Imagine


Not so much moaning (allthough I am a founding member of the Grumpy Old Farts Club), as trying to sound the other bell for once. After all, we did give our money to Craig et al, to pretty much do with it as they saw fit, so it's not as if we owe those magnificent developers a kowtow. Without the money, there wouldn't be much to develop on, no?
 
Another case of premature exhortation. It aint over yet. Being impressed by how long it's been going is a bit puzzling as it's quite the opposite feeling of most of the pre-ordered and the biggest source of joy to the projects detractors and I IMAGINE it's going to take a bit longer still unless you mean it's impressive not everyone has canceled by now in which case I have to agree. Keep the faith and hang in here.
 
While not having a physical device to develop for isn't an insurmountable obstacle, it certainly isn't much of incentive.

I am one of those who intend to do some development, but just don't have the interest without a pandora in my hands.

I'm sure that there are many others in the same situation.
 
I think MooTheKow is correct in that only a small percentage of the Pandora owners will wind up being developers, but Exophase is also right in pointing out that when people do finally get the hardware in their hand, there will be a coolness factor of writing something and then seeing it run on a device you hold in your hand. I think there will be a number of little games coming out once people get their hands on the hardware, but significant indie development won't happen until the second or third batch of Pandoras ship, when the user base gets above 15-20k users.

I do however think that there could be quite a few Pandora Panic type games, where several people pitch in mini games in order to form a larger game. Some of the games will even be spun off into larger offerings, like PandJoust. This is an excellent way for newer developers (and artists!) to get their feet wet, without having to commit to a huge game that they never finish. Plus with Penjin and other toolkits being well-tested and fleshed out through their use in such game collections, and tutorials being written about how some of the games were developed, I think that these collections could serve as quite a nice petri dish for growing homebrew development.

Cheers,
Michael
 
Alerino said:
we're gonna get laid by showing pandora to girls on the streets... :D

Some people seriously overestimate what the Pandora will do for them :p
 
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Pleng said:
Alerino said:
we're gonna get laid by showing pandora to girls on the streets... :D

Some people seriously overestimate what the Pandora will do for them :p
thats the same thing people said about n64 and dc emulation though....
 
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DaMummy said:
Pleng said:
Alerino said:
we're gonna get laid by showing pandora to girls on the streets... :D

Some people seriously overestimate what the Pandora will do for them :p
thats the same thing people said about n64 and dc emulation though....
So we'll get laid with sound off and a bit of frameskip? Any port in a storm I guess.
 
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First, not every person who owns a Pandora will be able to contribute developer hours to porting, but every single Pandora user, be they ne'er so base, can be a walking advertisement, a font of information, and a builder of interest. The easiest way to get more developers actively interested in your platform is to get more people, period, to be actively interested. That's statistics¡

That a device like this exists has yet to become common knowledge among many other communities who would be quite excited about it. I promise that the day that Slashdot runs a titled "Uber-Portable Linux Device Plays All Your Old Games, Software" that links to a semi-professional geeky video review (finally putting an end to vaporware trash talk), you will rapidly have just as large a community as you like. Then, I optimistically hold, you will see it grow much, much larger.

Once upon a time, I bought a pair of these shoes. They look strange! I drew looks. I drew comments. Every person who asked, I would explain that they were expensive, but incredibly comfortable, and last for years. I told them where the local outlet was. From our conversations, I don't doubt that more than one of them ended up buying a pair. The moral I took from this: the single best advertisement any business can ask for is that the people who use their product do so publicly, and with great enjoyment. So as long as we can do that, I do think things will work themselves out.

So I guess I'm with Karl: I'm not against tempering expectations, but I think the important thing is to not sit on your laurels and assume that community will take care of itself. Communities need nurturing!
 
What i want out of the Pandora , at some point in the not too distant future ...


