Two Months(TM)... with a Pyra


carlberry

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Joined
Oct 10, 2008
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65
So it's been two months (TM) since I received my Pyra, I was going to do a first impressions after one week but I quickly realised that it was going to need a bit longer to give the Pyra a decent run at things. I still haven't had as much time as I'd like due to work and family commitments but I've had a decent play around with things and here are my two month impressions.

Background.

This ia a standard 4GB Pyra (ordered day one) running the stock OS that comes with the unit (Debian 10), I haven't tried upgrading the distro beyond the standard apt-get update and upgrade. I have kept an eye on the Discord channel and I'm aware that there has been some development over there but this is a straight out of the box experience. I've been using Linux for years and used to own a Pandora but lost it years ago however I certainly think there's still some muscle memory still in there from the Pandora days that;s been coming back recently. If anyone has any feedback/solutions etc. on any of this stuff please let me know.

Hardware.

The unit in general is very solid and feels nice. The nubs work very well and the dpad is as good as a dpad ever is (I'm really not a fan on dpads in general, never got on with the Megadrive controller). I've been carrying it around in a pocket with no case and it isn't showing any signs of scuffs or scratches (this is the black version).

Keyboard.

I'm really not sure what I was expecting from the keyboard but this wasn't it, the key presses are softer than I was expecting, once I got used to it I really quite like the keyboard but it took a while to get used to. I still miss having a left hand shift key (I know you can use the shoulder buttons but when it's flat on surface this isn't really accessible), and I still keep pressing the enter key rather than backspace, I suspect this really is a throwback to Pandora keyboard positioning.

Screen.

The screen is very good, I'm of an age now where I generally have to wear reading glasses for anything Pyra sized but one of the things I wanted to be able to do with my Pyra was read PDFs and they display perfectly and are very readable on the small screen.

Ports and Connectivity.

The ports (such that I've tested) seem to wrong fine except for the HDMI out which (as noted in other threads) doesn't work. Bluetooth has picked up everything I've asked it to (headphones, keyboard, phone) and the wireless connection has been good for me (the Pandora's was always a bit of an issue.) The sound gets some getting used to, plugging headphones into the socket doesn't auto switch and you have to select them in software but it's surprising how quickly this becomes second nature.

Power.

Power is a bit of an issue currently, it takes a while for the Pyra to charge and runs through power when not doing much, again I know this is being worked on but out of the box don't expect to be using the Pyra all day without recharging.

Software.

As you would expect most of the time I've been playing with software and this has been a bit mixed.

Pyra Repo.

I've mostly tried emulators from the Pyra repository and GBAemu, GBCemu, MDemu, psx_rearmed and Snes9xemu all worked straight away with no issues. I had to fiddle about with reicast to get it to work (documented in another thread and on the repo page) but it works fine now and does a very good Dreamcast emulation. mupen64plus I couldn't get to work and it looks like that I'm not the only one in the mupen64plus thread here so if anyone gets that working let me know. I also downloaded and tried ptitSeb_Stuntcarremake which works great and takes me back to my Amiga days, which brings me to...

Debian Repo.

So I installed a few different pieces of software from the standard Debian ARM repository and had some mixed results. The usual suspects for programming all download and run fine (gcc, the whole build-essentials, vim etc.), FS-UAE the Amiga emulator will run but does so very slowly, some A500 stuff is playable at low accuracy (Super Cars was OK) but others are unplayable (SWOS stutters and Speedball 2 was a slideshow). Mame is unusable, I tried some version 78 roms with it and even something basic like Berzerk just chugs along. Libreoffice installs and runs fine and is very usable, zulucrypt works, I haven't got Angband to run at a sensible resolution but I suspect that just needs more fiddling with. I haven't tried getting the source code and recompiling any of these, this is just a straight apt-get install so there's that.

Other software.

Heading away from safe harbours I went in search of armhf software on the internet to play with and was generally pleasantly surprised, b-em, a BBC Micro emulator works after installing a couple of missing dependencies and compiling the source. Gargoyle, a z-codes interpreter runs well so you can play old text adventures like infocom (and like I said the Pyra's keyboard is very usable when you get used to it.)

Web-Browsing.


Things get a bit odd here, I installed Firefox as this is generally my web browser of choice, and at first everything seemed OK, then I tried to sign into my Firefox account to share bookmarks and after that Firefox just continually crashed. Restarting the Pyra didn't help, uninstalling and reinstalling Firefox didn't help (clearly hanging on to some config files somewhere). Fortunately I saw a thread (either here or on Discord) recommending Vivaldi. Vivaldi works great apart from two odd quirks. Firstly it never starts the first time I try and open it, I have to open it twice at which point it opens two windows, at first I thought it was just me being impatient but it just doesn't open on first attempt, odd and frustrating but not a killer. The second odd quirk is that some of Vivaldi's menus don't recognise the stylus, most of it does but the download window (for example) won't let me press any buttons using the stylus and I have to click on them with the pointer/nub. Again not a huge problem but it took me a while to figure out what was going on, Vivaldi is by far and away the most common thing to get updated when using apt so maybe these will come good at some point.

Video.


