Oh look, another review!


Some of your issues in the Software can be addressed with some scripting. I wish I knew how, but others do.
 
Did you set a label for your sdcard in windows, or whereever you load your files onto it? If it has a label this will always be the name of the sd in /media ;)


Fileassoziations can be done with pndutils. http://repo.openpandora.org/?page=detail&app=PND_utils


Edit: And a nice writeup btw. Would like to see your game materialize ;) I think gamemaker runtime works on pandora, so does java.


Maybe post into the devsection, you can get help there.
 
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[*]The Mini USB port got me to thinking that I could plug my Pandora into my computer like my GP2X and look at the system (and maybe the SD Card contents) and add/remove software. But no, when I plug it in, it just charges. I'd really like it if I could access my SD cards from the system (Why will be explained in the software section.)

This actually does work, though not intuitive. Plug the Pandora into your computer, and then you need to go the menu and find "SD Mass Storage" (sorry, I don't have my Pandora in front at the moment, so I don't know the exact wording....). It'll then pop up a menu, and then you select the card you want 'passed through' to the computer you plugged into.


I have run into problems where a PND didn't shut down correctly, and was still in use by the system, thus blocking the pass through. A simple reboot fixes that every time, though there are other ways to get around it.
 
The Mini USB port got me to thinking that I could plug my Pandora into my computer like my GP2X and look at the system (and maybe the SD Card contents) and add/remove software. But no, when I plug it in, it just charges. I'd really like it if I could access my SD cards from the system (Why will be explained in the software section.)

In XFCE (the desktop, not minimenu), you should head into the "System" menu on the pandora menu and choose "SD Mass Storage" - then, with your pandora plugged in via the mini-usb, choose the SD card you want to expose to the system. Your PC will then pick up the SD card and let you write to it. When you're done, be sure to use the "safely eject hardware" option on your system try (in a windows machine - in linux you can do it from your file manager), before closing the SD Mass Storage window on the Pandora.


It's not terribly reliable at present, though better in Hotfix 5 than it was before. I've found that often I need to eject the SD card and re-insert afterwards on some occasions, but that's quite rare. There's also an issue where if you have a PND open, or the PND system hasn't properly closed a PND off that you find you cannot set your SD card to mass storage mode - just reboot the pandora and you'll be good to go.


Edit: Ninja'd :)


D.
 
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Nice review!

[*]The Mini USB port got me to thinking that I could plug my Pandora into my computer like my GP2X and look at the system (and maybe the SD Card contents) and add/remove software. But no, when I plug it in, it just charges. I'd really like it if I could access my SD cards from the system (Why will be explained in the software section.)

If I understand correctly what you meant, you CAN do it! Just select Menu->System->SD-Mass Storage, it will pop-up a nice dialog to choose which SDCard to expose and then, when you'll plug it, it will auto mount on your desktop (at least, it works here :D ).


EDIT: OMG, double ninja'd ;)
 
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  • Like I said above, the USB Port is nice, but not particularly useful in it's current state (At least from my point of view...) If I could connect a Gamepad to it and use it as a second controller, that would be awesome and a much more useful tool.
You should be able to do this - if it's not working for you, you probably have a USB 1.1 gamepad. Plugging it in through a USB 2.0 hub should work.

  • Some PNDs don't show up, period. Dega is a good example. Is there another emulator that runs Master System and Game Gear games? (I know Picodrive has basic support of Master System titles, but... I want my Game Gear games too!) That or a way to make Dega appear?
Dega shows up fine for me.

Mygames19 said:
  • Why can't I assign my own programs to open files? I'd rather use gPicView than the built in picture viewer, but I can't figure out how to change that. Maybe I'm just missing something....
This is a planned feature, and already implemented by PND_utils.
 
  • Some PNDs don't show up, period. Dega is a good example. Is there another emulator that runs Master System and Game Gear games? (I know Picodrive has basic support of Master System titles, but... I want my Game Gear games too!) That or a way to make Dega appear?
Dega shows up fine for me.
Going on personal experience, the version of Dega in the repo does not show up, whereas the one in the app-store does. :p


By the by, great review, Mygames19. I've added it to the User Reviews Aggregation Thread.
 
As someone noted above, if you label your SD card volumes, they will always be named by their label and not auto-assigned names by the operating system as long as you don't label two of them the same.


