Pandora's Design

[Gr.Viper]

QUOTE
No one is to stone anyone until I blow his whistle, even - and I want to make this absolutely clear! - even if they DO say "keyboard"!

(almost © Life of Brian)

 

[b._.o._.b]

Meaning, on the assumption that optimization will still take place, battery life with the Pnadora as is will be vastly increased over how it might have been. Which, even if the extra power doesn't get used fully, I'd say is worth the wait for a new chip.

I'm curious how long it will be possible to play mp3's with a fully charged battery. Could make it very usable as mp3 player

Smaller laptops could easily be accessible to everyone, if everyone wanted them. As it turns out, laptops with screens smaller then 12" are hard, not to say impossible to sell anywhere but the "third world." This device, as great as it may be, has a 4.3", and in a comparison, that alone is a problem. Yes, it's not a laptop, but what will reviewers compare it to?

I think it will be compared to the eeepc and the GP2X. The eeepc is very popular, it has a rather small keyboard and a 7" screen, only 900 Mhz cpu so pretty slow for a laptop. Lots of people want to play games on the eeepc, but thats not really suited for this purpose. The eeepc is too big to put in your pocket so will not function as pda. Pandora will have all these options and is fun as well, because of the gaming abilities. The audience for this product will be huge, I'm pretty sure of that.
Could be, by making it look like a very small laptop/eeepc, its appeal will be even bigger and Pandora will get free publicity that way. Only time will tell

[edit] Oops did I just said 'keyboard'? :blink:

 

[Squidge]

[edit] Oops did I just said 'keyboard'? :blink:

Yup, you know you want it really

 

[b._.o._.b]

[edit] Oops did I just said 'keyboard'? :blink:

Yup, you know you want it really


Nah, don't care for it, just trying to piss off Mr B

 

[Clad]

QUOTE
it still lacks a good space internal storage [...] SD memories can easy make the cost of the device double


Are you kidding ? SD cards are so ridiculously cheap those day.

http://www.mx2.co.uk/default.asp?part=SD4GBHCR

£18.99 for 4GB@4mb/s, that's less than £40 (even including postage) for 8 GB (Pandora having 2 SD slots). Plus it will be ridiculously easy to transfert files from your PC via wireless.

Seriously, EIGHT GIGABYTES ! 8000 MEGABYTES ! That's HUGE. You couldn't have more than 128megs on the GP32 and it was already way enough. Ok, the pandora will play higher resolution movies, and PSX/SegaCD isos, you can also argue than N64 roms are bigger than SNES rom, but still, none of this is 64 times bigger than the typical kind of files you had on the GP32, where you have 64 times the storage space you had, for more or less the same price. (I remember paying more than €60 for a 128megs SMC back in the early days of the GP32).

 

[Tobriand]

And fingers crossed, 8gb cards will have come down to ~£30 by the time it's released. Which basically means there's enough space to have cards with entire romsets on them.

Which aren't NES, at least. The Nes romset easily fits onto a single 1gb card - which is actually insane, if you think about it...

 

[Clad]

And fingers crossed, 8gb cards will have come down to ~£30 by the time it's released. Which basically means there's enough space to have cards with entire romsets on them.

Which aren't NES, at least. The Nes romset easily fits onto a single 1gb card - which is actually insane, if you think about it...

20 years of video game - half of the whole video game history ! - all fitted on a £30 device as big as a stamp. Yup, what wonderful times we are living in.

 

[Mr B]

Are you kidding ? SD cards are so ridiculously cheap those day.
16Gb @ebay.co.uk (Hope the link is good) Cheapest i find is £35.50, and it doesn't say if its a class4. Class 6 is £60. At the very least, i'd need 2 of those if i had a PSX emu. At the very least. Just the final fantasy series alone pretty much use all of both memories if i go with 2x4Gb. 2x32Gb would cover all my gaming needs, and i wouldn't have to get extra memories to swap with. Its far to expensive tho, so if it happened today, 2x16Gb, and at least 1 spare would be my choice.

Seriously, EIGHT GIGABYTES ! 8000 MEGABYTES ! That's HUGE. You couldn't have more than 128megs on the GP32 and it was already way enough. Ok, the pandora will play higher resolution movies, and PSX/SegaCD isos, you can also argue than N64 roms are bigger than SNES rom, but still, none of this is 64 times bigger than the typical kind of files you had on the GP32, where you have 64 times the storage space you had, for more or less the same price.
I'm not sure what size is max for the SNES actually, but 6-8MB? (I've checked, and found statements saying 48Mbit.) A single PSX cd is easy 400-600MB 400/6 (just for fun) is 66....So, if the 48Mbit statement is right, an average game might very well be more then 64 times larger, and thats single disc games. My favorites, RPG's are almost always multidisc, 2-5 cd's. Perhaps all the CD's aren't 100% squeezed full, but 5 discs are still about 500 times larger. Movies with a 800x480 resolution at a good quality, could very well be a GB+ a pop.

