Which Developers Are Getting A Free Pandora?

[scottm]

I see some guys involved in the project - skeezix, DaveC & zodttd - are getting free pre-production Pandoras (which is obviously fair enough). I was wondering what other developers are earmarked to get free Pandoras? - i.e. Ari64, exophase, the guys doing the dreamcast emulator etc. Or is it only the guys who were part of the original project team that are getting the free ones.

I think it would be a good idea to give some of the other developers free ones so that they keep developing / refining their emulators. Is this maybe what some of the Dev fund is going on?

 

[borgqueenx]

most of the dev's are pre-orderers, so they dont come free.
But some of them are free though.

Yes i'd also like to know. I would love a playable N64 and DC emulator.

 

[WizardStan]

I doubt they're being given away for free. I'd suspect they're demo units that OpenPandora will be expecting back, eventually, maybe.
In any event, they've got maybe a dozen in cases (5 from the second sample cases, 7 from the 3rd), so it's not like they can give one to everyone who's had a hand in the development.
The Dreamcast emulator is a huge endeavor, and the guys working on it have been silent for a while. They're probably busy with other things and will schedule some time once they've got their own Pandoras, but I doubt getting an early Pandora would help much. It's a multi-month (possibly year) project, and a few weeks either way isn't really going to accelerate them at this point.
Ari64, on the other hand, has shown a lot of progress on his N64 work, and a real Pandora would probably help bring things even closer (assuming he doesn't already have one)
I don't know why you think Exophase would get one. He's a really smart guy, way out of my league, agreed, but what's he working on? He's mentioned some stuff he'd like to port if he ever got one, but sounds like the motivation isn't really there.
I might have expected Dunny to get one, but it looks like there might be some bad blood between him and Craigix right now, although I may just be imagining it.
The only other person I can think of that's expressed interest in doing some work that doesn't have one is myself, and I'm content to wait.

 

[ari64]

Ari64, on the other hand, has shown a lot of progress on his N64 work, and a real Pandora would probably help bring things even closer (assuming he doesn't already have one)

I did not receive a prototype Pandora, and I think they've used all the cases. I will have to rely on others to test the controls and full-screen rendering, as I can not test this right now.

 

[senorgomez]

I see some guys involved in the project - skeezix, DaveC & zodttd - are getting free pre-production Pandoras (which is obviously fair enough). I was wondering what other developers are earmarked to get free Pandoras? - i.e. Ari64, exophase, the guys doing the dreamcast emulator etc. Or is it only the guys who were part of the original project team that are getting the free ones.

I think it would be a good idea to give some of the other developers free ones so that they keep developing / refining their emulators. Is this maybe what some of the Dev fund is going on?

I was surprised to learn that exophase did not pre-order a pandora (though of course he'll accept a dev one if offered).

 

[Phawx]

Exophase is working on a super secret project. Maybe.

 

[hdonk]

Finishing my port of CaPriCe32 is waiting on receiving my Pandora - I've got it as far as I can with my beagleboard and the OpenGL ES simulator environment for Linux. It's the library dependencies that are the blocker - I don't see any point in redoing the work on SDL that Cpasjuste has done, and as I can't it to work on the bb/Angstrom build I've got, it's stalled. I suspect there are quite a few projects like this waiting in the wings. But as it's only a few hours of mucking about to finish it off, there's no rush to get an 'early' Pandora sample, so I'm quite content to wait for my preorder to arrive. So let the core developers get the platform stable on the 'early' Pandas. There's already going to be loads of things to play with when the units ship anyway!

 

[WizardStan]

There's already going to be loads of things to play with when the units ship anyway!

Too many things, if you ask me. They're porting a lot of the good stuff already, leaving us with nothing to take credit for.

 

[Exophase]

Ari64, on the other hand, has shown a lot of progress on his N64 work, and a real Pandora would probably help bring things even closer (assuming he doesn't already have one)

He seems to be doing well without one, actually I doubt he could do much better than he is now regardless of pretty much anything.