Mednafen also plays Sega Master System and Game Gear games, and by what I can tell so far, does so quite well. It emulates a lot of systems, though, and makes a separate menu entry and/or icon for every one, so be prepared to have a lot of entries added if you use it. The weak points in the emulation for Mednafen are Game Boy Advance (I use gpSP), Virtual Boy (I haven't really emulated that system anyway), and to a lesser extent the NES (sometimes you need an overclock, and I've noticed sound issues; I use gpFCE-GP2X). All the other systems it emulates (Game Boy, Lynx, NeoGeo Pocket, PC Engine/TurboDuo, and the aforementioned Sega systems (I haven't tried Wonderswan)) it seems to emulate very well indeed so far (I get to play Dracula X: Rondo of Blood again :) )
 
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Sorry for the late reply! I was out of town for 2 days with no internet connection... ^^'

Did you set a label for your sdcard in windows, or whereever you load your files onto it? If it has a label this will always be the name of the sd in /media ;)


Fileassoziations can be done with pndutils. http://repo.openpandora.org/?page=detail&app=PND_utils

I labeled my SD cards in Windows "OpenPandora" and "GP2X", but I used an autorun.ini file to do it. Opening up Properties reveals a blank title on both cards. Problem Solved! Removed from the review. :)

Edit: And a nice writeup btw. Would like to see your game materialize ;) I think gamemaker runtime works on pandora, so does java.


Maybe post into the devsection, you can get help there.

I might be posting some of the stuff I've come up with for my game in the dev section in the next few days... I dunno. I'm afraid to announce it publicly because I'd hate to have worked on it for a year and than someone else comes along and takes my idea. :p

I seriously doubt the Game Maker runtime wworks on the pandora.

You'd be right, slaeshjag. The Game Maker I'm talking about creates Windows Executables and Mac Applications... I don't see any Linux support.

Stuff about SD Mass Storage that I didn't know about.
The guy who got ninja'd posting about the SD Mass Storage program that I didn't know about.
The guy who got ninja'd by a ninja posting about the SD Mass Storage program that I didn't know about.

Thanks all 3 of you! That worked. I guess now my only complaint is that it be titled something different..."SD Mass Storage" sounds like a SD properties editor for your SD cards to me.

You should be able to do this - if it's not working for you, you probably have a USB 1.1 gamepad. Plugging it in through a USB 2.0 hub should work.

I don't have an USB Gamepad so I didn't try but there's a video with ED playing on some external pad.


(Posted Video)

I used a hub, and it still didn't work. Than again, I WAS trying to use it to play 2P Super Mario Kart via SNES9x4p, and it doesn't give you the option to map the controls. Your video shows that I CAN map my gamepad for use in Picodrive though. My real complaint I guess is that the option to have more players isn't really supported by other programs.

Dega shows up fine for me.

Going on personal experience, the version of Dega in the repo does not show up, whereas the one in the app-store does. :p

I download almost everything from the Repo (unless it's not on it!) So ya, it was the version I downloaded. I downloaded a new one and played some Sonic Chaos on my trip. :)

This is a planned feature, and already implemented by PND_utils.

I never downloaded PND_utils because I thought recent hotfixes make it obsolete. Guess I was wrong. XD


It probably will be with the next hotfix.

Mednafen also plays Sega Master System and Game Gear games, and by what I can tell so far, does so quite well. It emulates a lot of systems, though, and makes a separate menu entry and/or icon for every one, so be prepared to have a lot of entries added if you use it. The weak points in the emulation for Mednafen are Game Boy Advance (I use gpSP), Virtual Boy (I haven't really emulated that system anyway), and to a lesser extent the NES (sometimes you need an overclock, and I've noticed sound issues; I use gpFCE-GP2X). All the other systems it emulates (Game Boy, Lynx, NeoGeo Pocket, PC Engine/TurboDuo, and the aforementioned Sega systems (I haven't tried Wonderswan)) it seems to emulate very well indeed so far (I get to play Dracula X: Rondo of Blood again :) )

Mednafen wasn't released when I wrote this review, but I DID download it before my trip and beat Sonic Pocket Adventure using it's Neo Geo Pocket emu. :)


The program could use some work though. I couldn't figure out how to save state in it, or turn off the 3D effect on the Virtual Boy emulator. It's probably because it's a direct port of the source or something...