Still, your point with cheap small SD memories isn't all invalid even for me. A possibility is simply to use a USB connected harddrive, but then you have to bring it everywhere, and swap items back and forth when you need them. However, that to costs a bit. Cheaper then the larger SD memories tho. And, it means the Panda has to have drivers built in to handle USB disc's. I think it will, from scratch, to support cameras, USB memory sticks and so on...
B!

 

[Tobriand]

Or, alternatively, don't treat yourself to the desert of plenty in the first place - only take 4-5 psx games with you. If they're RPGs, it's unlikely you'll have more than 1 or 2 going at once anyway, at least not intensely...

Conversely, if you find room to put all 40 games you're after on a card, you'll do what anyone does in that situation: play 4-5 of them and forget the others even exist, at least for a week or two...

Slightly different when it comes to action-games, of course (at least for me), racing, fighting, etc. are all much more of a "quick bash" style. But still basically there...

 

[sephiroth111]

First off, I generally don't care about the design. so long as it fits in my hands, and it doesn't hurt after playing it for an extended period of time (the PSP has that effect, it hurts to hold it after around 1 hour of playing)

i'd like to see alternate case colours, like the NDS onyx, cherry, pearl, and pink (and DS phat's silver). Customizable bootsplashes (the GP2x ones hurt my eyes badly) and a sort of built in theme engine (where it's just 1 file that gets put in, a la winamp)

see the "pimp my pandora" thread (http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?showtopic=39839) for the general ideas people have been having.

 

[Mr B]

I play FF7-9 on my PSX almost daily, along with Breath of fire 3/4, and Alundra, hitting every game about 2 times a week. On top of that, Metal Slug X, Bust a move 3DX, and my NES emu CD. The emu CD has around 1K games on it, and i have to admit, i play perhaps only 10-15 of them regularly. Then there are favorite pass-times that get a run when I'm bored, but short on time, Raiden, Rollcage, and so on, games that you just run for a half an hour, and get bored of, but you can do that half an hour, over and over. I'd say 2x16GB isn't an absolute minimum, but its close. And, as should be obvious, I wouldn't spend much time using any other features then game emus. However, others would perhaps like to be able to bring the Panda on there travels, for work, or vacation, and watch movies, or TV series on it. If your spending a couple of hours everyday with the Panda, watching vids, your going to need a lot of space a swell... And, Flash memory aren't exactly known for its eternal rewritability, So if you know your going to want something back on the memory, if possible, don't remove it to start with. You'll still reach a couple of 10K rewrites in some area soon enough, and sectors may start to fail. at that point, I'd replace it, even if its likely most sectors wont go for quite some time yet...
B!

First off, I generally don't care about the design. so long as it fits in my hands, and it doesn't hurt after playing it for an extended period of time (the PSP has that effect, it hurts to hold it after around 1 hour of playing)
Not sure, but i think thats mainly due to being to thin. Doesn't seam like the Panda will be quite as thin. I may be wrong tho.
B!

 

[sephiroth111]

the average NES game is 256kb. the average SNES game is 4mb (12mb for Star ocean, and Tales of phantasia). the max N64 games could go was majora's mask which was something like 64mb or something. PSX had a limit of 700mb (though few used this limit.) all gameboy advance games started at 4mb, and go up to 64mb.

personally, i'd keep a few from each console on the SDHC cards. *shrugs* i dunno, there are some times when i just don't feel like playing a certain genre of games.

First off, I generally don't care about the design. so long as it fits in my hands, and it doesn't hurt after playing it for an extended period of time (the PSP has that effect, it hurts to hold it after around 1 hour of playing)
Not sure, but i think thats mainly due to being to thin. Doesn't seam like the Panda will be quite as thin. I may be wrong tho.
B!

actually i think it's just the way you have to hold it, the NDS just "fits" better.

 

[Mr B]

the average NES game is 256kb. the average SNES game is 4mb (12mb for Star ocean, and Tales of phantasia). the max N64 games could go was majora's mask which was something like 64mb or something. PSX had a limit of 700mb (though few used this limit.) all gameboy advance games started at 4mb, and go up to 64mb.
So on average, a 1 disc PSX game is still about 100 times larger then a average SNES game. And thats sticking to 1 disc games. Games that used more then 1 disc often spread the data evenly on the discs so they are regularly 550mb+ each at least.

Well, anyway, to me, it doesn't seam like 16, or even 32GB would cover my regular usage needs, much less my "Hey, i got my Panda with me on the rainiest vacation ever. All I'll do is watch vids, and play games." but then, as i said, i doubt it will be a real problem. Just get a external drive cage with USB interface, and stick a drive in it. It should handle 1 TB drives, no problem. Yeah, not even i should be able to fill that, with stuff for the Panda.
B!

 

[Clad]

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PSX isos are way more heavy than snes roms

Well, it's not because Pandora will emulate PSX games that you'll stop playing nes games. If you take a mix of Amiga, C64, master system, megadrive, nes, snes, GBA, N64 and PSX games (to name only the most popular systems), the size of the average game won't be increased that much. Plus, isos will probably be compressed a lot on the pandora (PSX, and even more SegaCD, really are uncompressed because the system doesn't have the muscle to uncompress data too much. If you convert CD tracks to ogg or mp3 and gzip/bzip everything else - it can be made easily with some specific compressed iso format - you get to an average of 50 mbits per iso for PSX, 30 mbits for SegaCD.

