Toronto, Tuesday, Pubgrub And Pandora


skeezix

Internal Development
Joined
Mar 11, 2003
Messages
8,063
Website
www.codejedi.com
I live and work in Toronto area, but life has conspired to keep me on a tight schedule and work too damned much ... so I've not met up with many folks form the boards :)

I'm probably going to meet up with Wizard Stan for lunch on Tuesday, just to make him skip out on a work meeting (haha, sucker, I'll get us both fired during a recession!)

If you're planning to be downtown Toronto that day and like a good burger, I know a great little place. Post here, and I'll get back to a few of you ;) A few would be merry, too many might be goofy, and I know I'm living on the clock and need to get back to work, so not doing a town hall here. (But you know, once the Pandora takes off, and if theres tonnes of people, a PUG thing could be cool/nerdy/weird/awesome :p) I'm figuring 11:45-ish for an hour lunch and run, Roy Thompson Hall area (though I'm not being specific yet.)

I dunno, just a thought :)

jeff
 
Hmm, brings up the question of what to show people.

Limited amount of time, and what most people would want to see. (I don't actually keep too many things on here, as I hack on it more than play with it.)

Quake 3
Dosbox (Eye of the Beholder, say?)
Vice - Commie 64?
Hatari - Atari ST?

Do I need to copy over some PDFs or mp3s or something for people to see on the xfce desktop?

(There are a few various UAE ports, but damned if I know how to use them; I've never really used an Amiga or UAE :)

Myself, I'd show off BattleJewels and Kronos, but I doubt many care :)

Suppose I should pack two bootable SDs for the inevitable "I popped out your SD and lost it into my soup" moment and get the apps set up and working eh? :)

jeff
 
I am an Australian, and have spend 2x winters in Toronto. It is my favorite place in the world. (I met my wife there)
It is big, busy, fun, crazy.. All my friends who have gone there fall in love with it too.

As an outsider, Sneaky Dees and Dangerous Dans were standout places to dine :D

I can't wait to go back (Next time I will have a Pandora for the long ass flight!) with my wife to live.

How I miss Poutine.. And root beer.. and Franks extra hot sauce.. and Tim Hortons.. And snow :)

O'Canada, I miss thee!
 
Bring N64! We all love it!

Bring you mmenu (mini launcher menu).
Finally - a video camera!!!!

VIDS!!
 
nikudorei said:
I am an Australian, and have spend 2x winters in Toronto. It is my favorite place in the world. (I met my wife there)
It is big, busy, fun, crazy.. All my friends who have gone there fall in love with it too.
As someone who lives in it, I can't wait to get out and move somewhere far up north where there are few people and clean air. I'll miss the library system, though.
 
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Since this Tuesday has only half an hour left in it, I presume you mean next Tuesday (the 30th).

As long as you don't want me to travel backwards in time, I'd like to be there.
 
I'm interested in this BattleJewels of yours. Anything original is a welcome treat. I'd also like to give the Intellivision emulator a try on actual hardware, which I can bring on my own SD card. Pretty sure the controls are totally messed up, I may have 1st and 2nd player backwards, but whatever, I'll fix it all when I finally get my own system.
Gotta have something to tax the system and show off the prettiness. Quake 3 works.
I just want to molest the keyboard a little bit. :unsure:
A few MP3s and videos, something actiony to show off the screen. If you've got a genesis emulator and Sonic, I'd like to try and see this ghosting some people are talking about first hand.
Hmmm... Can't think of anything else off the top of my head. It's like you said, we've got this big blank hard drive... now what? :D
 
As ED noted .. picodrive ghosts pretty heavily sometimes, but I've not seen it anywhere else. I'm just not sure why :) We do currently have gamme setting oddities (dark is really dark, but thats a software thing) so might be part of it. (And doubly so, since I cocked up the LCD cable in the prototype, so mine shows blue-tinge on everything and I avoid open/closing the unit too much for fear of wrecking the LCD cable more than I already did.)

BattleJewels I can bring; shoudl probably level the guy up so it haqs some spells, but too bad :) Too big a treadmil on that game.. who wrote that POS?!

jeff
 
I thought you moved out to Mississuaga last year but sure I'd love the opportunity to see your hard work. So count me in. Also please keep it TTC accessible.
 
skeezix said:
As ED noted .. picodrive ghosts pretty heavily sometimes, but I've not seen it anywhere else. I'm just not sure why :) We do currently have gamme setting oddities (dark is really dark, but thats a software thing) so might be part of it. (And doubly so, since I cocked up the LCD cable in the prototype, so mine shows blue-tinge on everything and I avoid open/closing the unit too much for fear of wrecking the LCD cable more than I already did.)