I haven't done much with music yet but I have been playing around with the Pyra as a video platform. First off vlc installs and runs but seems to use a huge amount of resources and nearly every file I tried playing in it stuttered. I spent a huge amount of time recoding videos in various resolutions and video types using handbrake and Mystiq but it didn't make much positive difference (handbrake works on the Pyra by the way, I haven't tried Mystiq but I wouldn't recommend the Pyra for video encoding). This lead me to look elsewhere, mpv worked beautifully except it screwed up the colours (blues instead of reds etc.), I'm not a video expert and spending a chunk of time searching through the forums and github trying to find configs that helped, proved fruitless. It might be something to do with the Pyra's screen from what I could gather (HDR vs SDR seemed a popular issue) but none of the fixes worked for me and vlc didn't screw up the colours. I tried mplayer but that didn't show anything. Finally I install smplayer which is a front end for mpv/mplayer and in there there is a menu option in preferences for Video Output Driver, setting this to x11 (slow) and using mpv as the multimedia engine had the Pyra playing up to 720p video smoothly with the correct colours (only got this working a couple of days ago so haven't tested it too much).

And that's been my Two Months(tm) journey so far, still lots to try, still lots to tweak. I'll let you know any major findings as I go.
 
I'm really not sure what I was expecting from the keyboard but this wasn't it, the key presses are softer than I was expecting
There's definitely variance in keyboard feel between units. I have no clue if this assembly or production run related, but the prototype units I touched in the past and whatever you'd label Askarus's Pyra have better feeling keyboards than mine.
Maybe it's a dice roll... honestly no idea, though.

This lead me to look elsewhere, mpv worked beautifully except it screwed up the colours (blues instead of reds etc.), I'm not a video expert and spending a chunk of time searching through the forums and github trying to find configs that helped, proved fruitless.
The "mpv config" search term does bring up the config I shared back in the day. Admittedly I haven't done much of anything with mpv since then, so I can't vouch if it still works the same (and mpv devs don't necessarily care a lot about low-low end targets). There's at least one negative response down in thread, but still worth a try I suppose. Main part of it is using the SDL video driver in combination with gl4es.
Don't expect wonders, but h.264, 24 fps 8-bit encodes played fine when I tried. But yeah, that was years ago at this point.

And I suppose the CPU cycles wasted on the audio sampling don't help either.
 
The second odd quirk is that some of Vivaldi's menus don't recognise the stylus, most of it does but the download window (for example)
Are those at the sides ? Does it work if you reduce a little the size of the window and put it at the center of the screen ?
The touchscreen should not work at the sides because it's too stretched.
 
There's definitely variance in keyboard feel between units. I have no clue if this assembly or production run related, but the prototype units I touched in the past and whatever you'd label Askarus's Pyra have better feeling keyboards than mine.
Maybe it's a dice roll... honestly no idea, though.


The "mpv config" search term does bring up the config I shared back in the day. Admittedly I haven't done much of anything with mpv since then, so I can't vouch if it still works the same (and mpv devs don't necessarily care a lot about low-low end targets). There's at least one negative response down in thread, but still worth a try I suppose. Main part of it is using the SDL video driver in combination with gl4es.
Don't expect wonders, but h.264, 24 fps 8-bit encodes played fine when I tried. But yeah, that was years ago at this point.

And I suppose the CPU cycles wasted on the audio sampling don't help either.

I'll give it a go when I get the chance.
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Are those at the sides ? Does it work if you reduce a little the size of the window and put it at the center of the screen ?
The touchscreen should not work at the sides because it's too stretched.
Nope, doesn't matter where the message box pops up it just doesn't do anything, well it selects the "save as" button but doesn't actually register it's been pushed.
 
I too received my pyra about two months ago. It's a lovely, high quality device. I had several rather annoying issues with the stock os, stylus calibration and network settings not being remembered, Firefox crashing. Bookworm 3 solved them. I still don't know how to reliably charge it, only my rpi PSU seems to work. Admittedly I've be distracted by my MiSTer Pi as of late. For a portable UNIX box pyra is pretty much perfect.
 
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The Charging Situation is really strange, i never had an Issue with my Power Suplys on the Pyra, i did use USBC to USBC Cables with Adapter to Micro USB, whyrd Rollon Cables whit Micro, USBC and Lightning to USBA, all sorts of Powerbanks etc ..
It might depend more on the Port for Charging: the Micro USB Part of the "Micro USB3" (This W chaped Port) did work better than the Port above the USBA in the Middle ..

Apps from the Debian Repo do depend on the GL4ES , there was an Terminal Command to let these also use GL4ES so they should run better, but i dont remember it sadly ..

The Dreamcast Emulator was allway running for me quite fine, i have the Buster Image on the Nand and an Bookworm Image on the SD Card,

N64 needs quite some Depencies to work, but i also have it not running..
 
There's definitely variance in keyboard feel between units. I have no clue if this assembly or production run related, but the prototype units I touched in the past and whatever you'd label Askarus's Pyra have better feeling keyboards than mine.
Maybe it's a dice roll... honestly no idea, though.
They are all the same, I use an older prototype keyboard.
I prefer mine by a lot but ED prefers the new one. The new ones are all the same.
 
The new keyboard makes some "sound" when keys are pressed ?
I mean like that squishy sound that makes the Pandora keyboard.
 
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