Introduction and some questions...


Darkjudge1

Still Fresh
Joined
Jul 30, 2012
Messages
8
Location
Orygon
Well, time I got myself an account and introduced myself: I'm a new pandora user (though not an entire stranger to Linux.) and have been following the project since the early days, off and on. It was exciting to see and finally decided to plunk down my hard earned cash for one. :)


Also, for those who may not have dealt with ithic.com before, and if you're here in the US, I must say the owner is awesome! Poor guy got to talk to me as I was just waking up (hey, I work swing shift.) since Google Checkout decided that it didn't like my name and therefore it must be eaten. It's kinda cool to get a call from the owner of the company and the fun of smaller projects like this. Service was fast and personable. Give Link a shot.


So, I got into this because I needed a small machine that was game oriented, but also had the capabilities of the PC and at least a good 10 hours of battery life and Linux in all its glory. (I've tried netbooks, They're ok, but I wanted something a bit more portable.) After looking at the Sony Lifestyle PC (and not really being satisified as the battery life looked atrocious.) I remember this project and decided to check in on it again (as the last time I looked, I think everything was still being done in Germany. But hey, there's a US dealer, the price is right and so, let's finally give this thing a spin. Seems like everyone here who bought it REALLY likes it. Which is awesome. Full desktop with some dev tools (Wannabe programmer, don't get too excited.)


This machine looks like it'll run DOSbox about perfectly. The implementation in Android just about drove me nuts, but that was probably about a year ago with an Epic. There was nothing wrong with the emulator per se. But the keyboard input on a physical keyboard was... lacking and chances are, it was probably user error. From what I could tell in the youtube reviews, the crazy thing seemed to have no trouble at all with much of anything that I would want to play...(Some old EGA/VGA stuff. Say... pre-1996?) So, that was a major selling point to me as well.


We also have a PSX emulator. N64 emulation (ok, we're still getting there and that's okay. Slightly disappointed Goldeneye doesn't run as well as I would hope, but I have some ideas for workarounds. Speaking of, anyone able to get this to run perfectly, yet? Think the latest video I watched was 1 month ago, though as I recall, the user didn't overclock.), and a few other open source games that weren't there when I used to have Ubuntu Linux as my OS. (Gah. I really don't like the way that distro is going. Ubuntu kernal my left foot. How dare you disparage the good name of Linus Torvalds!) And that's before we get into SNES (maybe now I get to see about Earthbound.), Sega, NES, Atari, and just so many other games that were either before my time, never had access to, etc.As someone mentioned, there's a life time of gaming here.


One other question while I'm thinking about it: QEMU (which looks like an awesome project) looks like It can handle some Windows 95 stuff. Has anyone tried Win98 (IIRC, the specs aren't that different, though I might have to go dig out my old disc for that.)


Finally, can anyone point me to some easy terminal guides? (I have not perused the entirety of the wiki yet. so maybe I'm getting ahead of the game.) I want to learn a bit more about the black magic that is terminal as I know most everything in DOS 6.22 (and some stuff from Windows XP/Vista/7) and would like to get about that proficient (down to writing config files, compiling source code for stuff that doesn't have executables, etc.) as I seem to follow the guides and end up having to look at two or three because, well, sometimes the stuff I do at the command line doesn't work. Hence why I'm asking this question. I have a few guides I'm working with now, but am always interested in more. (Preferrably guides that have you hands on with the terminal as that's the best way I learn.)


Ok, that's probably enough for my first post.
 
Hello Darkjudge, welcome.


Nice initial post, I too am keen to get my mitts on a Pandora, ordered one from the First Batch couple years back or whenever it was, I try to blank it from memory for sanity sake, and the nice surprise it will be that glorious morning my postie calls with it.


Anyway regarding the Terminal, this page of the wiki might be of help:


http://pandorawiki.org/Basic_Linux_Guide


Not sure about the Goldeneye speeds etc, someone will no doubt confirm this for you either way soon enough though
 
Welcome to you too. Someone mentioned that they were going to try out Win98 once they had gotten their hands on the new 1Ghz model.
 
One other question while I'm thinking about it: QEMU (which looks like an awesome project) looks like It can handle some Windows 95 stuff. Has anyone tried Win98 (IIRC, the specs aren't that different, though I might have to go dig out my old disc for that.)
It is a little bit more sluggish then Win95 if you turn off the whole IE integration into the Explorer.
 
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Only real advantage of 98 ist, that you can use the touchscreen properly.
 
Welcome to the boards Darkjudge1.


One little warning about DOSBox. It's keyboard mapping is based on a normal qwerty keyboard and not the keyboard of the Pandora.


I.e. to type a : you need to type shift+; which maps to shift+Fn+, on the Pandora.
 
Welcome to the boards! Thank you for the kind words. Enjoy your Pandora when it arrives, and this is the place for answering your questions as you're already finding out. I'll just say that there is some killer homebrew and ports on the Pandora as well.
 
NLS -- Yeah, I was reading about the 1 Ghz model. That's one of the few things it looks like it would improve (I've got plenty of stuff to play, but would like to give Diablo 2 a shot, though I suppose I could do that through the PSX emulator.) I'm curious to see what happens with battery life... but hey, the Rebirth unit looked perfect to me.


mcobit -- Hmm.. Ok. I might play with it just to see what happens. I'm guessing I have to over clock for it to be useful. (Need to go read that topic some more...)


Caine -- Understood. I might go check it out from the repo. Though I'm now curious to see what the default buttons are.


Link -- You're welcome!


FZERO -- Thank you for the link. I'll read that a bit more here in a bit.
 
Welcome.


Win98 is usable, if you like browsing around in explorer. Anything more than that and you're going to task the system a bit much - but that's on a 256MB Classic pandora, not a 1GHz model.


DOSBox is pretty good also, but not as fast as QEmu.


Link really is the dude. You'll fit right in, I'm sure.


D.
 
Hmm, just went back to the system requirements of 95. Yeah, my memory was faulty. Guess I should give this a look, instead.
 
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