I don't know why you think Exophase would get one. He's a really smart guy, way out of my league, agreed, but what's he working on? He's mentioned some stuff he'd like to port if he ever got one, but sounds like the motivation isn't really there.

The Pandora people know why I (eventually) want one ;p Porting Temper is a non-issue, but there's no reason to send me a Pandora for that when someone else could easily do that it if I sent them the source. zodttd has already agreed to port gpSP.

I might have expected Dunny to get one, but it looks like there might be some bad blood between him and Craigix right now, although I may just be imagining it.

I can understand not sending one to me - and I've stated for them not to as well - but then why Dunny? No offense to him, but porting a ZX Spectrum emulator is even less substantial than porting a PC-Engine one.

I was surprised to learn that exophase did not pre-order a pandora (though of course he'll accept a dev one if offered).

craigix told me he'd send me one a long time ago, and indeed I got a board at one point (but I sent it on to another person because I wasn't doing much with it). The preorders happened during the 2.5 or so months when I was inbetween employment and making a purchase like that would have been financially irresponsible.

 

[Dunny]

I might have expected Dunny to get one, but it looks like there might be some bad blood between him and Craigix right now, although I may just be imagining it.

You're imagining it - Craig and I are great pals at the moment, so long as he wears that great hat.

As for me getting a Pandora? Crikey, what did I do to get a rep like that? I've trolled and trolled and trolled until the cows came home (and went to bed with a cup of hot chocolate, indeed) and people still respect me?

Anything I develop for the Pandora will be months away at least, and won't be terribly popular. I have three main projects at the moment (four if you count my little tile/sprite engine):

1. ZXSpin - an emulator which, although insanely accurate, is written mostly in x86 asm and Delphi. Porting that would be very difficult indeed, and would be a case of "take what I know about the z80 and rewrite it". The state of Speccy emulation on the GP2X and Wiz is pretty shockingly bad at the moment, so this is something I might actually do.

2. BASin - the enormous, jack of all trades IDE for sinclair BASIC. A development environment for creating Speccy software, has everything you need (Assembler, sprite editor, screen$ paintbox, tape creator, and a lovely IDE with full debugging at both BASIC and asm levels). This would be much easier to port than ZXSpin, but again would be a massive job.

3. SpecOS - An operating system that turns your PC into a Speccy. Well, not quite - the idea is that it would be a speccy with a 640x480x8bpp screen, full soundcard access, sprite engine, drawing primitives, bitmap renderer etc, all accessible from BASIC. The main thing with this is you turn the machine on, and within seconds (like, about 2 seconds) you have a BASIC prompt available. It's written in C, but makes heavy use of very specific hardware to do the job. I have no experience with ARM hardware, nor the gfx hardware in the Pandora, so all that would have to be rewritten. The interpreter would likely be a straight port. This is something I really would like to do for the Pandora, especially as you could just drop it on a small (say, 2gb) SD Card and boot it when you want to use it, and the hardware won't vary from machine to machine so no messing around with soundcard drivers and SVGA access. As all the apps for it would be written in BASIC, they're not very large.

As you can see, I'm mostly about the 8bits, Speccy mostly. Most people on here seem to want their CPS2/Capcom beat-em-ups and so I'd say that it would be best for devs that are looking at that sort of thing to get a pre-production machine - certainly not me.

I might port my xRick port to the Pandora though, just to get started. And I'd love to get Jet Set Craig finished at some point.

D.

 

[Poem58]

Exophase, I was under the impression you were getting one!? Especially seeing as how we had mentioned meeting up sometime. I'm surprised you didn't mention that then. WOW.
Well, you are always welcome to see mine when it arrives. Just let me know. Edit: Ahh, hadn't read yet and see you were in between jobs. That makes sense.

 

[Exophase]

Exophase, I was under the impression you were getting one!? Especially seeing as how we had mentioned meeting up sometime. I'm surprised you didn't mention that then. WOW.
Well, you are always welcome to see mine when it arrives. Just let me know. Edit: Ahh, hadn't read yet and see you were in between jobs. That makes sense.

