What Can You Do With Pandora?


SeriouslyMike

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Allrighty. So, I'm seriously considering getting the Pandora, but I'm curious about doing some extreme things with it (running heavy stuff like GameCube and PS2 emulators - they'll most probably be made sooner or later). OMAP3530's native speed is given in Wikipedia as 720MHz and people here managed to crank it up to 800 MHz without major problems.

The questions are:
1. Can I run WinE or other Windows emulator to run Windows98/XP games?
2. Is there an emulator for Gamecube, PS2 or PSP available for Pandora?
3. How complicated porting Q3 engine games is?
4. Did anyone attempt to port Unreal Engine 2 (UT2003, Splinter Cell, XIII) to Linux? Would it run on Pandora?
5. ...can OpenOffice be installed on Pandora? (yes, I'm serious)

Word of warning: I'm a complete newb when it comes to Linux. I only used it once to un-f*** a laptop so Windows could be installed properly on it.
 
Hello newbie!
You should start with the wiki, then google
Code:
site:gp32x.de "search-term"
And come back when there are questions left.



:)
 
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1) Not possible. Some windows 98/XP games are open source or have open source remakes/implementations of their engine and might run. In general: no.
2) Forget about it.
3) For most: impossible.
4) Is it open source?
5) Sure, no problem.
 
Seriously Mike said:
Allrighty. So, I'm seriously considering getting the Pandora, but I'm curious about doing some extreme things with it (running heavy stuff like GameCube and PS2 emulators - they'll most probably be made sooner or later). OMAP3530's native speed is given in Wikipedia as 720MHz and people here managed to crank it up to 800 MHz without major problems.

The questions are:
1. Can I run WinE or other Windows emulator to run Windows98/XP games?
2. Is there an emulator for Gamecube, PS2 or PSP available for Pandora?
3. How complicated porting Q3 engine games is?
4. Did anyone attempt to port Unreal Engine 2 (UT2003, Splinter Cell, XIII) to Linux? Would it run on Pandora?
5. ...can OpenOffice be installed on Pandora? (yes, I'm serious)

Word of warning: I'm a complete newb when it comes to Linux. I only used it once to un-f*** a laptop so Windows could be installed properly on it.

1)Don't try running windows on this. There is dos-box that can play early dos games.
2)No chance of that. There is a unreleased dreamcast emulator in the works that maybe maybe will play some games fullspeed. That is as extreme emulation you'll get from the pandora. It's not built to do the things you're wanting to do.
3)?
4)?
5)Yes
 
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4) Unreal Engine is not open source AFAIK. A Linux port on its own is not good enough, because it will still only run on x86 hardware (ie intel/AMD CPU). The OMAP is ARM.

5) You can install OO but there are more lightweight options (Abiword, Gnumeric etc). These come pre-installed. :)
 
hum, actually:

2) there is actually a psp emulator on developpment, don't imagine you'll ever be able to run psp real game at an acceptable rate through...
 
Xenu said:
Seriously Mike said:
2. Is there an emulator for Gamecube, PS2 or PSP available for Pandora?
3. How complicated porting Q3 engine games is?
2)No chance of that. There is a unreleased dreamcast emulator in the works that maybe maybe will play some games fullspeed. That is as extreme emulation you'll get from the pandora. It's not built to do the things you're wanting to do.
3)?
Okay, so to clarify:
2. There's no GC, PS2 or PSP emulator available for Pandora YET. Which, of course, doesn't mean there won't be one in the foreseeable future. Okay, maybe GC emulation would be a wee bit problematic, considering the lovely "CPU: The fastest you can find." remark in the list of requirements for Dolphin. So with a little faith and my financial record I can safely say someone's gonna write a decent PS2 or PSP emulator for Pandora before I buy it (hey, living in Middle Eastern Europe is hard!).
3. Well, can the Pandora version of IOQuake3 (or other Q3 ports, if they exist) be reworked to run titles like Soldier of Fortune 2, Urban Terror or Return to Castle Wolfenstein?
 
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Seriously Mike said:
Xenu said:
Seriously Mike said:
2. Is there an emulator for Gamecube, PS2 or PSP available for Pandora?
3. How complicated porting Q3 engine games is?
2)No chance of that. There is a unreleased dreamcast emulator in the works that maybe maybe will play some games fullspeed. That is as extreme emulation you'll get from the pandora. It's not built to do the things you're wanting to do.
3)?
Okay, so to clarify:
2. There's no GC, PS2 or PSP emulator available for Pandora YET. Which, of course, doesn't mean there won't be one in the foreseeable future. Okay, maybe GC emulation would be a wee bit problematic, considering the lovely "CPU: The fastest you can find." remark in the list of requirements for Dolphin. So with a little faith and my financial record I can safely say someone's gonna write a decent PS2 or PSP emulator for Pandora before I buy it (hey, living in Middle Eastern Europe is hard!).
3. Well, can the Pandora version of IOQuake3 (or other Q3 ports, if they exist) be reworked to run titles like Soldier of Fortune 2, Urban Terror or Return to Castle Wolfenstein?

PS2 Emulation will NEVER happen on the Pandora. NEVER. Nor will Gamecube. PSP emulation will not work the way you want it to either. Chances are you won't be able to play commercial PSP games so you can consider that a NEVER too.
 
