What is your favourite part of the Pandora legend?


directive0

directive0

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So the Pandora is a device with a very complex history from conception to release. In the short time I've had mine I've become quite enthusiastic about it. Both the device and the tale surrounding its genesis.

I'm going to do a short video about my Pandora in the next few weeks and I wanted to provide some interesting tidbits of the Pandora story.

I don't want to just focus on the negative parts like Craig and whatnot, I think the story of Pandora is one of triumph. But being a newcomer to this community I don't have first hand knowledge about a lot of the cool things that ED and the community did that helped bring the Pandora to the world.

So I ask you forum; whats your favorite recollection of the Pandora during those rocky first few years. Do you have some interesting behind the scenes fact that you think no story about the pandora should be without? Was there a moment the community pulled together and made the unlikely outcome of the Pandora a reality?

Also, are there any links or forum posts you think would be worthwhile for me to read?
 
Wow nice Thread :D

I have so many positive Memories about the Pandora and still use one of my Devices Today with Ptitsebs CodeBlocks to compile a fresh rescent Mplayer Version for a new PanPlayer2 Pnd.

My Memories on the Pandora...
..they just begun on an old Warez2000 Website where there was a copy of a Forum Newspost about the Pandora in early Days.
A little Google Research showed me a Device which nearly fullfill all my Whishes like Ps1 Emulation,Portable,good gaming Controlls.

After reading a lot of Informations i wanted to have one Pandora and send EvilDragon one Mail with a Request to order one.

After i got one Email back...he have some Devices over but Delivery will be in around 2 Month(tm)...
..and i ordered one.

After ordering and after prepaying i followed the Story much more and found out that he do not have Pandoras yet.
I am just a PreorderNumber...something over 2000 and no Pandora was build yet.

Then i waited...wrote Forum Posts with Ideas what we can do maybe all Thing with the Pandora.
And in an April 2 Years Later the Moment has come.
It was shortly after my Birthday and i was very happy to hold a CC Pandora in my Hands.
This was one of the most exiting Moments.
Finally i can play many many Games...
..but moment...

This Device work with Linux and little Step for little Step i learned more and more about Linux itself because this Device.

Djwilis released a Toolchain @this Time and i begun to try to compile Things.
With my little little Knowledge i was able to compile Qemu 0.15.1 and run Windows95 in it on the Pandora.

My Goal was ever to go behind the Beyonds what other say.
I know People sayed Windows95 will never run good..let it go.
..
..but i was the first one who played Starcraft and Age of Empires and Diablo+Diablo2+SimCopter on this Device.
Age of Empires under Windows95 with Qemu playable...
..was a Dream for me and it work.
This was the Second most exiting Moment in my Pandora Memories.

Mcobit..a Forum User saw whats possible with that and helped me to make a clean Recompile,wrote a nice Gui and packaged it as PND.
With this PND we won the Pandora Rebirth Edition..yay.
He got mine CC Pandora and i got the golden Special Pandora with a Protoype Board of the Rebirth Edition.
There is a Video on my Youtube Account about unpacking this nice Device.
This was the thirt Exitingest Moment in my Pandora Memories.

EvilDragon saved the Pandora Production to Germany in that Time ..thats because its called rebirth Pandoras.

And there are many other Moments which where Wonderfull:

Release of many Things we never thought which where possible:
Drastic NDS Emulator,
Ppsspp Psp Enulator
Reicast Dreamcast Emulator
...and many others...
..woohoo the Text is too long for typing with my Phone..maybe i will Post a second Part of my good Memories too soon.

For me the Pandora IS ever a very nice Decive,which i do not want to miss in my Life

Regards
 
This is all really awesome stuff. I think the golden pandora is a really cool piece of the story I'll make sure to research that, thank you!
 
The part where humans screw themselves over.

Oh, you mean the device, not the mythical figure...

After the basic community supported idea, my favorite parts are where ED reorganized things to bring the project back to life (eventually leading to the Pyra), and the community fund raising to try to make it right for the preorderers that never got their unit. The unfortunate side of that is that some people still have nothing to show for their financial support, and others feel through the cracks and weren't listed in the info that was sent to ED, but many people tried to help them out even though it was not their responsibility. This is one of those examples that shows that humans aren't wholly selfish.

Of course the phoenix aspect of it, where everything kept going wrong, but it eventually worked out, is always a fun story.
 
My Pandora Preeorder was first more a frustration Buy, i had a shitty mini job for the german postal service this time, i drove whit a big van (like the Mercedes Sprinter, but from Renault), trou the whole country, and delivered the Post Stations whit Post..
One Afternoon, i had a little accident whit a cart full of advertising letters, and was a bit late for the following tour, so i lost this job..
i was quite frustratet, and wantet to spend the money i got on something..
Then i saw on Youtube EvilDragons apearence in a show called "GIGA Games", which was long time a TV Chanel about Videogames in the German TV, but ditnt exist anymore..,
The Show was about Homebrew Handhelds, and EvilDragon shows his GP2X, i wantet something cause i also was in search of a Device to play Gameboy Games, so i made some research in the German Board, and found out about the Pandora, which dit fit my needs a bit more than the GP2X..
So i preeordered it in Second Batch, was pretty diligent reader and writer in the Board, i also startet to be in the English Boards, wrote some translations of News from the English Boards to the German,
became a Moderator of forum.gp2x.de,

Some time ago, i made a Premium Upgrade, got my First Batch Pandora, and it became my "Every Day Carry Handheld", which i carryd in a Bag of one of my Pants every day..
 
