What Would You Pay For?

[douglasamcintosh]

I don't know how the dev fund is going to work in the longer term. Is there always going to be an opportunity for people to 'buy' dev fund or is it something only for the launch? Hopefully there will be a permanent dev fund tip jar for those of us feeling wealthy.

I wonder what people would actually *pay* money for, possibly in advance. I remember giving Zod a wee bit for his PSX emulator for GP2X as I was so impressed and thought it deserved supporting. I was trying to think what I would pay money for, as an incentive, on the Pandora. This is the list I came up with.

1. A Stanza like ebook reader, with the ability to download books from online. Or something like Calibre. I would without a doubt pay money to encourage someone to develop something like that.

http://www.lexcycle.com/stanza

http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/

2. A Sega Saturn emu. Unlikely I know. Very unlikely. But I would be willing to throw some money in the direction of a proven developer who was willing to give it a shot, even if it did not work in the end.

3. A N64 emu. Hopefully more likely but if a small donation would encourage a developer to have a proper look and see what could be done.

These strike me as things unlikely to be developed without some kind of financial incentive.

I know a lot of the developers do this for fun, the challenge, personal satisfaction or whatever and quite happily release their work for free (in all senses of the word).

So what are your most wanted apps on the Pandora that are not part of the standard linux distro. What would you pay actual money to support.

Douglas

 

[faded_jeanjacket]

1. A Stanza like ebook reader, with the ability to download books from online. Or something like Calibre. I would without a doubt pay money to encourage someone to develop something like that.

Oh lordy. I've been lurking for years, but finally registered to reply to this.

http://www.fbreader.org/

It's a fantastic little program, has library support, and has been ported to many mobile devices. I personally fell in love with it on the Nokia 770, which architecturally shares a lot in common with the Pandora. I'd like to hope that it wouldn't take someone trying to reinvent the wheel just to get a decent port of a quality program.

 

[Capn_Fish]

CODE
bitbake fbreader


Copy the IPK over to the Pandora, install, and presto* (or just install from a less-optimized feed)!

*requires a BitBake/OE setup first

 

[Bronek]

I wonder what people would actually *pay* money for, possibly in advance.

Something to play Audible .aa files , so that I do not have to recode/decrypt them to mp3 (on another machine) before playing on Pandora. I'd be happy to pay for that.

 

[Esn]

I'm afraid I don't understand about the ebook readers. Aren't we all but guaranteed a good txt/PDF reader?

 

[douglasamcintosh]

I know about fbreader. It's more the online access functionality of stanza that I like. The cataloging features of Calibre are better. I would be quite happy with an fbreader core with some UI improvements.

Any chance we could try the topic I planned. Might encourage a developer looking for a project.

 

[Trip]

Multi-player gaming is definitely something that I would pay out for.
The ability for 2 players via the internet (emulators included) is some thing that would really set the Pandora apart from other hand held devices.

 

[sterling976]

Multi-player gaming is definitely something that I would pay out for.
The ability for 2 players via the internet (emulators included) is some thing that would really set the Pandora apart from other hand held devices.

Then throw some money over here.

EDIT: I would also be willing to throw a couple dollars at a Saturn emulator. I'd have to see some results first, though.

 

[cb88]

saturn emulator? which from what I understand there isn't even a good one on the PC

dreamcast people dreamcast .... at least there *some* possibility it would run *some* 2dish games *possibly* half decent

 

[scottm]

1. a working n64 emulator - so I can play Banjo & Kazooie
2. Blitzmax to get ported to Pandora - so I can port my cr*p games

 

[Trip]

Multi-player gaming is definitely something that I would pay out for.
The ability for 2 players via the internet (emulators included) is some thing that would really set the Pandora apart from other hand held devices.

Then throw some money over here.

EDIT: I would also be willing to throw a couple dollars at a Saturn emulator. I'd have to see some results first, though.

Yeah I'm waiting with baited breath for that and TINXL to get going

Emulators will probably be fine anyway because they are more fun to write/test/use. I'd rather pay out for something that will benefit more than one program. People always donate to emulators but not so much with the stuff that runs in the background.

System wide voice coms, messaging, multi-player libraries etc. will enhance the gaming no end IMO

 

[jamaya15]

I would gladly throw some money the developers way if I got a working N64 emulator.

 

[socket]

I would definitely donate to a top notch tracker dev... i donated to 0xtob who created nitrotracker for the DS... he wasnt even really accepting donations at the time but i HAD to help him out... it is imo, by far, the best homebrew for DS.

 

[audovoice]

I would definitely donate to a top notch tracker dev... i donated to 0xtob who created nitrotracker for the DS... he wasnt even really accepting donations at the time but i HAD to help him out... it is imo, by far, the best homebrew for DS.

I thought milky tracker and renoise were both easily portable. Milky tracker is open source. Renoise is not but I thought I read something about a port but it was probably people (including me) assuming there would be a port. However Milky is probably good enough for most people. The only big thing it lacks in my opinion is built in VSTi support. Does any one know if VSTi can work on ARM?

 

[God Ginrai]

I would like to see a good N64 emu, Red Alert working well, (whether it be through DOSBox or FreeRA/FreeCNC/openredalert) a good DS emu, and that PSP emu that hlide said might be possible.

-God Ginrai

 

[bustaballs]

I pay for a Saturn emu for sure. If someone could get get some portable Panzer Dragoon Saga, I'd sure as hell be willing to dish out $100 or so and I'm one of the poorest people that I know.

 

[RajTakhar]

Definately a N64 Emulator and a Dreamcast Emulator - those two would have awesome games for Pandora and take it up a few levels

The Saturn one will take ages to develop as it had far too many custom processors

===========
gp32_console + :gp2x and in Feb/March 2009 ... andora1:

http://gp2xwizandpandora.blogspot.com/

 

[mali]

I'd pay for a good RPG any day(oldschool medieval/fantasy, please no japanese manga style/kiddie stuff).

 

[pupnik]

dosbox fmopl on dsp

 

[OrR]

While paying for things to be made in advance through a bounty system sounds like a good idea at first, there are a lot of problems to be considered. (Not splitting money between too many projects, defining exactly what should be developed, preventing parallel development, making sure the developers actually get the proposed money but also making sure people get their money back if nothing is developed in time, ...)

I would pay for quality games, whether they are commercial, homebrew or open source ports. Possibly also for some emulators (Playstation, SNES, Lynx, Game King) but I'm not so much interested in that. I'd also like to spend money on a robust software backend like multiplayer libraries and OS development but I would probably have difficulties to judge who did how much of what and thus who deserves what amount of money... so this should maybe be financed through the dev fund and the money distributed by more knowledgeable people.