Will Pandora's Mame Port Match The Mame Project Versions?

[PolloLoco]

Back onto the topic, I'm slightly disappointed that only 0.37 romsets will be ported on to Pandora's MAME.

Just as a matter of interest, why would you be disappointed with 0.37?
The three games you mention would most definitely run at full speed.



Those aren't the only games I hope to run. I was just commenting that I'd be happy to get those 3 running, but I'm HOPING for much more. There are a bunch of games since 0.37 that I'd like to play that don't fall under dedicated emulators like finalburn. Since the Pandora is so much more powerful, I was hoping for games well beyond the emulated capacity of GP2X - not just a more accurate port.

Craigix - that's a wonderful gesture, I hope you'll e-mail or PM him to let Franxis know.

 

[TaG]

Is it still GP2X, F800?

Oh, and "Pure GPH brilliance" + sarcasm is probably what was discussed about before. GPH can probably do without the official distributors mocking them. Although, as a community, I think all is fair, as long as you keep supplying their products.
Although, of course, they can't keep supplying their products as they are no longer available.

And Franxis is very welcome to a Pandora. For free.

 

[realyst]

GP3Z Extra 9000 Deluxe Black!

Or the GP3ZE9KDB for short!


"My, what are you playing there, sir?"

"Well it's my GeePeeThreeZeeEeeNineKayDeeBee!"

 

[craigix]

Is it still GP2X, F800?

Oh, and "Pure GPH brilliance" + sarcasm is probably what was discussed about before. GPH can probably do without the official distributors mocking them. Although, as a community, I think all is fair, as long as you keep supplying their products.

No, not the F800 any more, it has a name now.

My sarcasm about GPH is entirely tongue in cheek, after all we stock their stuff even if they do make some truly mind blowing decisions sometimes.

Back on topic to MAME, it is hard to tell what the FPS will be, I think for most games it will easily be 60fps but because the Pandora isn't running with all its tricks turned on (see the 2 SNES videos for just the -o flag results) we need to get all the cache, hardware blitting etc. going to see some real results, it's a bit of a double edged sword to release FPS this early on because for some reason those figures are the ones which always get quoted for years after on other forums.

What I think will be much more cool is seeing how low we can get the CPU speed and high the battery life. SNES @ 500Mhz gets 8.5 hours on the beta battery with full brightness. This is going to lead to some 10+ hour times for straight ports of GP2X stuff. Imagine battery life with 200mhz. Awesome times ahead.

So for those goals Mame4all which is a lot more low CPU friendly makes sense. For later games there are other emulators which can be used.

You could even have a front end handling all this, running the best .exe for the best game for the best CPU power.

 

[parag0n]

GAMEPARK HOLDINGS SUPER MP4 PLAYER EXTREME VERSION 3

 

[efegea]

And Franxis is very welcome to a Pandora. For free.

Do that confirms that there will be more development pandoras? I hope you remember my private message when choosing the developers

 

[Kyo]

What I think? There's gonna be a fight while planning the GP3X and a new company called gamepark holdings holdings will be created

 

[Orkie]

What I think? There's gonna be a fight while planning the GP3X and a new company called gamepark holdings holdings will be created

I doubt that very much .

 

[greendots]

Is the beta battery 3200mAh compared to the release battery at 4000mAh?

just wondering... If not that is still excellent battery life

 

[craigix]

What I think? There's gonna be a fight while planning the GP3X and a new company called gamepark holdings holdings will be created

There is already a reference to the name in the thread.

The battery is the 4000mah one. Remember that it's 8.5hours with no power optimisations.

 

[ingrin]

What I think? There's gonna be a fight while planning the GP3X and a new company called gamepark holdings holdings will be created

There is already a reference to the name in the thread.

The battery is the 4000mah one. Remember that it's 8.5hours with no power optimisations.

I was wondering about that, was your link to the fred savage movie meant to imply it will be called 'The Wizard'?

*EDIT* or, keeping with the Wii 'slang for bodily function' naming convention, they could just call it 'the Wiz'

 

[telegramguy]

What I think will be much more cool is seeing how low we can get the CPU speed and high the battery life. SNES @ 500Mhz gets 8.5 hours on the beta battery with full brightness. This is going to lead to some 10+ hour times for straight ports of GP2X stuff. Imagine battery life with 200mhz. Awesome times ahead.

So for those goals Mame4all which is a lot more low CPU friendly makes sense. For later games there are other emulators which can be used.

You could even have a front end handling all this, running the best .exe for the best game for the best CPU power.