SOFTWARE
1.Simple user interface OS with multitasking for listening to music while running game/app
2.Simple OS media player and web browser capable of most/all normal use tasks
3.standard set of emulators,nes/snes.sms/smd running fullspeed
4.Other OS support for up and comming linux distros tailored to the Pandora ubuntu/mint

REALITY
1.we have this already and multitask could be in a future release
2.we already have this apart from hd movie playback ,again in the future
3.well .. we havemore than the standard set of emus already don't we
4.again we have a basic ubuntu image for pandora yey and also pandora angstrom linux right here and now.

so .. i recon the panda is doing pretty well for its preorder/early adopter first 4000 out the
door units and when the public at large see this little device out in the wild then i am sure
as i could ever possibly be that much more dev tech savy guys and gals will want they own mark
writen on the pandora.

enough said ?
 
paddy said:
SOFTWARE
1.Simple user interface OS with multitasking for listening to music while running game/app
REALITY
1.we have this already and multitask could be in a future release
WTF?
of course there is multitasking.
OHHH I see you're referring to the sound.
That just requires a software mixer, you could run multiple apps still. For example sometimes you want to just listen to music and play a game with the sound muted anyway, so just open the music player first.
Not having a sound mixer is different than not being able to multitask, and I'm pretty sure a software mixer will be ported right-quick as it's needed for a lot of other projects (eg. Torpor probably wouldn't want to write his other apps until he has a software mixer so maybe he'll be motivated to do this)
 
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MooTheKow said:
1) How many of the 4000 preorders are developers and
2) How many of the people in that 4,000 that are developers are actually going to contribute anything super meaningful.

That's the great thing about software, isn't it? It only takes one good dev to make something all 4000 of us (and more later) can enjoy indefinitely. We already have a handful of excellent developers hard at work. We already have a system that's more capable than a PC of not long ago. I have little doubt that more dev's will perk up once they see the hardware become a mass-produced reality. And who knows how many of us will be (and already have been -- see Pandora Panic) inspired by the little device to join their ranks?

I'm expecting even better things ahead but it'll all be just icing on the cake. The cake is in the oven and it smells like it's almost done!
 
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paddy said:
2.we already have this apart from hd movie playback ,again in the future
Well, it's not really useful to be able to decode HD movie on a device with a 800x480 screen and without VGA, DVI or HDMI out...
Moreover if you re-encode your movie, you'll be able to put more of them on your SD card. ;)
 
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Gruso said:
DaMummy said:
Pleng said:
Alerino said:
we're gonna get laid by showing pandora to girls on the streets... :D

Some people seriously overestimate what the Pandora will do for them :p
thats the same thing people said about n64 and dc emulation though....
So we'll get laid with sound off and a bit of frameskip? Any port in a storm I guess.

Does that mean that the main goals will be easier to achieve with less effort?
 
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Alerino said:
we're gonna get laid by showing pandora to girls on the streets... :D
Not off the street. You don't want them, anyway.
Y'gotta know the right girls ;)
 
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Gruso said:
DaMummy said:
Pleng said:
Alerino said:
we're gonna get laid by showing pandora to girls on the streets... :D

Some people seriously overestimate what the Pandora will do for them :p
thats the same thing people said about n64 and dc emulation though....
So we'll get laid with sound off and a bit of frameskip? Any port in a storm I guess.
Vision impaired deaf girls need love too.
 
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rabidpoobear said:
paddy said:
SOFTWARE
1.Simple user interface OS with multitasking for listening to music while running game/app
REALITY
1.we have this already and multitask could be in a future release
WTF?
of course there is multitasking.
OHHH I see you're referring to the sound.
That just requires a software mixer, you could run multiple apps still. For example sometimes you want to just listen to music and play a game with the sound muted anyway, so just open the music player first.
Not having a sound mixer is different than not being able to multitask, and I'm pretty sure a software mixer will be ported right-quick as it's needed for a lot of other projects (eg. Torpor probably wouldn't want to write his other apps until he has a software mixer so maybe he'll be motivated to do this)
Sound mixer : FIXED. ALSA working.
 
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hidden developer here, I normally only write stuff for fun or family since coding stuff to work on every possible permutation of the PC "standard" is a major pain, smaller apps have more code devoted to device detection and fallback modes than there is actual application, so writing stuff for the Pandora will be a really nice change, back to the days of Amiga/Speccy/C64 etc

having said that, there is a chance (admittedly, incredibly slight)* that the Pandora may never appear, so I ain't getting excited until I have the source of joy clutched in my grubby mitts, THEN I'll get excited, and start coding, until then I will just keep making notes and wait to see what occurs.


* ie: Craig gets hit by bus or has breakdown and spends funds on wild living, or sells out to Nintendo/Sony for millions and just sends everyone a refund etc, lots of possible scenarios...but VERY remote possibilities imo.
 
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