Honestly, I really did just think I'd get a "complete" prototype at some point. craigix was talking about sending out ones with cases and buttons even in fall 2008. Ultimately the board I did get would have probably been more useful a bit from now than it was back then, but even so I find developing on a bare board to be quite frankly really uncomfortable. This was around when Wiz development without a reasonable way to upload files completely destroyed my spirit.

1. ZXSpin - an emulator which, although insanely accurate, is written mostly in x86 asm and Delphi. Porting that would be very difficult indeed, and would be a case of "take what I know about the z80 and rewrite it". The state of Speccy emulation on the GP2X and Wiz is pretty shockingly bad at the moment, so this is something I might actually do.

Are there really no comparably accurate ZX emulators written in portable and open C/C++? With something like 50 ZX Spectrum emulators out there I would definitely have expected it. How is Fuse? I see you've personally mentioned porting it before.

 

[borgqueenx]

Ari64, on the other hand, has shown a lot of progress on his N64 work, and a real Pandora would probably help bring things even closer (assuming he doesn't already have one)

I did not receive a prototype Pandora, and I think they've used all the cases. I will have to rely on others to test the controls and full-screen rendering, as I can not test this right now.

then i would vote for you, to be the next dev receiving a pandora.

 

[WizardStan]

As for me getting a Pandora? Crikey, what did I do to get a rep like that? I've trolled and trolled and trolled until the cows came home (and went to bed with a cup of hot chocolate, indeed) and people still respect me? Fuck's sakes, guys!

Oh don't worry, I don't respect you.
I was just trying to think of anyone that had said they were actively working on something that I wasn't aware of having gotten a dev board, and at this point that list seems pretty short. You may have noticed I included myself in that list, and I've done pretty much jack!
I had forgotten about the secret project that Exophase may or may not have been working on that may or may not still be active and may or may not be a PC-Engine emulator.
I'm probably missing someone very important though. Let's see: Notaz, Pickle, Skeezix all have one, I believe. DaveC got one for his contributions to the controls. Zod got one. ED has one which he's been making videos with. Fatih had one, but I think it was passed onto someone else though I can't recall who. That's 7, I think there's still 5 unaccounted for. DJWillis, cpasjuste, and Squidge? Did they get one? What has Squidge been up to lately? I don't think I've seen him about in a while. Eniko and the MMO she was working on might warrant one, though again, I've not seen her in months. Dflemstr have one perhaps?

 

[clyborg]

I would like see Exophase get his Pandora soon. What better to promote the Pandora then a Dev investing experience, knowledge, and time to these forums.

Thanks

Jason

 

[Nova]

I remember Sam Fisher mentioning Craig was sending him a dev unit once upon a time, but I've not heard anything about that for a while.

 

[Dead1nside]

I'd really want to see the dev fund go towards providing these developers with Pandoras, gratis, if at all feasible. People like Ari64 should have one. I'm sure OP know all the people that they'd like to have one, it's a case of when they can get one to them.

 

[sam fisher]

I remember Sam Fisher mentioning Craig was sending him a dev unit once upon a time, but I've not heard anything about that for a while.

Yeah, he told me sometime around late 2008 iirc. He didn't specify a time frame that I'd get it in though and there are many other people who would likely make far better use of one than me.

 

[trooper]

DaveC got one for his contributions to the case design and controls

Sorry WizardStan, I felt you needed correcting.

Trooper

 

[gruso]

DaveC got one for his contributions to designing the case and controls.

Further tweaked.

Yes i'd also like to know. I would love a playable N64 and DC emulator.

As you probably know, Adventus is contributing to Mupen64. I believe he received a Rev3 Pandora this week. He also mentioned that he's taking a look at NullDC, because DrkIIRaziel has hit a brick wall with it. He's not promising any results, but at least we know it's not dead.