Sync / Desktop Installer / Pnd Manager


Rebel

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May 12, 2010
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Anyone else think it might be a good idea to have a desktop app to make it easy to manage pnds / send them to the panda as clearly the panda is going to be limited by the amount of SD card space about against the many hundreds of gigs of disk capacity most people will have on their desktop.


p.s. Sorry if this has been covered before.
 
IT has been covered very much before; its a many pronged thing. Essentially.. yes people have thought about it, and yes it will happen, and yes we need more bodies .. feel free to help out ;)

(And when you say 'desktop', you suddenly mean Windows, OSX and Linux, which makes it extra big :)

Theres several pushes..
- on-pandora
- using a repository (in traditional linux sense), so easy to do auto-updates to latest versions and easy to get new apps installed; conn is that tends to depend on device being connected, and implies applications are more than a single file. Apps would still need to be pandora-ified to handle being on SD with data going to SD instead of home directories.
- using pnd files as is, but with a repository or other file manager to assist getting new apps and new versions, but otherwise working as we have now; downloading pnd files is fine by hand, but we'll ultimately build something to do it more automated. (by 'we' I mean the community)
- a repo is being set up now so that firmware updates can be done on pandora with a simple command

- off-pandora
- without going into middle-men to help with pnd or repo downloading and dependancies, we have several websites to make it easi to get pnds (dl.openhandhelds which may go away, the app store, The Box system by dflemstr, and a couple others), and likely as these catch on more, we'll have tools to scan what apps you have and hit the online systems to see if there are any updates.
- for firmware updates the reliable old hotfix .pnd files will be made available still

The reason things like this are not here yet, is really just because theres not many devs with units yet, and the system is still very young. Feel free to help out.. most of the Pandora stuff comes about because we all (everyone) are building it

jeff
 
I have the feeling these two posts are slightly at cross purposes. Keeping apps updated is one problem, and is being prodded with many prongs. I think the OP was proposing that he might not have sufficient or large enough SD cards to be able to keep everything on the Pandora at once. I'm less convinced that this is a real issue - 16Gb class 2 cards are like £18, and most software is not really big. Do people have enough small SD cards that they need a way of managing a split of pnds across cards (and then syncing the appdata for app.pnd when it might be used on 2 different cards would be a small challenge)

Maybe for media/video - it would certainly be nice to have a myth-tv plugin which would re-encode and sync to an SD card, or a music sync to desktop over wifi (and actually, video could be synced overnight whilst charging too), but this is a more specific issue.
 
skeezix - Well updates was one part of what I was getting at although not my main point (my idea did have a check against repo for .pnd version updates and update if needed)

tsh - That's more what I was thinking of and while pure capacity is one problem it's more an issue of if I want to put PSX games on one card and snes games on another the programs may be quite small but the datafiles / roms soon accuminlate, I might also say want to have N64 "somewhere" but maybe not on a card it would be nice to be able to easy swap the PSX images for the N64" (and I know in real terms it's not like I cant do this manually with dir trees but then you just have to remember what you got where and then remember to put .pnd onto card fire up the pandora then remember to run an update on it and hope the wifi doesn't take 2.5 years to update it, having a application on my PC that keeps the pnd's always up to date and ready to drop on cards just seems so much.... nicer.

As I have already said on these boards you REALLY don't want anything I have coded as I am *YEARS* behind the game, I howerver have stupidly overpowered servers sat in bluesquare with around about 2.5TB/month transit going spare (we use vastly less then the package we have to pay for to cover the leccy costs of the servers ;) ) that I more then happy to use for the cause should anyone think of something cool to do with it.
 
For managing files onto and off of SD .. its not really anything to do with Pandora; not sure theres much software to cover such a thing ... sort of like backup software with more fine resolution -- you really want to have a 'media' (cdr, SD, usb thumb, drive directories, whatever) with a 'pull off, push back' type operation, where its stored in backup in the meantime. Or something.

Sounds pretty fringe to me -- most people will use a file explorer for such things :) ie: You could go the DaveC-ish route, and keep a directory structure like .. /pandora/menu/emu/snes and put your roms-dir in there with the pnd. Then you can move your entire snes collection on/off easily, or your whole emu collection. One directory move and poof.

For my part, I've got a pair of 8GB and I'm covered, excepting video .. but I'm the odd one out -- I sort of prefer smallish media cards, to encourage me to be more precise and up to date with my pickings, instead of trying to dump my whole collection and carry it with me :)

jeff
 
Hi,
I agree with you that basic management is nothing more complex a file copy from your main systems directory tree to the flash card I just thought it might be better for asset management and updates. That said as you pointed out if ppl carry stuff on say 4 cards it's accademic anyhow because they would have to update the pnd when it's inserted anyhow so it's a case of keeping a master copy updated and hoping the users sync from their cards to main system before use or just put it in and see if there's an update.
I just think only having a random collection of files stuffed in some folders where you have to rely on whatever xxx.pnd means to know what you are handling is remarkably klunky in this day and age ;)
 
.pnd syncing is actually a good way to do it, IMHO... if a "package management system" can be built around that concept, that would be great, but not absolutely necessary... having the gsync tool and manually downloading the updated png would be just fine, but it would be nice to automate pnd updating as much as possible for the non-tech savvy of us who are just retro and homebrew gamers. But having the sync process ignore folders not in the pnd to be synced (or is it not deleting files in the destination that are not in the source) so that assets can be preserved during the game update would be pretty much perfect. Again, this appeals to the not-so-tech-savvy, but still makes for ease of use across the board. Another idea would be a pnd archiving tool for the desktop that checks against whatever folder you provide as the place you keep your "master pnd files" and auto updates them similar to an rss feed which is always on and checks for updates in intervals (said program could also be added to the pandora and configured to do a single check everytime the pandora goes online) Wonder if it is possible to have a batch processing script that syncs all pnds on an SD card with pnds in the app store... it would have to be an end to end process (IMO) and something that could also be automated to run once upon net connection... as long as it was defaulted to ignore asset files and check only for updates (optional prompting of "do you want to update this PND?" would be cool as well) or possibly offer a list of new games (checking against an xml or something on the Pandora's NAND listing what games you already have and adding new games as they are either accquired or actually ran on the Pandora) would be cool as well... just spitballing the ideas as they come to me... maybe they can lead to some cool PND tools... :D
 
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