PND criticism

[ZXDunny]

But how do I know where to put them? How do I know which directory my improved graphics need to go in without opening up the PND file? it's all very well just popping them in appdata/PNDname, but which subdirectory should they go in?

Run the pnd. Minimise it. Navigate to /mnt/utmp/<pnd name>/ and you can see the internal of a pnd. You can even do using Thunar if you want - no need for the command line.

This advice is, to put it mildly, complete crap. I know - I wanted to look inside PicoDrive's PND file, but couldn't find a button to minimise it. All I could do was quit, after which there was no directory like you said, so I think you're either lying or don't know what you're on about. Which is it? PND files are still very confusing.


As for ED's declaration that:


1. Nobody has a valid reason for changing the contents of a PND file


2. The overlay in appdata is more than sufficient...


I call bollocks on that one too - I wanted to replace the rather crappy tiles in Lopan with my own. So I add them to my appdata. I then send my new PND to my mate by email, but he can't see my new tiles. WTF? I thought this was an overlay and by putting stuff in the appdata folder I'd be adding new stuff to the PND file. WHY CAN'T I JUST OPEN THE PND FILE IN WINDOWS AND CHANGE IT THERE? No more messing around in this confusing-as-hell "linux" thing that looks like Windows but isn't and nothing works like it should.


Now, for myself I'm quite capable of opening a terminal and using the pnd-utils to mount the sucker myself, and even build a new one if I choose but a new user with a fair knowledge of computers (been using Windows since Win95, possibly done some coding in high-level languages) will almost certainly come up with complaints like these.


I don't think we should move to .zip files, for reasons already stated by others. But we do need to be making PND files as easy to use as .zip files, and soon - before this thing takes off, if it ever does. PND files are still way too complex to do anything with except run them We've made amazing progress in that regard.


D.

 

[freamon]

This advice is, to put it mildly, complete crap. I know - I wanted to look inside PicoDrive's PND file, but couldn't find a button to minimise it. All I could do was quit, after which there was no directory like you said, so I think you're either lying or don't know what you're on about. Which is it? PND files are still very confusing.

It's the second one - I've no interest in lying to you. I'd assumed you'd be able to minimise full-screen apps like PicoDrive using the Start+Space menu but I couldn't find a way to do it either. Apologies.

I thought this was an overlay and by putting stuff in the appdata folder I'd be adding new stuff to the PND file.

At the risk of offering bad advice again: when you run a pnd the launcher takes the contents of the pnd and the contents of appdata and merges them together as if they were all in one directory. It doesn't rebuild the pnd. If you want your friend to use your graphics, he needs to run the pnd with the extra files in *his* appdata directory.

WHY CAN'T I JUST OPEN THE PND FILE IN WINDOWS AND CHANGE IT THERE?

Are you seriously suggesting that if a file format isn't recognised by Windows, then we shouldn't be using it?

 

[EvilDragon]

I now see I'm never going to get my ideas for ease of use being the most important thing on the Pandora across. There is too much resistance to it, I predict this won't go anywhere good.

I haven't seen a single post of anyone disagreeing that the Pandora needs improved user-friendlyness.

 

[EvilDragon]

I don't think we should move to .zip files, for reasons already stated by others. But we do need to be making PND files as easy to use as .zip files, and soon - before this thing takes off, if it ever does. PND files are still way too complex to do anything with except run them We've made amazing progress in that regard.

It is as easy. You can use 7zip to open and extract them the same way you can do with ZIP files.


Also, a manager to easily create and extract PND files would be a nice thing, everyone agrees with that - but that's something someone needs to code.


We've got a handful of devs working in their freetime.


Since they got their Pandora, not much time has passed. They were building a solid foundation for the whole system, always thinking how to make is as flexible as possible and also easy to use in the future.


The main goal was of course to get that working first and THEN improve upon that.


A house will break down if you don't build it on a solid foundation. That solid foundation just exists for a few weeks now, the devs are currently building the house.


To speed that up, more manpower is needed. Everyone is free to help out. If someone wants to do a nice PND extractor / creator for Windows, Linux and MacOS, we would all be very happy.


But with the current manpower, we can't build everything as perfect possible within a few weeks. It just takes time.