BattleJewels I can bring; shoudl probably level the guy up so it haqs some spells, but too bad :) Too big a treadmil on that game.. who wrote that POS?!

jeff
I wonder if the ghosting is caused by the MegaDrive's GFX style... I mean in that many games took advantage of CRT blur and used chessboard type dithering of colours to give the illusion of more colours being displayed... the sharp alternating colour may giving the LCD subpixels a headache... just an out of my arse theory.

EDIT:Typo
 
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I'd come, but I'm all the way down south in Connecticut (USA!) so I do have a recommendation: bring out the PS1 emulator and Final Fantasy VII. That'd be awesome.
 
Tis a good pub ;)

I don't have a PS1 emu (or the N64 emu), I'm afraid. I maybe can get ahold of the n64 one .. will try :)

jeff
 
PokeParadox said:
I wonder if the ghosting is caused by the MegaDrive's GFX style... I mean in that many games took advantage of CRT blur and used chessboard type dithering of colours to give the illusion of more colours being displayed... the sharp alternating colour may giving the LCD subpixels a headache... just an out of my arse theory.

It's definately the chessboard dithering.
Also happens on some ST games, as they also used that technique.

Rarely seen on the Amiga emulator, as the Amiga had more colors.

So if chessboard type dithering + fast smooth scrolling combines, you have a heavy ghosting, but that will always be a problem with LCDs :)
The higher the contrast between those two is, the worse this is.
Luckily, not many games had a combination of fast scrolling and high-contrast chessboard type dithering.
And this could be fixed with a wicked filter - I remember some emulator (Forgot which one) included a filter that analyzed the screen and changed that dithering into a real color it tried to simulate. Looked cool :)

notaz did code a small gamma changer program. I changed the gamma to let the display look more like a CRT (this also changed the contrast).
It made things WAY better. Sonic looked amazing to me :D
 
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EvilDragon said:
PokeParadox said:
I wonder if the ghosting is caused by the MegaDrive's GFX style... I mean in that many games took advantage of CRT blur and used chessboard type dithering of colours to give the illusion of more colours being displayed... the sharp alternating colour may giving the LCD subpixels a headache... just an out of my arse theory.

It's definately the chessboard dithering.
Also happens on some ST games, as they also used that technique.

Rarely seen on the Amiga emulator, as the Amiga had more colors.

So if chessboard type dithering + fast smooth scrolling combines, you have a heavy ghosting, but that will always be a problem with LCDs :)
The higher the contrast between those two is, the worse this is.
Luckily, not many games had a combination of fast scrolling and high-contrast chessboard type dithering.
And this could be fixed with a wicked filter - I remember some emulator (Forgot which one) included a filter that analyzed the screen and changed that dithering into a real color it tried to simulate. Looked cool :)

notaz did code a small gamma changer program. I changed the gamma to let the display look more like a CRT (this also changed the contrast).
It made things WAY better. Sonic looked amazing to me :D

That sounds really encouraging. From all the qualitative comparisons with PSP-1000 screens. Well my sister's got one of those and I've never noticed a thing wrong with it.
 
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Tempel, Skeezix, and I met today for lunch and had a grand ol' time breaking his Pandora. Skeezix reminded us several times that not only was it the prototype case and board, but he'd also opened it up several times and kind of broken things. His LCD cable, for instance, had cracked in the repeated disassemble/reassemble process, resulting in a forever blue tinted screen. Unfortunate, but things like that are to be expected. I've got some video that may or may not be interesting that I'll post up later. See, I thought I was clever. I had a brilliant idea to get around the whole "so hard to play and take video at the same time" problem. I picked up a pair of spy glasses with a camera built into the bridge! The camera sees what I see, no need to mess with lenses and stuff. Except, upon viewing the recorded video, I realized that I was looking down with my eyes more than my head, so all the video I took has the Pandora at the very bottom of the screen, when it's even visible at all. Sorry, I'm a slouch. :( I'll do my best to assemble something that looks good tonight or tomorrow.
ONWARD! To a review of sorts.

First impression: it's bigger than I expected, thicker especially. At first I was worried about it, but after handling it for a few minutes, it actually felt a lot more comfortable. My DS now feels too small in comparison. The extra size makes it seem to fill your hands, like a large sammich. I don't really know how to explain it. I put my fingers around it and they fit. With my PSP and DS, I have to curl my hand slightly to get the same kind of grip.

