Last week I finally received my Pandora! For those of you who don’t know what a Pandora is; it’s basically a full-featured and very powerful Linux computer slightly larger than a Nintendo DS. It’s capable of running a full desktop environment you’d expect on a PC or notebook and it’s designed mainly for gamers, geeks and developers (which would pretty much describe me)! It runs games on 3d hardware up to Quake3 and PSX/N64 emulation. But best of all, it’s completely open source! From the kernel to most of the games and applications being made and ported for it! I won’t go in too much detail here about the Pandora, so for more information about it, visit OpenPandora.org. Here you can see mine running Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (PSX):
Excuse the slightly crappy image quality, but it’s the best I have at the moment. I can make more pictures of it or record videos of certain games or programs upon request. Castlevania SotN works pretty much flawlessly, other than the sound occasionally keeps hiccing up. But very playable nonetheless.
I’m currently working on a small open source game for the Pandora, which is basically SDL Sand optimized and rewritten in C. It’s a Falling Sand Game, which is a very enjoyable sandbox game where you drop (draw) different kinds of particles (like sand, water, salt, etc) on a black canvas and they interact with each other (salt and water merge to salt water, oil and plants burn, etc). The Pandora has a touch screen, so it will fit perfectly for this kind of game. The only thing that worries me is that small things might be hard to see (FSG being a pixel-based game), since the Pandora has a DPI of 217, so I might have to build in scaling or zooming for that. But we’ll see how it turns out.
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