Rome wasn't built in one day. The Pandora also wasn't built in one day. And a userfriendly system with a solid foundation also can't be built in one day.

 

[Morn]

What is the difference between /mnt/utmp and /mnt/pnd?

IIRC /mnt/pnd is a mount point for PND contents and it's readonly


/mnt/utmp is a directory with /mnt/pnd overlapped with appdata. Any change in /mnt/utmp will affect appdata folder (since PND is readonly).

Run the pnd. Minimise it. Navigate to /mnt/utmp/<pnd name>/ and you can see the internal of a pnd. You can even do using Thunar if you want - no need for the command line.

This advice is, to put it mildly, complete crap. I know - I wanted to look inside PicoDrive's PND file, but couldn't find a button to minimise it. All I could do was quit, after which there was no directory like you said, so I think you're either lying or don't know what you're on about. Which is it? PND files are still very confusing.

There's way better solution. Instead of running the app you can (and should) just mount the .pnd. It's just single instruction in terminal (described here).

 

[ivanovic]

If only OPT had not failed at giving basic instructions like "download and save your pnd to this or that folder", maybe we were not having this talk about how unfriendly pandora is, which i too disagree. Imho, Pnd is a jewel, that has some flaws, but can be fixed with teamwork.

The available documentation is basically the wiki at http://www.pandorawiki.org/. It is public and everybody is welcome to improve the available documentation. This is something that you don't have to be able to code for. Once you found out something nice/interesting, add it to the wiki. This is the only way to really improve the available documentation.


In general there are lots of tools and script to handle pnds, just as devs tend to need them. The main "problem" with this is that most devs do use some linux system (no matter if in a VM or native), so they can easily make use of the tools. On the other hand many users might still prefer to run basically "Windows only". In open source software development the most important driving force is selfishness. Some dev wants to have some tool for themselves and does directly provide it to others, too, since there is no reason not to share the work done (cf the efforts with the toolchain(s)). The problem many users might perceive is that they feel left alone on Windows. But why should devs do something just for Windows in their free time if they aren't using it themselves and don't enjoy it?


So basically to get the same usability level of tools for Windows (or even OSX) you will basically have to find someone with an interest in things working there. Yeah, this is not a problem of PNDs themselves (hey, why should Windows, which is from Microsoft, come with file extension associations for .pnd's?). There are tools that can open them even on Windows, like eg said 7zip. Of course they are not associated directly by default, because those tools don't know about this stuff and Windows is only based on the extension. So if you rename an image file (.bmp) with some text extension (.txt) Windows will open it with a text editor, just because it only looks for extensions, not the content of the files (aka "mime type"), which is really bad for those "non standard" things. What you basically have to do is look for people willing to work on tools for Windows/OSX that have enough free time to implement the stuff.


Just adding .zip support to libpnd for reading those won't help (much), simply because there is the problem that you have to basically extract the stuff into RAM while running, which would not work (nicely) for "larger stuff" (as was mentioned several times before). So if you wanted to add zip support in a *sane* way you would have to reimplement fuse-zip support in a more clever way, so that it basically behaves like squashfs already does.

 

[Thorium]

I like the idea of the PND's.


Nowadays many devs dont care about optimization. They just use some libs and stuff because it's easier for them.


With PND the devs thought about optimization and i appreciate that. Zip just isnt designt for fast access and it's a bad choice for storing data that needs to be accessed fast.


And i cant believe you are comparing it to the iPhone. The end user can't even access the app files without a jailbreak.

 

[ZXDunny]

Are you seriously suggesting that if a file format isn't recognised by Windows, then we shouldn't be using it?

I think you really, really need to go back and re-read my post if you think that's what I was suggesting.


D.

 

[Blue Protoman]

You can open PNDs with 7zip? Hot damn!

 

[yoshi41dragon]

I hope this helps to make the Pandora a bit more user friendly (fact sheets for 15 console emulators). Suggestions are welcome.





I will also create an emulator pack with all these emulators.


EDIT: Console emulator pack added to post.

 

[Blue Protoman]

Wow, those are pretty cool! I'll look at them more in-depth momentarily.

 

[WizardStan]

WHY CAN'T I JUST OPEN THE PND FILE IN WINDOWS AND CHANGE IT THERE?

