ekianjo
Hardcore Member
Ok guys this is going to be a difficult category, hence the reason why I kept this poll as the last one to go online. This is not just about choosing your favorite entry here, but trying to judge and choose which of the entries was the most significantly improved through the update or additional work done by the participant. Look carefully at the descriptions and comments below regarding the updates, before making your choices, and of course are you are strongly advised to test all entries before casting your vote.
Here goes...
Pandora Image Viewer / Repo
Description:
Pandora Image Viewer is a fast image viewer, optimized for large JPEG files (e.g. from a digital camera). It has all the basic functionality to get you from an SD card full of holiday pictures to a web gallery of selected images.
What changed through this update (comment by _wb_):
A feature that has been requested a lot, but was still missing from PIV, is thumbnail navigation. This can be quite practical when sorting out a collection of hundreds of pictures. In the new thumbnail mode, PIV can show 2, 6, 12, 20, 30, ... up to 320 thumbnails per screen, in a simple but nice 2D grid without any clutter. It does not pollute your card with a thumbnail cache like some other viewers -- instead, it uses the embedded previews that are usually available in big image files.
With this addition, PIV now really turns a Pandora into a great tool for amateur or even professional photographers to view and process their photos on the go.
ZDoom / Repo
Description:
ZDoom is an enhanced port of the official DOOM source code to Win32. As such, it not only works with (and requires) Windows 95/NT 4.0 (well, it runs on Linux too now), but it also adds new features not found in the version published by id Software.
What changed through this update (comment by PtitSeb):
Being a DooM, I thought that this one would be a quick and easy port. How wrong I was. ZDooM is a huge engine, with many options and dependancies. One of them was FMOD. I tried to get FMOD running on the Pandora but gave up, and finally used the OpenAL port that has been done on an branch and put that in the current version. After some work I got vanilla ZDooM running. But then I realized I needed a minimal GUI for it, and especially to select some additional WAD/PK3 because ZDooM is the king of mod DooM engine. I finally found an opensource GUI (abandoned it seems) that I could alter to add some Pandora specific setting. Enyo-doom is QT4 again, and after some fighting, I got a version where I could have some per-games settings, including Pandora Nubs & Drivers.
Stella / Repo
Description:
Atari 2600 VCS emulator. Relive the days you spent as a child in front of the TV set "playing Atari"
What changed through this update (comment by SVOlli):
I'm coding demos for the Atari 2600 VCS, and I always wanted to have a 2600 in my pocket, more for watching and showing demos than "just" playing very old games. It was the first CPU based system I ever owned, sold it later to buy a C64 and started to learn coding there. It still is the most retro platform you can start hacking on without spending big bucks. The problem was that the Pandora is capable of running Stella in general, but there is a nasty bug in the Stella code that crashes the application when running a PAL game or demo ROM. More than 90% of all scene demos are written for PAL systems, so the original idea I bought the Pandora for was not working. This lead to a long Saturday of setting up a development system and debugging Stella. Once this was done, I also wanted to bring the most retro experience to a broad audience, so I included a simple downloader for open available ROM packs covering three categories: original ROMs from "back then" when the 2600 was produced, Homebrew stuff that was developed afterwards and of cause the scene demos I wanted to see on the console.
Here are some demos that can run on Stella now:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/iIlc9ndujP0?feature=oembed
Here goes...
Pandora Image Viewer / Repo
Description:
Pandora Image Viewer is a fast image viewer, optimized for large JPEG files (e.g. from a digital camera). It has all the basic functionality to get you from an SD card full of holiday pictures to a web gallery of selected images.
What changed through this update (comment by _wb_):
A feature that has been requested a lot, but was still missing from PIV, is thumbnail navigation. This can be quite practical when sorting out a collection of hundreds of pictures. In the new thumbnail mode, PIV can show 2, 6, 12, 20, 30, ... up to 320 thumbnails per screen, in a simple but nice 2D grid without any clutter. It does not pollute your card with a thumbnail cache like some other viewers -- instead, it uses the embedded previews that are usually available in big image files.
With this addition, PIV now really turns a Pandora into a great tool for amateur or even professional photographers to view and process their photos on the go.
ZDoom / Repo
Description:
ZDoom is an enhanced port of the official DOOM source code to Win32. As such, it not only works with (and requires) Windows 95/NT 4.0 (well, it runs on Linux too now), but it also adds new features not found in the version published by id Software.
What changed through this update (comment by PtitSeb):
Being a DooM, I thought that this one would be a quick and easy port. How wrong I was. ZDooM is a huge engine, with many options and dependancies. One of them was FMOD. I tried to get FMOD running on the Pandora but gave up, and finally used the OpenAL port that has been done on an branch and put that in the current version. After some work I got vanilla ZDooM running. But then I realized I needed a minimal GUI for it, and especially to select some additional WAD/PK3 because ZDooM is the king of mod DooM engine. I finally found an opensource GUI (abandoned it seems) that I could alter to add some Pandora specific setting. Enyo-doom is QT4 again, and after some fighting, I got a version where I could have some per-games settings, including Pandora Nubs & Drivers.
Stella / Repo
Description:
Atari 2600 VCS emulator. Relive the days you spent as a child in front of the TV set "playing Atari"
What changed through this update (comment by SVOlli):
I'm coding demos for the Atari 2600 VCS, and I always wanted to have a 2600 in my pocket, more for watching and showing demos than "just" playing very old games. It was the first CPU based system I ever owned, sold it later to buy a C64 and started to learn coding there. It still is the most retro platform you can start hacking on without spending big bucks. The problem was that the Pandora is capable of running Stella in general, but there is a nasty bug in the Stella code that crashes the application when running a PAL game or demo ROM. More than 90% of all scene demos are written for PAL systems, so the original idea I bought the Pandora for was not working. This lead to a long Saturday of setting up a development system and debugging Stella. Once this was done, I also wanted to bring the most retro experience to a broad audience, so I included a simple downloader for open available ROM packs covering three categories: original ROMs from "back then" when the 2600 was produced, Homebrew stuff that was developed afterwards and of cause the scene demos I wanted to see on the console.
Here are some demos that can run on Stella now:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/iIlc9ndujP0?feature=oembed
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