getting things to work.

 

[klapse]

Which emulator do you think needs changing and exactly how should it be changed (which keys should be remapped to which)?

 

[monstercameron]

is it legal to advertise fully open system if the graphics portion is closed source?

 

[urjaman]

The 3D accelerator (drivers), Wifi (firmware), bluetooth (firmware) and nubs (firmware) all have closed stuff. Even the OMAP Boot ROM is closed IIRC

But the system is open from the point of view of actions by the manufacturer, OpenPandora did not actively close anything down, although I would have preferred to choose alternative parts if any existed, but I dont know about that. Also, the nubs were custom made, so I think that deal was not well done (should have gotten fw rights with them).