Thanks for all your help! A few addendum's have been made to the review to accommodate for the responses I got. :)
 
Mednafen wasn't released when I wrote this review, but I DID download it before my trip and beat Sonic Pocket Adventure using it's Neo Geo Pocket emu. :)


The program could use some work though. I couldn't figure out how to save state in it, or turn off the 3D effect on the Virtual Boy emulator. It's probably because it's a direct port of the source or something...

You should be able to save states in Mednafen with F5 and load saved states with F7. You can select which slot to save to / load from by pressing a number key before you save or load your state. I believe that "0" is selected by default.


As far as I know, you can only turn off the 3D effect in the Virtual Boy emulator by manually editing the configuration file (yourSDcard/pandora/appdata/mednafen/.mednafen/mednafen-09x.cfg) If you want to try it, find the appropriate lines and change them to this:



Code:
;Anaglyph preset colors.

vb.anaglyph.preset disabled


;Anaglyph maximum brightness color for left view.

vb.anaglyph.lcolor 0xffba00


;Anaglyph maximum brightness color for right view.

vb.anaglyph.rcolor 0x000000


...

;Disable parallax for BG and OBJ rendering

vb.disable_parallax 1


That turns color for the right eye to black (instead of blue) so you only see the left eye data. I would save the file before I tried this. Proceed at your own risk (a wipe of the mednafen appdata folder would restore your default settings if necessary).
 
The Mini USB port got me to thinking that I could plug my Pandora into my computer like my GP2X and look at the system (and maybe the SD Card contents) and add/remove software. But no, when I plug it in, it just charges. I'd really like it if I could access my SD cards from the system (Why will be explained in the software section.)

In XFCE (the desktop, not minimenu), you should head into the "System" menu on the pandora menu and choose "SD Mass Storage" - then, with your pandora plugged in via the mini-usb, choose the SD card you want to expose to the system. Your PC will then pick up the SD card and let you write to it. When you're done, be sure to use the "safely eject hardware" option on your system try (in a windows machine - in linux you can do it from your file manager), before closing the SD Mass Storage window on the Pandora.


It's not terribly reliable at present, though better in Hotfix 5 than it was before. I've found that often I need to eject the SD card and re-insert afterwards on some occasions, but that's quite rare. There's also an issue where if you have a PND open, or the PND system hasn't properly closed a PND off that you find you cannot set your SD card to mass storage mode - just reboot the pandora and you'll be good to go.


Edit: Ninja'd :)


D.
You should note the pandora needs too be switched off when you conect it too the computer or sd mass storage does not work.Something that should be fixed in the next update,the pandora should instantly show up if you attach a mini usb .
 
very awesome review, can you say more about the flash support?

Flash support, for me, has been poor. But than again, I expected more out of it than I should have.


After failing to work out using MiniTube, I tried actually going to Youtube to view the video. It took a really long time to load, but the video did run... it was about 4 minutes long and at 320p.


I than tried to watch a 25-minute long video... Well, it was downloading really slowly, so I let it sit and download. The problem is, somewhere between 12 and 15 minutes, something goes wrong and the browser crashes. It's happened 2 other times too. So only use Youtube on short, low-quality videos. In Firefox, anyways. I'd recommend you install a Youtube download plug-in on Firefox (or whatever you use) so you can download the video as an MP4 straight to your Pandora's SD Cards. Than you don't have to worry about the plug-in crashing.


As far as flash games go, I've only tried 1 flash game, which was fairly basic. It ran okay, with some lag, but it ran. Unfortunately, after playing it for 15 minutes, it crashed. You might have better luck using the SWF player and downloading the games to play in it, instead.


Keep in mind that this was all experienced using Firefox 4. Recently, Firefox 5 came out. Also, it's been said elsewhere that Midori now has Flash support that I've yet to try. The slow internet connection I get from my Pandora and the weak flash support are the only reasons why I still use my desktop though. ;)
 
Mini-USB stuf...
You should note the pandora needs too be switched off when you conect it too the computer or sd mass storage does not work.Something that should be fixed in the next update,the pandora should instantly show up if you attach a mini usb .

Mine doesn't need to be switched off to get sd mass storage to work. What OS are you using?
 
Mini-USB stuf...
You should note the pandora needs too be switched off when you conect it too the computer or sd mass storage does not work.Something that should be fixed in the next update,the pandora should instantly show up if you attach a mini usb .

Mine doesn't need to be switched off to get sd mass storage to work. What OS are you using?

Ditto - I just attach it and select the mass storage option, no turning off necessary. Sometimes it needs rebooting because the cards get "lost" but other than that...


D.
 
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