Ok


Extract to C:\pndtools and then double click install.reg to insert the registry stuff. If you want to put it somewhere else, you'll need to manually update the install.reg file first. I could probably create a better install script that figures out where you've put the files, maybe, but this is a good start. Feel free to improve upon it as well.

No more messing around in this confusing-as-hell "linux" thing that looks like Windows but isn't and nothing works like it should.

To be fair, it works exactly as it should, which is not necessarily the same as working how you want it to.

 

[Sitwon]

What about XAR instead of Zip?


http://code.google.com/p/xar/

The XAR project aims to provide an easily extensible archive format. Important design decisions include an easily extensible XML table of contents for random access to archived files, storing the toc at the beginning of the archive to allow for efficient handling of streamed archives, the ability to handle files of arbitrarily large sizes, the ability to choose independent encodings for individual files in the archive, the ability to store checksums for individual files in both compressed and uncompressed form, and the ability to query the table of content's rich meta-data.

 

[WizardStan]

It would have exactly the same problem that Dunny and Craig are having with the current SquashFS system: unable to open, create, or otherwise manipulate in a default Windows environment.

 

[skeezix]

And if a _developer_ has problems figuring pnds out..


Jeffphone

 

[skeezix]

Someone check fuse-zip for updatez or other zipmdrivers; or else we need someone to write a new zip driver. It would be very slow likely, unless tonnes of caching going on. Existing drivers last I checked put open files in ram so they could access with any speed.. But probably those drivers must be able to open 2gb files on 1gb ram? If so maybe we can configure fuse-zip to have no or minimal in ram footprint


If so supporting zip -in- a pnd is trivial.. A nights work. The real work is the zip driver for filesystem mount


Also it'd still be called .pnd .. If you wanted .zip apps to work then libpnd would have to open every zip (consider your mame rom dir size...)


Someonelook into it--


But thats our eternal problem. We have no one working on such things.


Now if craig wants to rewrite the world he should use that enormous talent to work on things. Instead of writing games for other platforms than his own with hard to port libraries while we do all the work on pandora firmware ourselves *teehee*


Jeffphone

 

[Cameleon]

Well here is my two cents. I think the PND format is fine for end users (my 14 year old brother knows how to install and remove applications), however I do think that the tools for manipulating said files need a bit of work. More user friendly tools rather than overhauling the entire system. If there were GUI tools for reading/writing and creating PND files I think this discussion about user friendliness would not be happening.


Just my thoughts. I may be right, could just as easily be wrong.

 

[ZXDunny]

WHY CAN'T I JUST OPEN THE PND FILE IN WINDOWS AND CHANGE IT THERE?

Ok


Extract to C:\pndtools and then double click install.reg to insert the registry stuff. If you want to put it somewhere else, you'll need to manually update the install.reg file first. I could probably create a better install script that figures out where you've put the files, maybe, but this is a good start. Feel free to improve upon it as well.

Yeah, I could do that or I could just boot into linux and do it there like I usually do

No more messing around in this confusing-as-hell "linux" thing that looks like Windows but isn't and nothing works like it should.

To be fair, it works exactly as it should, which is not necessarily the same as working how you want it to.

Yes, I know. I use Debian Squeeze and Slackware64 on my other box, and I love them both dearly. I thought I was playing devil's advocate quite convincingly, but I had no idea I was that convincing.


D.

 

[ZXDunny]

Well here is my two cents. I think the PND format is fine for end users (my 14 year old brother knows how to install and remove applications), however I do think that the tools for manipulating said files need a bit of work. More user friendly tools rather than overhauling the entire system. If there were GUI tools for reading/writing and creating PND files I think this discussion about user friendliness would not be happening.

Which mirrors what I've been saying all along... Dead right. PND is a lovely system, and it's a joy to install an emulator or game on the pandora - it's really just drag and drop. And yes, it's the tools that need to be better.


D.

 

[WizardStan]

Yeah, I could do that or I could just boot into linux and do it there like I usually do


...


Yes, I know. I use Debian Squeeze and Slackware64 on my other box, and I love them both dearly. I thought I was playing devil's advocate quite convincingly, but I had no idea I was that convincing.

<_<


You owe me the hour it took to create and test those scripts.