The Future of Homebrew - Pandora Console ?

[pas]

Can you neither read or look at pictures properly?

It says its about the same size as a DS, and the picture has a 10p coin in the picture for comparison.

It is hardly bulky.... at all...

IMO this console looks awesome, but lets hope it gets the dev support it needs.

Ahem... can't you think ? IF and I mean IF it was the same size than the DS + having this keyboardlayout, what would be the point of a keyborad as tiny as this at all ? It is a mini laptop no matter how you look at it.

DS emulation? on a SINGLE 4.3" screen?

thats the other point that makes i unattractive to me.
Laughable.

[Exophase]

Ahem... can't you think ? IF and I mean IF it was the same size than the DS + having this keyboardlayout, what would be the point of a keyborad as tiny as this at all ? It is a mini laptop no matter how you look at it.

Welcome to the world of handhelds, where small keyboards are everywhere (and although not as efficient as laptop ones, which are in turn less efficient than desktop ones, they still get the job done). Go look at a Nokia N810. Even better, look at the iPhone and its onscreen keyboard, that people seem to tolerate. Or any number of texting devices or UMPCs. Even cellphones are used to (clumsily) enter messages, and people do it all the time.

Pandora has a keyboard mainly to assist in web browsing, chatting, and for emulating old computers (think about it for a minute, if you just need to press a key to enter a menu or start the game then wouldn't you want a keyboard there for that, as opposed to having to pull one up on the screen?).

The form factor is also locked at this point, and no amount of "logic" will change that. Several mockups have been sent out which show exactly what dimensions it'll have and where everything will be placed. It's only slightly larger than a DS or a GP2X. Relatively small size is an important design goal for the team.

See for yourself: http://youtube.com/watch?v=AwPb_vunkQY

Here's another one that has a bunch of size comparisons, and you can see that it's very similar to the size of a GP2X:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=alP_l62wPsU

[bah]

Exophase: Any idea of the potential of the TI OMAP3430 relative to the PSP's CPU/GPU?

Layman's terms appreciated.

[pas]

you're right, it looks nice and is powerful at the same time.

I would but it, if official devs would support it like they support DS and PSP.

Nice youtube vids.

[robman84]

Released in April you say? Hmm, I'll come back on the FIRST day of APRIL to see iF there are any mOre announcements abOut this great consoLe.

[Exophase]

Exophase: Any idea of the potential of the TI OMAP3430 relative to the PSP's CPU/GPU?

Layman's terms appreciated.

We don't really know exactly what clock speed these will be able to do, except 625MHz at least. We also know that they can get their test units at 750MHz, but not much higher than that (it's expected that the versions we'll be getting will be better though).

If clocked at the same speed as PSP its CPU would be quite a bit faster than PSP's main CPU. This is largely due to three things:

- It can execute up to two instructions per clock cycle, whereas PSP's CPUs can only do one at a time. How much this will actually happen depends on how good the code written for it is though (big burden on compilers)

- Twice the L1 cache, 32KB/32KB instead of 16KB/16KB (instruction/data cache)

- L2 cache. It hasn't been announced how much but my guess is that it'll be 128KB.

For 3D stuff it's hard to beat PSP's VFPU, but Pandora's CPU has a "NEON" unit which is also a VFPU, and looks pretty good.

So if it were clocked at 2x PSP's speed (667MHz) it's a given that it'll be over 2x faster. How much, who knows; it'll depend on the app.

I wish I could tell you more about the GPU. It looks great on paper but we know too little about it. If it means anything to anyone it's PowerVR tech, which is what was in the Dreamcast. Its predecessor, PowerVR MBX, was in the Dell Axim x50v (and other handhelds)

[bah]

Seems like this thing will certainly be worth looking into.
I just hope the build quality is better than the GP2Xs. A friend has one of the earlier ones and it's pretty poor (headphone jack pushes into the console etc), I think the later ones were supposed to be better.

Thanks for the info mate.

EDIT: Mentioning the similarity of the GPU to that of the dreamcast may come back to haunt you: "where's our DC emulator, where's our DC emulator....."

[FaIIen]

u realise that this is a cgi mockup

[Platt]

Is there any details as to what memory cards this takes or whether it will have a build in hard drive or anything? Because if it gets a PSX emulator and each game is about 700 mb then you'll need alot of memory to fit the games on it. I am mainly looking to purchase this for a fully working n64 emulator seeing as daedalus for the PSP is making such slow progress, also n64 games are only about 8, 32 or 64 mbs each so you could fit alot on it.

Nevermind ive found out that it has dual SD HC card slots, this is good news seeing as you can get these cards with big storage capacity for quite cheap. Here is the webpage with all of the devices details http://openpandora.ca/

[sci-fisteve]

Render everyday of the week if i ever saw it, if this thing ever makes it to market in the time stated some real photo's and or video should be out too.