So What Are The Musts For You?


yaKC

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Aug 21, 2007
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I remember when buying my GP2X (just over a year ago) I had very definite systems that I was buying it for... Even as much as I love homebrew there's no way I could have justified 200 pounds (once charger, batteries, SD card etc all in) for a handheld, so I was basically buying it as a portable version of my fave machines.

For me at the time my GP2X was bought for the following :-

MAME - always been happy with MAME

Amiga - Wasn't as good as I hoped / needed, and whilst many could argue that Amiga on 2X works well (and indeed it does) the amount of overclock, frameskip and the incompatibility with games just killed it dead for me, and ended up using ST emulator instead with it's rock solid 60 fps... hopefully the Pandora will manage a steady 50/60 fps and compatibility will go up... I stress though that the compatibility was the main killjoy for me, I could have handled a 2 or 3 frameskip if more games had worked.

Spectrum - Whilst there were initial hiccups with the speccy emulator for us F200 owners, once it was put down to polling the battery meter (or whatever) I couldn't imagine a sweeter emulator, both for actual emulation and the onscreen keyboeard, joystick swapping etc etc... even being able to overclock the emulated speccy to nearly double speed and still have the clock of 2X at 200 Mhz or less, wow

SAM Coupe - Whilst the emulator came a long way over last year, have never felt that it's truly full speed, still with many games if you have sound on you have to overclock to nearly 250 Mhz and still frameskip to play games and Mode 3 (512*192) is not supported which was a very widely used Mode on SAM. I'd donate a good whack of cash (for me, I'm disabled and poor) as indeed I did offer for the 2X for a decent SAM emulator on Pandora

So, after much rabbling and not of much worth :p I had a hit rate of 2 systems perfect and better than expected with the ol' GP2x, and 2 systems that I bought it for sadly not as good as I wanted / needed. Still after the same systems on Pandora, what are your systems you are buying for? :)
 
Since the Pandora has a keyboard, I'm justifying it as a:
PDA replacement
PMP replacement
Laptop replacement for super-portable computing
Web server if I feel like it


I might use a GBA emulator but I don't really care for emulators enough to consider it part of why I'm buying it.
 
First and foremost?
-Portable video player, because I'm tired of having to convert my videos I want something that can use multiple players in case one doesn't support the video I want to watch I can try a different one.)

-Portable Document reading and editing, Every once and a while I'll get an Ebook and I hate reading them in TXT format because they lose all their rich text formating. I cant see Italics or bolds and forget special blocks of text, some times they dont even show apostrophes! Also I'd like to get back into writing again something I used to do a long time a go and I'd like to have the ability to do that anytime the mood hits me without lugging a 20 pound laptop that only lasts 2 hours.

-Games. c'mon you knew it was coming.
 
My biggest personal must is a GBC emulator so I can relive Zelda OoA/OoS in a portable environment as they were meant to be played. Both of my original cartridges don't work, and even if they did, my original GBC (and GBA) has a screen scratched beyond usability.
 
I want a Linux handheld, plain and simple. I have a Nokia N800, but the whole maemo/Hildon stuff really sucks IMO and it's difficult to just run plain Linux apps on it.
 
0) Working hardware.
1) Working drivers (including wifi).
2) Shell prompt.

Everything else is just gravy. :)
 
  • Video player
  • Audio player
  • Games
  • Genesis and GBA emulation
  • Web browsing
Another of the reasons is that it is basically a Linux laptop, and there is so much to tinker and have fun with because of that. At one point (before I heard about the Pandora) I was interested about the Nokia Linux tablets because of this. Also there is the homebrew; I am beginning programming so running your own code on a portable device like this is great! :)
 
- Music
- Internet
- Videos
- Games!
- Game/Software Development

I'm really looking forward to testing out the hardware of pandora ;).
 
- Replacement for my old laptop (which will be scraped for working parts)
- Writing
- Internet
- Media
- Work on the go
- Studying (I can work on my research papers anywhere!)
- Games
- Programming

Yeah, just about everything it does. I'm new to linux,but not much else. I plan on putting something like open office on it so I can use it for work and school purposes as well as entertainment.
 
Game wise I'd say anyone who plans on playing games on it are going to be playing what ever they can get a hold of. I mean it'd be great to just have a better GP2x.

We already had TG16/turboduo, genesis/megadrive, NES, Mastersystem, MAME, Amiga, Lynx, GB©, (almost kinda sorta)GBA, (slow)PS1, and SNES(to an extent)... etc etc, If the System does most of those, or more, and better, there will be wet underware all over the world.
 
Netbook replacement
Portable media player
Emulators, specifically those that will surely be better than they were on GP2X (including Amiga, C64, PSX, GBA and SNES) and MAME/NeoGeo of course.
 
Internet Tablet(surfing, youtube)
Business(keep track of online sales, pre-tax calculation)
Quake I-III uber-handheld(working 3D-acceleration!!)
-> replace N800 completely, Notebook partially
 
Video Playback
Web Browsing - via WI-FI
LINUX - hopefully for writing and testing perl scripts and possibly connecting to web servers and test functionality
E-Book/PDF Reader - this should kick the sony e-reader into touch by screen colors
Office - Initially Abi-Word and Gnumeric, but hopefully a older port of Open Office which is happy in 256MB
GAMES - All of classics - Atari 800xl, Sinclair 48K, C64, BBC B, Amiga, Atari ST, SMS, SNES, Mega Drive, NEO-GEO, MAME, and N64 (possibly)
 
Full keyboard + emulators for older computers (BBC micro, spectrum, etc) is going to be a dream come true. Dosbox should also allow me to play most of the stuff from abandonware, which includes some of the first games I ever played.

Other than that, internet browsing should be better than on my phone, which is always a plus.
 
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