Pandora Devkit, Emulators and Console News
Craig one of the forces behind the Pandora Console posted this Pandora News
Hello everyone, Craig here,
It's been a busy month and if you visit the forums I'm sure you will have been following all the recent news posted there, if not Chip has made a great sticky post with all the little nuggets of information we post which is updated almost immediately, well worth checking out.
Now, interesting news for those of you who didn't get a MK0 dev kit, TI have now started taking orders for the Beagle board OMAP3 development kit. It shares some main parts with the Pandora and those of you eager to get in to the development scene can buy one of these now, check out their site for more info, programs written on the Beagle should be quite easy to port over to the Pandora, it is certainly the closest thing to a Pandora devboard you can currently buy on the open market.
Now, there have been a lot of videos posted in the last few weeks of Pandora dev kits running software, here are the direct links to some and we will post a highlights video soon.
A http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe_R787gREc by Firefox.
Notaz running [video=youtube;ZuLLYzaZaJ4]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HhIt8A-d34]Megadrive[/url] and [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuLLYzaZaJ4[/video] games without a frame limiter. Seeing sonic going at 200FPS is quite entertaining.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGz52EIVN8s (not using the 3D hardware yet, but still pushing 60fps).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5XGMrv25G0 without a frame limiter.
Now, another area which has a lot of strong opinions is the Pandora default GUI.
The original plan was keep the GUI simple and put as much time and effort in to getting as much cool software running as possible, but after a poll we have changed direction.
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).
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, as you may have read the battery life is looking like it will be even longer than the estimated 10 hours, and clever CPU speed changes will be the key to optimising this even further.
We will have a real final MK0 Pandora complete with case later this month for photo goodness, if you write for a website or magazine and want to do a feature please get in touch.