Besides the already mentioned community keeps it going aspect, and besides the already mentioned aspect that the comunity tries to help those customers who have had bad luck ( I can hardly think of a community, or customers, who would do either thing), my main point of admiration I think is, how an ordinary private person, or a small goup of private persons, once got together to create the handheld of their dreams, thus, showing it is possible to not just let sony, apple, nintendo do all the hardware work, and unlike the hardware modders, it became possible to create a comemrcial product out of a dream idea by self-organization and with the support of a community. Following this and seeing it grow despite all setbacks along the way has made the Pandora very special for me. Maybe Commodore, Apple, Samsung, Nintendo had similar exciting stories to tell, but if so, everything was behind closed doors, and problems were solved by more money, not by community. This and the aspect of openness make the Pandora and Pyra unique (and loveable) in my opinion :)
 
Thats definitely an important aspect of the story I think; the transparency. Communities come together to build things all the time, but having it this out in the open with this much input is rare.
 
In terms of emulators, I remember when Ari came in with dynamic recompiler goodness for mupen. The project seems to have been started by Pickle back in the day, but the state of the art code we was using wasn't actually that good back then. Then I think Ari came on board with his clever code which sped things up a lot. Sebt3 seems to have been involved at some point, and then of course Ptitseb stepped up and brought mupen2.0plus to the pandora, clever integrating all of the previous and current goodness together with his own coding chops. The difference in performance and stability between the first releases and the later ones has been a regular revolution.
 
I do think it's important to include some of the Craig stuff (specifically the video of him "Falling" off the roof), Craig did do somethings to make the pandora what it is today so it'd be sad if stuff were ignored.


There's a video that was at GC that had some pretty neat electronic music of the first mass production, pretty sure it was either by @Link, @Askarus or @Linux-SWAT, I'd get all nostalgic if I had a copy of that again however it's a great reference to how the community comes together to help someone build something great.

The biggest thing is the community, it's amazing to see such a community over a device that wouldn't matter to most people which have mostly stuck together and have helped mould the Pandora (and now the Pyra) for what it is) and have put out some pretty cool things: GLShim, Perfect PS1 emulation with upscaling, Statically recompiled Diablo / Starcraft, games which have had GL converted to GLES so they work (Like Jedi Knight II or Serious Sam which I would never have dreamed to see on the Pandora), Flying Snakes, oh and let's not forget Pandora Panic! as that's @aTc's favourite game. ;)

It's been a great run so far, let's keep it up and make the Pyra be absolutely desirable!!
 
I'm pretty much like you, a newcomer to the community but for me, the Pandora was everything I dreamt of. The thought of a phone-sized device doing everything a computer can just blew my mind. In fact, my story is a bit weird. I had this thing for mobile computers back when I was at 6th grade (didn't know much about what specifications meant back then), apprx. 3 years prior to my account here. I was researching devices like xpPhone when I suddenly came across this little device in a forum (the device, in total, had 1 posts written about it in the whole country). It was like xpPhone, but ran this thing called Linux and the buying website wasn't all in Chinese.

I forgot about it, only to find it again at high school. Then I bought it and had lots of fun till its LED cable or whatever got broken and now I'm too lazy to send it to ED, meanwhile he is so busy making the Pyra :)
 
Excluding the 90% of the bad history, that (for me) ended when after 2 years I finally received the unit (just because I thrown more cash to Craig when he offered a newer model to jump the line), I will remember forever how excited I was at the first Pandora coding competition... it was so full of cool creations that it was almost impossible to choose who should have won !!

Also, one thing that I hated was a missing feature... there was no visible way to connect the Pandora to my phone with bluetooth for using it as a modem, as I did with my PC...
the cool part was that thanks to the community I actually found a way, but was tricky and needed to deal with the firmware files... and I wasn't so Linux savvy...
the coolest part was that after a week of researching I was able to put up a PND that did the thing without dealing with the firmware at all !!
I was super happy !! If I was able to do that, everyone could have added more functionalities, and that's the point of a device.
 
Can anyone tell me if there was a design phase with different design options? I have the original rendering but I would love to know if there were alternate designs that were rejected in favor of what actually got made.
 
There were threads where it was decided it will emulate Amiga and therefore it must have a keyboard, and I guess after that they settled on the idea of it being clamshell. I don't remember where the nubs came from - I'm not sure how many people were seriously expecting to be able to emulate PS1 before release. I ducked out of the community and switched to getting my news from Gruso's Pandora Press site which was a really cool way of keeping track without getting the full force of Craig's personality in your face every five minutes.
 
The original design of the Pandora was pretty special, and looked great. What we got was ugly as sin (as is the Pyra).
 
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