Some more of my ideas

[xiongxioi]

As long as we keep that USB charging port, P2's battery life would not be the biggest concern. 

Me and many of my friends always keep some extra external charging batteries on hand. (This doesn't mean if you don't put one of those in your pocket, you can't be my friend. You can always borrow mine when the time comes. )

How about a little LED flash on the back lid if Pyra is going to have a webcam? It could also be doubled as a torch when you are playing legend of mana (thanks to notaz) while walking on a very dark street. (while we are at it, having a tazer on the side would also be quite useful when some little robbers are trailing you just as you finished the jumi arc and cried some manly tears. ) 

 

[Binky]

friends always keep some extra external charging batteries on hand

That shouldn't be necessary.

They should just carry a pandora, and charge their feeble-batteried telephones off that using the USB host port.

 

[xiongxioi]

That shouldn't be necessary.

They should just carry a pandora, and charge their feeble-batteried telephones off that using the USB host port.

I don't know what has possessed me, but that's immensely humorous.  

Imagine connecting a mobile to Pyra which is plugged an external charging battery pack to an ac adapter to a solar panel. 

Anyway, here's a more constructive idea. We can move the shoulder buttons to the back side of Pyra, so you can hold pandora up rather comfortably. 

 

[Natsu]

If the p2 is going to be bigger in someway, shouldn't there be room for a bigger battery? Also, I like how samsung do their back covers.

 

[slaeshjag]

It's not going to be bigger. Not by more than a millimeter anyway.

 

[Grench]

There are two kinds of people, those who break things and those who don't.

It seems to me that for some people stuff keeps breaking, they're jinxed. They always get the bad harddrives, their student loans don't arrive on time etc...

I belong to the second group, I've only had one harddrive go bad in my life and that was after years of heavy use.

I'm pretty much the opposite of jinxed, nothing seems to ever break in my care, except software.

I don't think it works like that . Most of my hardware works fine, but occasionally something breaks. My C64 suddenly started to show garbage on boot 20 years ago. A big heavy CRT monitor stopped working 15 years ago. I had some corrupted floppies over the years, and one hard disk crash 10 years ago. My laptop charger port is somewhat damaged because it fell on it while the charger was plugged in - it still works, but now the cable tends to fall out more easily. Maybe I forgot a few things, but that's about it.

So am I jinxed or not?

I think that different people have different definitions of 'broken' too.

I've encountered people who think their car is broken because the brake pads wore out.  That's what they are designed to do.  Expecting infinite longevity out of mechanical systems, especially those designed to be replaced with maintenance is silly.

If a cardboard box gets destroyed in transit but the contents are still unbroken - then the box did it's job.  Proper packaging is supposed to sacrifice itself for the sake of the contents.  I had a 22 kilo sealed tractor battery arrive in a box that was thrown around so much the box had turned round - every corner smashed.  The battery was fine inside it's protective expansion foam suspension.  The case around a computer servers a very similar role.  It's job is to protect the more expensive bits inside.

My original CC Pandora's case cracked and fairly well started to dissolve as the plastics broke down.  My take on it was that the Pandora was working great but I'd worn out the case - ordered & paid for new plastics and video cable and I was up and running again.  (Don't panic - the new cases are made of WAY better plastics.)

It makes me wonder how many working Pandora consoles got returned for perceived cosmetic flaws when it was just the case doing it's job.

 

[kingoddball]

Has there been any update on the SOC??

REVEAL!!

 

[_wb_]

Has there been any update on the SOC??

REVEAL!!

Most of us are assuming it will be TI's OMAP5, which would be good for backwards compatibility. It has a dual-core Cortex-A15 at 1.7GHz.

 

[matzesu]

If Pyra gets backwardcompabilitie, dos this means, dat, the Pandora Emulator s like drastik or muppen will run much better?

Or will they run like on a 1 GHz Pandora? ?

Seems like i have to get some Dreamcast Game Images until then ..

 

[Binky]

Emulators that run (almost) entirely on the CPU will probably be around twice as fast (at a guess)

However, Drastic uses lots of NEON stuff - and I don't know how much that's improved in the OMAP5

 

[_wb_]

Emulators that run (almost) entirely on the CPU will probably be around twice as fast (at a guess)

However, Drastic uses lots of NEON stuff - and I don't know how much that's improved in the OMAP5

I would guess that NEON code gets the same speedup as any other cpu opcode -- higher clockrate, probably better/more caching, faster memory access. Exophase and notaz can probably tell you more.

 

[Hồng Thất Công]

Drastic has already been running full speed on the Shield.  Pandora runs it pretty much full speed as well if you clock it to 1.2GHz with SGX4.10 and SZ1.60.  So I would say PYRA would definitely run it full speed.  It would probably run PPSSPP and Reicast full speed as well. 

 

[Pritchy]

Drastic has already been running full speed on the Shield.  Pandora runs it pretty much full speed as well if you clock it to 1.2GHz with SGX4.10 and SZ1.60.  So I would say PYRA would definitely run it full speed.  It would probably run PPSSPP and Reicast full speed as well. 

This makes me squee with delight. I'm not even sure what squee means, all I know is that I am doing it.

 

[Natsu]

 It has a dual-core Cortex-A15 at 1.7GHz.

How does that stand up to phones of today? Isn't the Tegra 4 using the same type of chip?

 

[EvilDragon]

 It has a dual-core Cortex-A15 at 1.7GHz.

How does that stand up to phones of today? Isn't the Tegra 4 using the same type of chip?

Very similar, yes.

 

[Null]

This makes me squee with delight. I'm not even sure what squee means, all I know is that I am doing it.

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/squee

 

[Exophase]

I would guess that NEON code gets the same speedup as any other cpu opcode -- higher clockrate, probably better/more caching, faster memory access. Exophase and notaz can probably tell you more.

In my limited testing, Cortex-A15 is all around better at executing NEON code than Cortex-A8, on a perf/MHz basis. It's helped by having OoOE (Cortex-A9 didn't have it for NEON or A8 for anything) and some additional execution resources/higher throughput.

Recompiled code tends to benefit a fair bit from OoOE in general because recompiled code tends to be poorly scheduled for CPUs like Cortex-A8 that have a lot of scheduling rules.

 

[Natsu]

Very similar, yes.

What the possbilty of using the Tegra 4?

 

[Hồng Thất Công]

Very similar, yes.

What the possbilty of using the Tegra 4?

Then we will probably lose notaz.

 

[EvilDragon]

Why should we? Tegra 4 is still ARM.

But nvidia is just not possible. You can only buy their SoC when you use a certified company to create the design and a certified company for production. Those companies usually don't start with less than 100,000 qty, and they probably wouldn't do a design like a Pandora anyways - they would do a tablet, maybe.