Pandora Review by Gamester81

[SNESFAN]

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

well that's just it, it's not just the button mappings that's the problem. 

but look at this yoshi's well written newbie guide

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B95m_et8qTlzMzg1dzRFTVZEWTg/edit

there is terrible inconsistencies on what button does what between emulators.

Some emulators have menus, some don't, some access it with the space bar, some with a combo of 2 buttons.

Some have save/load states tied to trigger buttons, some tied to L & S buttons,some with some other weird combo, some don't support save states at all.

Some exit with q or esc, some with the pandora button.

Some offer in game remapping of buttons via menu, some (most) don't.

The place you put roms varies between emulators too, some go in a user defined directory, some need placed in a specific folder under appdata. Some you have to exit out of the emulator to load the next rom, some do it on the fly.

I can make a large list of things that could used changed and exactly how to change them to make them unified. Some things that use the full keyboard will be tricky, but most plain consoles button mappings can be unified without being too creative.

This topic has been brought up by several different people, I can start a new topic and try to organize it so it all makes sense... ie what button should do what if you want. I just think the energy would be wasted if I did as others have tried as well in the past.

 

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[WizardStan]

This topic has been brought up by several different people

This topic has been brought up by several different people over the last several years, discussed at length, with absolutely no one actually taking ownership. Start yet another new thread if you so desire but unless you are also willing to take ownership of the responsibility of formalizing whatever comes out of that thread it won't do any good.

 

[Gamester81]

Thanks for all of your feedback guys.  I'll be the first to admit that I'm not much a tech guy, but more of a gamer at heart.  I'm not sure why when I formatted my SD card it took so much space. I tried following the instructions I got here in the forums and I even tried it several times with the same results.  I haven't posted this review to YouTube yet, but I will make some annotations based on your feedback to make it a little bit more clear to the viewers. Thanks for watching. 

 

[TrashyMG]

The Pandora has an Identity crisis among the user base, many see a mini-computer geared for gaming with massive amount of potential with a little work.. On the other side many who bought this device were hoping for a simple device that allows you to do everything with little effort and are upset when things are a bit difficult. Getting a fancy and polished system takes a lot of work and the Pandora's software and the hardware for that matter is all volunteer work done by people in the community on their own spare time.

@Android, It's very hard to getting several dozen different developers with varying levels of skills and programming comprehension to agree on a single control scheme on a wide variety of games and emulators on a device that is touted for it's openness and freedom to develop as the user pleases. It's like herding cats.

 

 

[vcoleiro1]

Thanks for all of your feedback guys.  I'll be the first to admit that I'm not much a tech guy, but more of a gamer at heart.  I'm not sure why when I formatted my SD card it took so much space. I tried following the instructions I got here in the forums and I even tried it several times with the same results.  I haven't posted this review to YouTube yet, but I will make some annotations based on your feedback to make it a little bit more clear to the viewers. Thanks for watching. 

Thanks for the review, I for one appreciated and enjoyed it.

 

[thatgui]

Thanks for all of your feedback guys.  I'll be the first to admit that I'm not much a tech guy, but more of a gamer at heart.  I'm not sure why when I formatted my SD card it took so much space. I tried following the instructions I got here in the forums and I even tried it several times with the same results.  I haven't posted this review to YouTube yet, but I will make some annotations based on your feedback to make it a little bit more clear to the viewers. Thanks for watching. 

As already said, nothing wrong to be a not so into tech guy. You did a good job by trying to have an open approach (and not just dissing it, because it lacks Android and top notch hardware) on the Pandora - thats all everyone can ask for.

As the Pandora is probably only one out of a bunch of devices you have lying around, I gues you won't have time/motivation for but I'd like to ask anyway: Could you redo some parts of the "Emu-Showoff" with newer emulators - especially SNES and NES Emulators are really, really good now. Or maybe you could at least link to some emulator videos in EDs Youtube channel ?

 

[Neelix]

Thanks for all of your feedback guys.  I'll be the first to admit that I'm not much a tech guy, but more of a gamer at heart.  I'm not sure why when I formatted my SD card it took so much space. I tried following the instructions I got here in the forums and I even tried it several times with the same results.  I haven't posted this review to YouTube yet, but I will make some annotations based on your feedback to make it a little bit more clear to the viewers. Thanks for watching. 

I believe the SD formatting issue was due to a bug in the tool which actually formats the card. This has since been fixed in the firmware but you need to run the Upgrade Pandora OS tool to get the fix.

- Neelix

 

[mcobit]

Thanks for all of your feedback guys. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not much a tech guy, but more of a gamer at heart. I'm not sure why when I formatted my SD card it took so much space. I tried following the instructions I got here in the forums and I even tried it several times with the same results. I haven't posted this review to YouTube yet, but I will make some annotations based on your feedback to make it a little bit more clear to the viewers. Thanks for watching.

I believe the SD formatting issue was due to a bug in the tool which actually formats the card. This has since been fixed in the firmware but you need to run the Upgrade Pandora OS tool to get the fix.


- Neelix

Yes, you can also format your SD Card to Fat32 on Windows, Desktoplinux or MacOS. Keep in Mind, that ExtFat will not work due to licensing issues and Microsoft being a dickhead about it.
As said, what took all that space away was just a bug, but now will always be in your video as a fact ...


