What do people think of the 1ghz Pandas?

[Zuk]

I'm not aware of anyone having received money from the dev fund. Doesn't mean nobody has but I was operating under the assumption that it was still waiting for something.

Frankly, I don't think that dev bounties are very successful in a community like this. If money was the determining factor between doing something and not doing something they'd probably be focused on getting software out for iOS/Android instead. I think the odds of funding serious emulator optimization (like uh, Dreamcast) are especially low.

I don't know of anyone getting that money either. I would hope our brave OS devs got it. I think our brave hardware devs sunk it into the losses.


You know, I agree with you on the getting software out on iOS and Android (for money), except for I am trying to do the opposite. If/When I get my game to a stable, playable state, I'm probably going to pay a commercial spriter to make the sprites. That's money out of my pocket to make free software. I'm sure that's the odd case. That's me, though.

 

[Wrath Of Khan]

I don't see a future for a Pandora 1.5 or Pandora 2 priced at $700 dollar. Any enthusiasm I have encountered for the Pandora 1 has always been silenced immediately by the current price. Rationalize it all you want, but $700 is going to put off a LOT of existing customers, which by itself is already an extremely small niche market.

All my friends that I have shown the Pandora to have said, "THIS IS AWESOME!!!!! HOW MUCH IS IT???!!!!" I say $500. They say "Oh...."


We all work in IT. I haven't been able to sell even one IT guy I work with at $500. PSX and all...


EDIT: We all make over $200K, really, and they act like they can't afford it.


EDIT 2: I actually got drunk enough to talk about my pay and make several posts in a night. Holy Shnikeys. Halleluiah. Maybe I am no longer a lurker.

yeah yor no lurker now.Stay with us here onthe forums.Heres hoping for dc emulation for us to enjoy

 

[Exophase]

I don't know of anyone getting that money either. I would hope our brave OS devs got it. I think our brave hardware devs sunk it into the losses.

You know, I agree with you on the getting software out on iOS and Android (for money), except for I am trying to do the opposite. If/When I get my game to a stable, playable state, I'm probably going to pay a commercial spriter to make the sprites. That's money out of my pocket to make free software. I'm sure that's the odd case. That's me, though.

It's not odd at all, lots of people want to make software for free, sometimes even if they have to spend money themselves. Those people just aren't really going to be motivated by bounties.

 

[kamui_kun]

Sorry to be off topic, but I have just a quick question about the 1 ghz unit: is it faster than the old one at the same clock speed ? (I mean compared to the old 512 MB pandora overclocked at 1 ghz, as mine is very stable at 1 ghz...)


Also the GPU and RAM is abour 2x faster... I suppose emulators that uses the GPU should be much faster ? like the N64 ?

 

[Exophase]

Sorry to be off topic, but I have just a quick question about the 1 ghz unit: is it faster than the old one at the same clock speed ? (I mean compared to the old 512 MB pandora overclocked at 1 ghz, as mine is very stable at 1 ghz...)


Also the GPU and RAM is abour 2x faster... I suppose emulators that uses the GPU should be much faster ? like the N64 ?

It's slightly faster at the same clock speed. RAM isn't 2x faster; the clock speed is only 20% higher but synthetic tests show an improvement of around 45%, probably due to other optimizations in the memory subsystems.


From what I understand N64 emulation is usually not GPU bound (ie, the CPU is not typically waiting for the GPU to finish doing something, although the CPU may be spending a lot of time preparing stuff for the GPU in driver code) and therefore the faster GPU may not make much of a difference.

 

[notaz]

From what I understand N64 emulation is usually not GPU bound (ie, the CPU is not typically waiting for the GPU to finish doing something, although the CPU may be spending a lot of time preparing stuff for the GPU in driver code) and therefore the faster GPU may not make much of a difference.

From my limited testing, it helps in certain cases, for example the slowdowns on fog effects in mario64 are mostly gone on 3730.

 

[kamui_kun]

OK thanks ^^

 

[Zuk]

I sent an e-mail drkIIRaziel explaining the deal. We'll see if anything comes of it.

 

[ElPoco]

is it faster than the old one at the same clock speed ?

Looks like it depends on when you ask, here is what they had to say about it before they sold Pandora with it:

What's the difference to the old DM3730 or our Pandora CPU? Basically nothing.

But now they're talking about noticeable improvements...

 

[rohezal]

Its a price / gain calculation. 500$ is mid class laptop which can play half life 2 and doom 3 without problems. And probably even newer games. 700$ is a mid / high class pc which can play Battle Field 3. The pandora is a cool mini laptop with game controlls and good emulators which can play games up to N64 and has no 3G. I think this is the way the estimate the money they want to spend on it. And I think 400$ would be fine for them.

 

[rohezal]

But now they're talking about noticeable improvements...

Higher CPU Clock Speed, Higher GPU Clock Speed (200 instead of 110 mhz), Higher Ram Speed and more Level 1 Cache (2x32 instead of 2x16KB). And since the manufacturing is done with smaller transistors it takes less Power. But its like a pentium 4 2,6 Ghz and a 3,2 Ghz (with Hyper Threadting). Same system just a bit faster.


One main factor for indy games and desktop usage is the 512 instead 256 MB Ram. This is indeed sweet.

 

[NearTao]

Zuk... you may be my official new up and coming personality on these boards. Keep it up!

 

[Zuk]

Zuk... you may be my official new up and coming personality on these boards. Keep it up!

LOL! Thanks!

 

[Wrath Of Khan]

I sent an e-mail drkIIRaziel explaining the deal. We'll see if anything comes of it.

fingers crossed

 

[Zuk]

I haven't heard anything yet. I asked if he was interested or knew anyone capable of doing it that would be interested. I did note while I was looking around on the google code site that it's a direct X emu. Probably a hard port. I saw some things on a google search about a guy that was porting to Linux, but the last entry was over a year ago (if I remember correctly, it was a few days ago that I looked).


So, if we can find another noble cause, I'll donate a 1Ghz unit to that instead. I don't want to limit it to something no one might actually accomplish.