Pocket Gamer Interview Craig Regarding Pandora


I don't know about anyone else but I'm sick of seeing craig bad mouth GPH and GP. Evildragon on the other hand even is not completely pleased with them doesn't go into that sort of talk.

Selling their devices is what led to him being able to put out Pandora at all. They paved the way for any open source handhelds. Craig is both riding on any success gp2x had and blaming any problems on GPH.
 
jbrodack said:
Selling their devices is what led to him being able to put out Pandora at all. They paved the way for any open source handhelds. Craig is both riding on any success gp2x had and blaming any problems on GPH.

Commenting on the shortcomings of their predecessors and stating how they plan to improve upon the previous generation isn't necessarily badmouthing, IMO.
 
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jbrodack said:
I don't know about anyone else but I'm sick of seeing craig bad mouth GPH and GP. Evildragon on the other hand even is not completely pleased with them doesn't go into that sort of talk.

Selling their devices is what led to him being able to put out Pandora at all. They paved the way for any open source handhelds. Craig is both riding on any success gp2x had and blaming any problems on GPH.
You guys whine even more than the pandora fanboys do.
the fact of the matter is- gp2x was implemented horribly. gp2x has no idea what we, some of their primary consumers, want, and don't care.
there is a reason so many people like the pandora, it IS what we want, and they DO listen.

stop being so goddamn sentimental.
 
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PoisonedV said:
gp2x has no idea what we, some of their primary consumers, want, and don't care.
Actually, this oft quoted idea seems to be a bit of a myth. The primary GP2X consumers are Korean people wanting a tool to help teach English.
 
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Orkie said:
PoisonedV said:
gp2x has no idea what we, some of their primary consumers, want, and don't care.
Actually, this oft quoted idea seems to be a bit of a myth. The primary GP2X consumers are Korean people wanting a tool to help teach English.


Is this sarcasm? I don't see how homebrew games help you learn English (unless they were English learning games).
 
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Orkie said:
No, deadly serious. Most of their sales are from Vocamaster.
This is true. Alas we can't buy them or we would still be selling the GP2X.
 
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Orkie said:
PoisonedV said:
gp2x has no idea what we, some of their primary consumers, want, and don't care.
Actually, this oft quoted idea seems to be a bit of a myth. The primary GP2X consumers are Korean people wanting a tool to help teach English.


Yep. The more correct way of saying would be something like "GPH didn't care diddly squat about their western customers needs, since their primary consumers where someone else".

The fact that they didn't care diddly squat is still a fact and no badmouthing, though.
 
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Moxie said:
Orkie said:
PoisonedV said:
gp2x has no idea what we, some of their primary consumers, want, and don't care.
Actually, this oft quoted idea seems to be a bit of a myth. The primary GP2X consumers are Korean people wanting a tool to help teach English.


Yep. The more correct way of saying would be something like "GPH didn't care diddly squat about their western customers needs, since their primary consumers where someone else".

The fact that they didn't care diddly squat is still a fact and no badmouthing, though.

Well, who is the Wiz marketed to this time? still the translators? cause now, I don't see how the controls scheme would suit translation and language utilities OR gaming.
 
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jbrodack said:
I don't know about anyone else but I'm sick of seeing craig bad mouth GPH and GP. Evildragon on the other hand even is not completely pleased with them doesn't go into that sort of talk.

Selling their devices is what led to him being able to put out Pandora at all. They paved the way for any open source handhelds. Craig is both riding on any success gp2x had and blaming any problems on GPH.
I don't think he badmouthed them, everything he said was true. Yes a business venture as a distributor of GPH products and a connection to the community that started with the GP32 did help him. But pointing out serious shortcomings so that you can move forward is NOT the same thing as badmouthing

AireTamStorm said:
Commenting on the shortcomings of their predecessors and stating how they plan to improve upon the previous generation isn't necessarily badmouthing, IMO.

Exactly.
QUOTE

Pocket Gamer: Can you explain how the Pandora came about?


Craig Rothwell: Well, almost all of the open devices of this nature come from Asia and they are not made by gamers or people who are into the computer scene; they are seen as a cash cow to sell to wacky westerners. The problem here is that the attention to detail is poor.

Um, I concur, the GP2X was heavily plagued with power supply issues and poor detail work. The first unit I received failed to register left or up if you tighten the screws in the wrong order on the back, and they weren't all tightened correctly at the factory.