Edit: I still thing this is a good review and it is good that we are discussing the issues you had now to make it better.

 

[klapse]

This topic has been brought up by several different people, I can start a new topic and try to organize it so it all makes sense... ie what button should do what if you want.

Well that would be a first step. Remapping buttons and recompiling an emulator is doable if source code is available. Rewriting an emulator frontend for each one is not really doable.


For e.g. it would already help immensely if all emulators used the 'Pandora' button to exit the current game and return to the loader menu. That might be doable.

 

[ptitSeb]

This topic has been brought up by several different people, I can start a new topic and try to organize it so it all makes sense... ie what button should do what if you want.

Well that would be a first step. Remapping buttons and recompiling an emulator is doable if source code is available. Rewriting an emulator frontend for each one is not really doable.


For e.g. it would already help immensely if all emulators used the 'Pandora' button to exit the current game and return to the loader menu. That might be doable.

I don't think the Pandora button is mappable.

 

[WizardStan]

I don't think the Pandora button is mappable.

It is, it's what mupen uses by default. I would disagree strongly about it being the best choice for an exit button though, I've accidentally hit it more than once trying to press start and select.

 

[ptitSeb]

Oh ?! In SDL what is his code (so I can use this key), I don't remember seeing this mapping before.

 

[SNESFAN]

This topic has been brought up by several different people

This topic has been brought up by several different people over the last several years, discussed at length, with absolutely no one actually taking ownership. Start yet another new thread if you so desire but unless you are also willing to take ownership of the responsibility of formalizing whatever comes out of that thread it won't do any good.

I was just suggesting that because this thread being a bad place to go into that much detail on that particular topic. I imagine anyone with the skill to do something like this correctly would already have their own idea how to do it anyway.

I was also just more or less readdressing what some might see as a problem with overall user friendliness and polish. I saw it as a major hurtle for the reviewer to show off each emulator's features, made the device look clunky.

@Android, It's very hard to getting several dozen different developers with varying levels of skills and programming comprehension to agree on a single control scheme on a wide variety of games and emulators on a device that is touted for it's openness and freedom to develop as the user pleases. It's like herding cats.

I understand completely, my suggestion is for someone else to go behind those great people and works and rebrand them so the interface and general mapping is similar. Trying to get everyone to decide on one standard isn't only hard to do, but probably impossible as lots of the original developers are no longer active on this device. Not to make a comparison to android, but yongzh and robert broglia did something very similar when bringing their multiple emulator ports to android. The difference here is that the emulator it's self already works and source should be available It would be quite a effort, but I don't think it would be as much as porting to another OS.

If I knew what I was doing I would absolutely be willing to do this myself. All I can do is offer anyone willing to do something like this help and suggestions due to my rather limited skills.

 

[Christoph.Krn]

Thanks for all of your feedback guys.  I'll be the first to admit that I'm not much a tech guy, but more of a gamer at heart.

Would you mind going a bit more into the detail of what exactly all the problems were that you encountered (if there are any such details)? This might help prevent some of such problems in future software.

 

[_wb_]

I don't think the Pandora button is mappable.

It is, it's what mupen uses by default. I would disagree strongly about it being the best choice for an exit button though, I've accidentally hit it more than once trying to press start and select.

I also don't think it's a good idea to map the Pandora button to exit. In notaz' SDL it is used to minimize your fullscreen application, which is OK to me (if you press it by accident, it's not that bad).

In general, I think ESC is the best key for exit. Only exception would be emulators that emulate a keyboard that also has an ESC button (e.g. dosbox).

For console emulators, I think a good convention would be to use SPACE to access the emulator menu and ESC to exit. Perhaps number keys to load savestates and Fn+number keys to save them would also be a good convention.

 

[Gamester81]

Thanks for all of your feedback guys.  I'll be the first to admit that I'm not much a tech guy, but more of a gamer at heart.

Would you mind going a bit more into the detail of what exactly all the problems were that you encountered (if there are any such details)? This might help prevent some of such problems in future software.

For the most part all of the tech issues I have I mentioned in the video...i.e. not getting some emulators like Lynx, Jag and C64 to work properly.  I'll try re-downloading the emulators and see if that helps any.  Also any advice on how to reformat my SD card without taking so much space up would be appreciated.  I'll plan on refilming some parts before I upload it to my main YouTube channel. I certainly want to convey the right message to those viewers who watch it. Thanks for your help guys.

 

[Neelix]

With regards to formatting the card your best bet is probably to do it on a windows machine.  But you have two main options if you want to do it on the Pandora itself.

You could put gparted on another card, then use that to format the card.

The other option is to use the hook up the wifi and use the Upgrade Pandora OS tool, (on the system menu) to get the latest firmware build then run the Pandora SD Installer again, to format the card.

Hope this helps,

- Neelix

 

[erico]

I like the review, a sincere one. 

 

[Gamester81]

Well I appreciate all of your guys' advice. To be honest I haven't been home the last couple of weeks, but when I have a chance I'm going to redownload some emulators and see if that fixes the problems. I'm still very confused on how to get any Lynx or Jag emulator to work on it.  My MAME emulator I could only get a few games to work and they were extremely laggy and the sound kept repeating itself.  Any suggestion is greatly appreciated.