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fraseyboy said:
PS2 Emulation will NEVER happen on the Pandora. NEVER. Nor will Gamecube. PSP emulation will not work the way you want it to either. Chances are you won't be able to play commercial PSP games so you can consider that a NEVER too.
Exactly. The Pandora simply is not powerful enough to emulate a PS2 or Gamecube. With some clever tricks it might (maybe) be able to emulate a couple of the less complex PSP games (but don't count on it).

<edit>
Seriously Mike said:
Everyone says "NEVER", but nobody says WHY. So, any reason it's impossible?
Search the boards, this has been explained in detail. It mainly boils down to lack of processing power.
</edit>
 
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KodeIn said:

Better link:

http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/53883-faq-is-it-possible/


Seriously Mike said:
Everyone says "NEVER", but nobody says WHY. So, any reason it's impossible?

Read my FAQ above - it actually explains why. Enjoy!
 
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2. GC and PS2 are definitely off the table. Someone may write or port something, and there's nothing stopping them from trying, but those systems will never run on this hardware at a playable rate. Rather like the N64 emulator for the GP2X. It runs one demo ROM, at about 2fps.

3. It's dangerous to speculate on which ioQuake 3 games we might see, but speculation is fun. Zeq2lite will almost certainly happen (one of the devs, MDave, has a Pandora already), although he says it will require a little / lot of massaging to run nicely on the hardware. The same could be said for many other ioQuake 3 games - they could happen if someone's willing to take the job on, and put a lot of effort into optimisation. We've had a Smokin' Guns dev in the forums too, who expressed what I'd call a passing, cautious interest in doing a port. Time will tell. :)
 
OK, one more stupid question, I hope you can put up with me: how complicated would emulating one machine with a RISC processor on a different machine with a (faster) RISC processor be? Both in coding difficulty and performance.
 
That depends on what the processors in question are, what the speeds involved are, how similar the RISC instruction sets are (RISC is a philosophy in processor design, it is not an instruction set) and a bunch of other factors. Mind, that is only about the processors. When you want to emulate consoles, emulating the main processor is the easy thing - it is the weird hardware surrounding it that is the most problematic.

In other words: How long is a piece of string?
 
Seriously Mike said:
1. Can I run WinE or other Windows emulator to run Windows98/XP games?
There was a proof of concept that went very, very slow. Eventually maybe it'll get sorted, but probably not to the extent that you desire. Older games that only required 200Mhz processors MAYBE, though likely not even that high. Different architectures, and emulating a CISC like x86 isn't nearly as easy as emulating a RISC style CPU.

Seriously Mike said:
2. Is there an emulator for Gamecube, PS2 or PSP available for Pandora?
Despite what others have said, PSP is looking like it could be very viable in the distant future. I seem to recall JayFoxRox posting some very promising results with his (very very alpha) emulator. Only time will tell, of course. Imagine it's like this: you've got a bucket full of lego blocks and you need to somehow stack them, all of them, into a box. With the PSP, looking at the number of lego blocks, there seems to be a good chance that, if they're assembled properly, all the blocks will eventually fit in that box, just barely. Even the funny shaped ones that don't seem to go anywhere. But that's just from looking at the blocks and guessing, actually assembling them we might find that a few blocks are left over that didn't fit. There are just way more blocks for the Gamecube and PS2 to fit them into that same box, though. In both cases, any leftover blocks will need to be discarded or carried separately, which results in slow down. Analogy starts breaking up here, but think of it like that: so much stuff in the PS2 and Gamecube that there's just no way to get it all in there. Sega Saturn is in a similar boat, even though it's older it was a lot more complex, so its lego pieces are in all kinds of weird shapes that aren't friendly.
Dreamcast, like the PSP, is showing a great deal of promise, though the Dreamcast has a few more odd shaped blocks than the PSP which may have to be abandoned.

Seriously Mike said:
3. How complicated porting Q3 engine games is?
There's already one version of Q3 ported. I played it. It was nice, smooth. I died many times. Because I suck at Quake.
Someone is working on porting a more advanced version. I expect it to also be nice, smooth, and die many times. Because I still suck at Quake.

Seriously Mike said:
4. Did anyone attempt to port Unreal Engine 2 (UT2003, Splinter Cell, XIII) to Linux? Would it run on Pandora?
As was mentioned, closed source can't be ported. Even if it runs on Linux, that's x86 Linux and probably wouldn't work on Pandora. If we could get ahold of the x86 Linux source code, there's a greater chance of it being ported than if it were Windows only, but it would still require a lot of work.

Seriously Mike said:
5. ...can OpenOffice be installed on Pandora? (yes, I'm serious)
Yes, this was a major selling point for many!
I wouldn't "install" it on the Pandora, though. It's quite huge and the Pandora has a limited storage capacity. Someone will come along sooner or later and create a package which can just be dropped onto an SD card which you can use. In the meantime, Abiword works great and is installed by default (as was mentioned as well)

Seriously Mike said:
Word of warning: I'm a complete newb when it comes to Linux.
That shouldn't matter at all. Forget that it runs Linux, tell yourself it's just a custom operating system, akin to the PS3, XBox, or Wii systems and you'll be fine. So many people get caught up in the idea that Linux is "hard", when in fact a lot of things around them already run Linux. My favourite example is Tivo. Tivo is Linux, and no one seriously complains about it because of that because 99% of the population don't know. The Pandora should be the same way. You'll notice it has a file manager, the command line is available if you want or need it (a little more need during the early days, since there are still some bugs to be worked out), but for the most part it's just "menu->program->work/play"
 
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