QUOTE
We liked the GP2X and the GP32 but they had their faults; poor controls, strange internal design decisions and the manufacturers not really understanding what people would want to use them for. As a distributor it was frustrating. The culture barrier was hard to get past; what seems like sensible and needed design decisions here in the UK seemed crazy to people in Korea. We reached a deadlock. There was no question about it, if we wanted a fantastic and unique open source machine we would have to go it alone. Thus the crazy adventure started.

The controls really are very poor. It really needed 3-4 AA batteries or a Li-Ion at the power it was drawing, and the internal power circuits were never very robust. Add to that the fact that USB should have been inside (even the average user could add a USB port with a small soldering iron, if they had put it onboard it would have cost only pennies per unit. They redesigned the board about 4 times I know of and never fixed the problem.)

I don't think GPH ever understood the scene here, they were just pleased that orders were flying in, and they wouldn't consider changing to accommodate the users in the English and European countries.

USB was very stupid, they treated that as a Cash cow for sure. It is common knowledge that a powered USB 2.0 hub is under $20, yet they basically sold a powered USB 1.1 hub for $70 when you figure in the weird power supply they made mandatory (even more if you added the second weird power supply to power the GP2X, and of course you couldn't even attach to the GP2X while it was in the hub.)

This accessory was badly demanded for a year and a half before we even got it, and it was very bad quality when we did get it.

QUOTE
We hired a company in China to help us design the PCB and this turned out to be about as bad as our relations with the Koreans. The same problems cropped up – they were just too used to designing generic media players or game systems. They could not get their heads around the Pandora idea and kept trying to change things. But this time we were not for turning, and we sacked them!

So after $20,000 we were back where we started and starting to think maybe the days of the ZX Spectrum and making things here in the UK were dead. Every firm we contacted in the UK either wanted tens of thousands of pounds to even consider the possibility of speaking to us, or thought we were mad.

Then, out of the blue, Texas Instruments emailed us saying they had been watching the project and were interested in having us use their new OMAP3 chip. This was really cutting edge stuff, far more advanced than anything we had expected to be able to get our hands on, and at the same time they put us in touch with a chap called Michael in Canada who was trying to make a small games console himself.

The match was perfect, Michael was a PCB designer without a distributor or investment and were were distributors and coders with money but without a PCB designer. So we got to work quickly.


OMG 20k down the tubes :blink: . That sucks man, I hope you make it back.

I wondered how MWeston figured in, and it is good to hear that Ti is able to work with you for a mutually beneficial goal; their processor is great, and your handheld is the perfect advertising gimmick, it will equate Ti with handheld Gaming and PDA/MID/UMPC markets. Not to mention absolutely stomp the current gaming handhelds for power, quality and resolution all in one go :).

That is an excellent article, Cheers.

I (and many on here), have tried to imagine a perfect re-design of the GP2X to fix all the woes and it is perfectly clear that fixing all the problems would cost much more than the Pandora costs as is.

Li-Ion battery
Better controls
USB built-in
Wifi In-Built
Bluetooth built in.
More processing power (realistically we only dreamed of this, few of us could understand what it would take, and fewer still had the ability).

The Pandora trumps the GP2X soundly. The Wiz? I think they made it clear with their stupid control layout, smaller screen, and continued use of a poor EXT connector coupled with no internal USB and a 2.5mm headphone jack that they still don't want our business. (us being people who wanted to browse the internet on the GP2X and play games properly).

The Wiz should be just the ticket for gamers and homebrew devs who want a pocket open gaming machine, but those of us who want more would always move up. I think this is fine, there should be a big market and scene and plenty of used Wiz consoles for those who want it, or even want both the Pand and the Wiz. Seeing how the consoles are so similar you can practically dev for both at the same time, and people will either be satisfied with Wiz controls, screen, and performance, or they will get a Pandora.

There is a large group who have maybe even priced the addition to a GP2X of the parts that would make it more useful to them, and they see the Pandora as a real value buy, realizing the Wiz isn't much of a step up from the GP2X in all the areas they need.

I sometimes wonder if we will get flooded by orders from people who buy $600 cellphones when they realize that their cellphone doesn't have half the functionality of the Pandora. They could sell their phone and pick up a Pandora and a smaller BT enabled cellphone for the same amount of money and enjoy better internet browsing, better gaming, more free software, etc.