The keys are shiny, bubbly, when you squish them they go straight down, no wiggle. I was constantly looking at the keys to remember where certain keys were (such as the /, ~, and -), but I imagine this will change with usage. Regular typing was pretty easy and only took a little bit to get used to. The location of the space bar is about the only thing I imagine anyone will have any problem with. On a fullsized keyboard I'll hit it with whichever thumb is convenient, but here it has to be the right thumb. More than once I found myself trying to press the B key with my left thumb. Practice!

The nubs! Oh my! Tactile and responsive. You can see in a video later Quake 3 being played with the nubs and I didn't completely suck, just mostly. The nubs moved smoothly, and snapped back when released. I think "frictionless" is the right word, or as close as possible. They just moved when pushed, didn't resist at all. I liked it!

I didn't get as much play with the D-pad as I could have. It felt good. Played Giana's return a bit, it worked smoothly, didn't scrape or poke my fingers. I can believe this would be good for extended play.

The sound was also a lot quieter than I had expected. I knew it wouldn't be able to fill a room or anything, but I expected to be able to hear a little better than I did. That pub wasn't exactly loud, and it was hard to hear sometimes. What I could hear was nice and clear though, including video and MP3 playback. Not a real problem, that's what headphones and the line out on the EXT port is for, just don't expect you and a couple friends to be able to sit around and watch something without some kind of external speaker.

This was the first time I'd run jzintv and Dink Smallwood on an actual Pandora and it made me very, very happy. They just worked. It was beautiful! That should demonstrate how easy it is to code for the Pandora if you're coming from a PC background. They're both simple SDL apps and they just worked. A little bit of keyboard mapping and they'll be perfect.

Yes, there is an outline on the lid of the case, that square that has been pointed out, but under a flat light it disappeared. I could only see it when looking at an angle. It might also be visible under brighter light, but it is faint enough that I can see the finish making it disappear. That's my hope anyway. If it doesn't, it's not that bad. Not perfect, but still very good.
I also went looking for other anomalies. The plastic, in general, was not perfect. There were spots where it was slightly more dull than others, but again, only under the right light. These should disappear with the finish (knock on wood). The "dent" on the right side of the keyboard we've seen in other pictures wasn't there, and I didn't see any sign of shrinkage around the side. I ran my finger along the seam all the way around the edge and it was smooth. Under the battery, however, was some very noticeable distortion. It almost looked like it was stressed and ready to crack. You may be able to see it in the video, we'll see if I got it. This is a prototype, I've got faith that the stress has already been taken care of. I hope.

I didn't see any ghosting, even when I was told I should be seeing ghosting. I do see ghosting on my PSP1000, so any ghosting on the Pandora is not as bad as on the PSP1000. I'm sure there is some there, but how many people it will actually affect has yet to be determined.

Both XFCE and Jeff's minimal menu felt very familiar and intuitive. The touch screen needs a bit of fuzzy logic for the double tap. I was only able to actually double tap an icon a few times, all the other times I gave up and just hit enter. The problem seems to be that it only counts a double tap if you're tapping the exact same pixel twice in a row. Really, it should have a reasonable dropoff, say 10 pixels on any side. The fact that I got it a couple of times proves it works, it just needs to be less sensitive.

I started Abiword, it came up fast. Happy happy, type away, "Hellollo" in big, bold, underlined, italic letters. This will serve all your rapid note taking needs, once you get used to the keyboard.

Obviously we didn't test the wifi, but Tempel did accidentally start Midori. It loaded pretty quickly, 3 tabs open, one of which was the list of recently used tabs in windows thing. He scrolled it up and down, it was smooth. Here's hoping the wifi gets solved.

We stress tested the hinge, giving it a hard twist. It squeaked, as old plastic tends to do, but it didn't seem like it was going to give. My DS, in contrast, I just gave a twist and I'm fairly confident I could rip the screen off if I wanted to.

I don't know what else I can say. Is it worth the wait? I think it is. It does everything I wanted it for (excepting wifi) back in May 2008, and there is no one device that matches it.
Is it worth the hype? That's a tricky one, but only because the last year has seen more and more hype built on it. When everyone finally does get theirs, there will be a huge fanfare, followed by a collective "now what?". I just hope the response will be big enough to generate enough momentum to carry them through a few more batches.
 
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