Pocket Gamer Interview Craig Regarding Pandora

[quadomatic]

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

It's supposed to be partially rewritten, but that doesn't mean somebody couldn't do something with the open-sourced engine once its released to get it to run on a platform with twice as much memory (Xbox - 64MB, Pandora - 128 MB).

 

[polooo2]

pandora is so sexy the first thing im gonna do when i buy the unit is to jizz all over it.

well, i'll wrap it up first so the unit won't be ruined....

 

[silvercroc]

pandora is so sexy the first thing im gonna do when i buy the unit is to jizz all over it.

well, i'll wrap it up first so the unit won't be ruined....

congratulations, you are the first poster here who'd made me lol

 

[icurafu]

Umm, Did anyone else notice the spelling on the vocamaster site? No wonder Engrish is so popular.

L and R is nearly the same thing in Korean. Common mistake ro make.

 

[quadomatic]

Umm, Did anyone else notice the spelling on the vocamaster site? No wonder Engrish is so popular.

L and R is nearly the same thing in Korean. Common mistake ro make.


rofl - this and the guy who wants to jizz on his pandora makes this thread extra funny.

But yeah, the story in the article is quite amazing. Craig and co. got pretty lucky with TI.

 

[sbock]

"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.




Full Ack. Doom III? I like the Pandora, but the marketing reminds me more and more of a Sony product not an Open Source console. Do we need even more hype, yes?
And bashing GPH seems to me not a very good way to promote a product.
You are right jprodack: You never see any insulting or unfair posts from EvilDragon on Gp2x.de about GPH.
I'm very disappointed how Craigix tries to sell the Pandora. A little bit understatement and fairness (I always thought this are typical and very sympathetic british virtues) would help imho to make the Pandora a success. And I always thought this virtues would match perfectly to an underdog Open Source project.
How naive from me...

 

[gaterooze]

I read the "wacky westerners" comment as applying to the myriad of Asian knock-off companies spewing hundreds of similar products ("includes 1,000 games!", "play GBA and Megadrive!") our way, not specifically GPH. The criticisms that were directed at GPH were quite fair as they have made a litany of mistakes and ignored the customer's requirements (USB, BoB, joystick, on and on). And that's coming from someone who still likes Gamepark in all its forms.

 

[PokeParadox]

Yeah I think the things that were said were fair to say, if said a little informally.
It's surprising though, companies are allowed to slag each other off in adverts now...
it used to be "Such and such cleans better than other brands" now they actually name names...

 

[craigix]

The perceived criticism was not my intention at all, I was just explaining how the Pandora came about, I mean I could hardly say 'everything was perfect so we decided to make the Pandora' there was obviously a need for it.

The wacky westerners comment was aimed at the whole bunch of 'MP4' style machines which seems to be flooding in to ebay, my original answer has been edited by Pocket Gamer, I actually wrote about checking ebay to see the huge selection of them.

Remember with almost all interviews that they are edited for space and impact by the publishers.

 

[timofonic]

Umm, Did anyone else notice the spelling on the vocamaster site? No wonder Engrish is so popular.

L and R is nearly the same thing in Korean. Common mistake ro make.


I could never trust on an English academy that doesn't has their site with their English words written properly...

 

[greendots]

I cant believe that any one could be disappointed or insulted at the pandora crew for trying to sell their product...

Many major companies have done worse then tossing around a couple of words.

 

[CronoTriggerfan]

GPH did some awesome things for the homebrew community, yes. But every iteration of their product has had a fatal flaw up to this point. GP32 had a horrid d-pad, limited controls, and an arcane storage media. GP2x, while far more solid, still had the control stick issue and even the F200 didn't completely alleviate the problem. Wiz would have been perfect, but this whole dual d-pad debacle as well as not including a 3.5mm headphone jack as the standard are all reasons why buyers deserve something just a bit better.

Again, I'm not saying GPH is a "bad" company. I loved the GP2x and will probably buy the Wiz as a gift for friends and maybe even myself if curiosity gets the best of my wallet. But it's completely fair to say that Pandora is more the result of GPH's failure to deliver than anything else.

 

[AireTamStorm]

"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.
Have you seen the number of Korean PMPs on the market? What is printed on the back of the GP2X? GPH isn't GP, it is a business for the purpose of making money. We never got USB, had a terrible DIGITAL JOYSTICK from day one, and they ignored many important requests. It seems they haven't learned their lesson with the Wiz, failing to even provide WiFi.