This is by far the most exciting thing I've read about your project in a long time. It's fantastic to read that you guys aren't just being mindful about power consumption.

Will there be options for battery configurations?

 

[Tobriand]

So effectively, 8.5 hours going full pelt? Which presumably means, once it has those wonderful power saving features that mean the CPU can work out how much power it needs to use and use only that, then battery life should be very impressive indeed.

Especially when you consider that SNES (or at least Chrono Trigger, which isn't a bad indication of SNES ability) looks like it's running at maybe half again as fast as it should be at the default speed, whatever that is.

Anyway, Mame. I must say I'm looking forward to seeing what Pandora brings to the table in the way of it!

 

[Fishbong]

So the clockspeed will be changed basing on which application is being used? What will be the standard clockspeed that the OS uses? And won´t there be problems with multitasking? I don't quite understand how the energy saving is going to be implemented...

 

[andyB911]

Oh those crazy Spanish people what will they do next? Lurkio, we will send the great armada to invade you. All your Pandoras are belong to us!

AndyB911, little explanations of two unclear points:

How the gp2x / gp32 were more internationalized... ? No keyboard We use some weird characters, you know: áéíóúüñ¡¿ Other Spanish languages uses a couple more àèòïç And that's only in Spain, French people for example do not use a qwerty at all and have even more characters. Yes, I'm sure that there will be some alternative way to introduce these characters, but, look, we use them very often. That huge keyboard is actually only comfortable for English people.

Is Craig being blamed for the end of the gp2x? In short, yes, he is. But I find this a funny argument, because we live in a competitive, commercial world

Just out of interest, given that the keyboard is of optimal use for emulation of Amiga, Spectrum, C64, Amstrad 64, Atari ST etc... How many of these were internationalised?

Anyway, I suspect that efegea's idea of supplying a few of the Spanish key developers with a free device (the offer for Franxis was made very publically above) will help tremendously.

I wonder whether the Wizard or Pandora will hit market first?

Back on topic, I'm old skool (well, actually just old) so for me MAME4ALL is more than sufficient.

 

[craigix]

So the clockspeed will be changed basing on which application is being used? What will be the standard clockspeed that the OS uses? And won´t there be problems with multitasking? I don't quite understand how the energy saving is going to be implemented...

OK, this is related to that GUI thread.

Since most potential customers seem to want a more advanced GUI as standard it's likely the default will be kDrive (X11 derivative) and any CPU intensive apps/games/emus can just kill kDrive when ran, set their CPU speed, have the system to themselves and just reload kDrive on exit.

For less CPU intensive games/apps/emus they can just run within X, so you can have your desktop like GUI (if you chose to set it up like that) with multitasking (ideal for browsers, media, chat).

It could be the case that some apps will come in an X and non X version for people to choose how to run it.

Currently the Pandora defaults to 500mhz. As we know it can clock a lot higher. You will be able to change that to whatever you like.

For something like Mame4All it would probably want to kill X and have the system to itself, but older games might be happy in a window.

And on another note Notaz has just turned on the L2 cache and blown away any performance numbers you have recently seen....

 

[Kayday]

You could even have a front end handling all this, running the best .exe for the best game for the best CPU power.

Now that's what I like. Instead of picking an emulator to play certain games, we'll instead pick the games by systems and it'll load the proper emulator. I love that!

As for MAME, could the Pandora handle CHD games?

 

[Fishbong]

Ah, now i get it. This makes a lot of sense, thanks craig.

 

[fusion_power]

Currently the Pandora defaults to 500mhz. As we know it can clock a lot higher. You will be able to change that to whatever you like.

I hope this includes Underclocking to.
I would like to see the Pandora Menu run lower than 500MHz. Music Player too of course and maybe the Video-Player doesn't need 600MHz all the Time?
The big Games will get every MHz but the most interesting thing will be to underclock the Machine so we can max the Battery times even more. Maybe MAME can also set the CPU clock automaticly so we have 50-100MHz when playing Pacman or Pong and 600MHz+ when playing "Radiant Silvergun" or equal Games.

 

[efegea]

Does the pandora have the "ondemand" cpufreq scaling? On AMD I think it's called Cool'n'quiet and what it does is changing the cpu frequiency depending on cpu load. ie on my desktop if cpu load is at 100%, the freq is 2400Mhz, but when idle it's at 1000Mhz, with a few other frequencies between. Well, it's a very common thing on laptops since a long time ago, and it's becoming popular on desktop cpus since some time..it's nothing new