And remember also than 96Mb (which is 12MB, so already not much) are exceptional and extrem cases. Most SNES roms are 1 or 2 MB (even 4MB is a huge rom already... DKCs are 4MB and Rare bragged a lot about how big it was at the time). And that's before compression. (you can bet than all rom-based emulators will allow zipped roms usage on the fly)

Of course you won't be able to carry the whole PSX isoset on 8 Gbits, but quite frankly, you're never more than one month or two without a computer, will you ever be in the situation where you'll be willing to play more than 20 or so games per emulated machine ? Even then (and including PSX, N64 and SegaCD... I'm not even sure there is 20 even remotly acceptable games on SegaCD), you wouldn't use more than 20% of the storage space and you'd have plenty of space for divxs,mp3s, scumm games, homebrew games, ect...

 

[Nova]

If the hinge opens so that the console sits at almost 180 degrees in the palm, like the DS does, I see no reason why it won't work for PDA functions.

 

[yannv]

Plus, isos will probably be compressed a lot on the pandora (PSX, and even more SegaCD, really are uncompressed because the system doesn't have the muscle to uncompress data too much. If you convert CD tracks to ogg or mp3 and gzip/bzip everything else - it can be made easily with some specific compressed iso format - you get to an average of 50 mbits per iso for PSX, 30 mbits for SegaCD.
Plain gzip wouldn't work too well for large images as it's not seekable, so bzip2 fits the bill better. I'd lean towards blocks (as in cloop) for seekability with LZO compression for efficient decompression.

For comparison, I compressed a Dreamcast game. This was a typical image with about 300MB blank space. The newer consoles are powerful enough to handle some compression, so we can't expect too much in size gains.
Uncompressed: 686MB
Rar: 287MB (unseekable) - possibly gets its size advantage from wider compression (multimedia mode).
split in 900KB files then lzop -9: 329MB
bzip2 -9 (900KB block size): 296MB
lzop -9 (unseekable): 325MB

Clearly bzip2 wins in compression ratio. However, decompression times (user cpu, not wall time):
lzop (unsplit): 2.0s
lzop (split, including starting 782 processes): 2.7s
bzip2: 41s

Tests performed on a Core2Duo T7200 in EM64T/amd64 mode.

 

[Clad]

Yeah but actually I was referring to that compressed iso format I don't remember the name. It has very efficient compression by converting CD tracks to a destructive format (can't remember which one) and it doesn't need much power to uncompress since the PSP can handle it pretty well.

We could even have a tool to compress isos even more aggressively on the Pandora since it has more beef. Plus, uncompression can easily be parallelised, taking advantage of the dual core nature of the Pandora.

 

[Mr B]

Yeah but actually I was referring to that compressed iso format I don't remember the name. It has very efficient compression by converting CD tracks to a destructive format (can't remember which one) and it doesn't need much power to uncompress since the PSP can handle it pretty well.

We could even have a tool to compress isos even more aggressively on the Pandora since it has more beef. Plus, uncompression can easily be parallelised, taking advantage of the dual core nature of the Pandora.

I took the first CD for Final Fantasy 8, and pulled it with alcohol 120% to a MDS/MDF combo. The track is 608 some MB, with Lead in, and Lead out, it's 698.3MB. I thin went and riped it with WinISO (608MB), just to get 2 different image types to compare with. I then compressed both types with RAR, and Zip, both with max compression. RAR:514 & 428MB Zip: 563 & 470MB
Why RAR & Zip? No audio tracks, so something that tries to destructively compress data to save space is rather useless. And i happened to have the two pre-configured for max compression in Total Commander. The ISO images may/may not work for some games, and emulators, depending on copy protection, and so on, the MDS/MDF format is a 100% copy, and a BIN/CUE would be somewhat smaller. A slight difference at best. What I'm trying to say is that this is alone more then 100 times larger then most uncompressed roms for the SNES, storage need WILL increase. Yeah, when you get the first memory you go "I'll just put this and that there, I'll have plenty space left..." I hope you manage to stick to that, i sure wouldn't.

B!

 

[zaffercharles]

I am not bothered about wearing out SD or carrying dozens of games at once myself. I could put say 10-16 favourite PS games on an 8 gig, another for bits and pieces of other computer and console emulation and carry a couple small cards for video and music. You could always rip the fmv out the PS games too couldn't you? Most the large games are just video. Sometimes it's best to keep them for storylines but in the main you can do without them. I wont be doing that myself but it would drastically reduce some of the game sizes

 

[Lobo]

Using PocketIso on your PSX ISOs you can drastically reduce the size of lots of games. I've got about 15 games on two 2GB cards.

For example FFVII cd 1 compresses to 290 MB, but it depends a lot on the game. Tekken3 goes as low as 50Mb, Blast Radius 50 Mb and Chaos Break 36 MB to name a few. I think I have a compressed Ridge Racer thats only 5MB somewhere.