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.
The estimated and demonstrated GPU performance levels, along with the shader feature set, make it both feasible and practical. The memory constraints require certain things to be toned down, but that has been said before.

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've searched for a LONG time for a Linux handheld, with only a few requirements. None of the solutions I've tried so far were able to do what I wanted, even with after market modifications. The Pandora checks all the checkboxes, and thats a first for me, a first for many.

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.
This has no relevance to the validity of your claims.

 

[icurafu]

Craigix wasn't being harsh to GPH at all. There is a lot of miscommunication and a differing perception, which is obvious due to the result of many strange decisions by GPH. You can't ask Craigix or ED to express their story in all truth without getting that point across.

Anyway, I'm skeptical on the following points. I'm going to feed it into the part of my brain that takes things with a grain of salt when listening to salesmen.

1) at the cutting edge even Doom III

448MB of ram minimum required with heavey dependence on virtual ram. Maybe if we hacked it into looking less than Quake2, it might be possible. Why not excite people by mentioning all the cool effects that could be used with Quake3 rather then raising peoples hopes.

2) Emulating something like the Sega Dreamcast would be pushing the hardware to the limits.

This is really unclear. Are you saying Dreamcast is possible, which is how a pocketgamer reader would be thinking, or are you saying that emulating dreamcast be one of the few apps that would allow users to know that the Pandora does have limits.

3) time of writing the most powerful mini computer

I can name atleast a dozen mini computers that are more powerful. But at twice the price and a quarter of the battery life. (Some are even thinner)

 

[Findingmyzen]

Must we scrutinize every word that comes out of Craig and co.'s mouth? The point of the article was hardly to bash the GPX, it was to tell about the Pandora. So why can't we be friends? Over sense the Wiz was announced I feared this would turn into another console war. Let's not have that happen, O.K.?

 

[CronoTriggerfan]

I find it incredible how people are so shocked and betrayed by the fact that Craig's got a product to sell. :lol: It's called marketing; besides, the more people who are attracted to the Pandora scene the better, right? And as he stated before, chunks of interviews like these are cut and pasted for journalistic purposes, he very well may have justified statements like the Dreamcast one in further speculation that just was removed.

 

[Chip]

Besides, as consumer electronics smack-talk goes, it was pretty tame.

 

[waffles]

I just hope Doom III doesn't become the new N64 emulator.

 

[adsharma23]

lol nice link Chip i remember reading that and laughing for like a minute
also could you elaborate on "new N64 emulator" waffles?
i think your hoping people don't start asking for a dreamcast emulator like they did for n64 because someone said it was possible but i'm not sure

 

[jbrodack]

The perceived criticism was not my intention at all, I was just explaining how the Pandora came about, I mean I could hardly say 'everything was perfect so we decided to make the Pandora' there was obviously a need for it.

The wacky westerners comment was aimed at the whole bunch of 'MP4' style machines which seems to be flooding in to ebay, my original answer has been edited by Pocket Gamer, I actually wrote about checking ebay to see the huge selection of them.

Remember with almost all interviews that they are edited for space and impact by the publishers.

It was really the "wacky westerners" comment that got to me and made the other comments look worse, such as, "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" and overall kind of seemed almost anti Asian. You (or least the way the article was written) referred to "open devices" in the comment so I interpreted that as being a jab at GPH and GP as the mp4 players aren't really open though there have been attempts to hack them like with the jxd.

Looking at the article again and putting the comment towards generic mp4 players I don't have a problem and I do agree that you and Evildragon both saw a need for a device after problems getting through to GPH and as such it was relevant to mention in the article. I also really liked the last paragraph of the interview which seemed very positive about open devices in general, though I probably didn't pay too much attention to it at my first read of the interview. I share that view that I really hope open devices do well and show people that things can be done differently.

You guys are right in that across bigger companies theres much worse stuff said. I'd just rather this smaller group of open device makers not get anywhere near that bad and coexist as peacefully as possible. Its also that sometimes there seems to be a little too much anti GPH sentiment spread throughout here and it seems a little unfair as they were kind of pioneers in getting devices like this out there. They didn't fully listen to everything from here but also didn't completely ignore everything from the community either. Thats probably the more frustrating part, that they would listen to some things and get some things so right then ignore others and have glaring mistakes.

Articles and interviews about Pandora and GPH products are always scrutinized and I'm sure will be even more so after the release of the Pandora. There's nothing wrong with some scrutiny and in this case (and others) even led to some clarification. Scrutiny usually leads to even better articles in the future.