Ditto for buyers of $800-$1,000 mini laptops, when they realize that the Pandora offers similar functionality at less than half the price and a quarter the size, with 4 times the battery life!!

Cheers Craig, and don't let the naysayers get you down. :)
 
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http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?showtopic=20021

http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?showtopic=19921

GPH has listened to the customers over here.

"they are seen as a cash cow to sell to wacky westerners"

that seems like bad mouthing to me. Also trying to make it seem like Craig really cares about his customers and isn't concerned about money like the greedy Asians that mock us all secretly.


Also, even putting a claim that you could play Doom 3 on pandora is purely speculative especially when (as stated) it isn't even open source yet and would need a port of the engine scaled down to run on pandora.

I have no real problem with pandora just don't like the way Craig talks about stuff and how the people here blindly love everything Craig says and claim Pandora is a completely new idea and perfect.

For the record I think the dual dpad design of the Wiz is incredibly stupid. I didn't bring this stuff up out of nowhere or to support the Wiz I read the interview and had some comments about what was said in the interview.
 
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Umm, Did anyone else notice the spelling on the vocamaster site? No wonder Engrish is so popular.
downroadts7.jpg
 
"We want to reward programmers and plan to hold many competitions and give our regular prizes for their work."

Does this mean the dev fund has morphed into regular comps instead? I like that idea.
 
jbrodack said:
http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?showtopic=20021

This one is not exactly true, they added the extra 32mb because the pre-packaged (and piss poor) divx firmware wouldn't work without using the upper 32MB.

QUOTE
http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?showtopic=19921

GPH has listened to the customers over here.

Hell no:
QUOTE

Q. Why are there no USB hosting?

A. GPX2 is an portable multimedia device. We've discussed about this in-house, but battery usage and hardware manufacturing cost was an issue so we decided to leave it out in this version.
But we promise you that we will do our best to include it in the next version of GPX2 (Hard disc type, planned for Q4 2006).


They jerked us around for 3 years and never put in USB. NEVER!

I agree that they APPEARED to listen to us. That is not the same thing.

QUOTE
"they are seen as a cash cow to sell to wacky westerners"

that seems like bad mouthing to me. Also trying to make it seem like Craig really cares about his customers and isn't concerned about money like the greedy Asians that mock us all secretly.
Is it Libel if it is TRUE? (and he never said he doesn't view us the same way, you just inferred that he was claiming he didn't ;))


QUOTE
Also, even putting a claim that you could play Doom 3 on pandora is purely speculative especially when (as stated) it isn't even open source yet and would need a port of the engine scaled down to run on pandora.

Look again, he said "Games like . . . Doom 3 (if source is available)".
  1. Doom 3 ported to Xbox (still Doom 3)?
  2. Pandora nearly same specs with twice the RAM and a DSP? Seems possible to me.
QUOTE
I have no real problem with pandora just don't like the way Craig talks about stuff and how the people here blindly love everything Craig says and claim Pandora is a completely new idea and perfect.

I never said it was a completely new idea, it just happens to have everything I ever wanted and more. A lot of people agree and see no other device at any price that has all of this stuff. Not just the Wiz.

QUOTE
For the record I think the dual dpad design of the Wiz is incredibly stupid. I didn't bring this stuff up out of nowhere or to support the Wiz I read the interview and had some comments about what was said in the interview.


Will they make it real buttons? I guess it is wait and see.

Craig is making an official announcement to ship FREE button mods to everyone if GPH won't listen (odds are they won't, the GP2X never got a D-Pad, ever.)


I guess we just have to agree to disagree, by my definition he was not bad-mouthing them, but if I accept a different definition of "bad-mouthing" and wanted to imbue him with an intent I could say that he may have been a trifle passive aggressive in his comments on GPH.
 
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interesting stuff
i never really got the GP2X cause it really wasn't what i wanted
it's power never really got there and i could get the excact same thing if not better by just buying something like an r4 for a ds or just buying a psp
the problem was is that it didn't really excel in anything
it had some aspects that got me interested but i never saw anything that made me want to get one
the pandora on the other hand excels in nearly everything that the GP2X was weak at (battery life, power, and more recently the control scheme)
Craig's statements about the GP2X were simply facts and i saw nothing wrong about them

also could someone confirm whether the Doom lll on the xbox was a port or a complete remake?
 
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