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Pandora: Merry Christmas on shipday, we get Warcraft 2!
Mon, 22 Dec 2008

This one is for Pickle, the eminent DOSBox for gp2x expert. This man slaved and slaved to wring every last bit of hot DOSBox action out of the little gp2x. He's been helping us out sorting out configs and fiddling to get DOSBox working on the Pandora. I asked what a good game to check would be, as I had been trying out some 'lightweights' .. he suggested WC2. Briliant I thought...Check it out..

This is a stock DOSBox (by which I mean compiled from source, with no optimizations _at all_, and not even tuning the config. Its got the wrong cycle settings and full audio enabled and installed _from my Warcraft 2 ancient CD_. DOSBox in dynarec mode though, so its working its ass off here :) The good news -- runs nearly full speed, and fully playably. I've worked through the first Orc campaign mission. USB mouse and keybord.

Aside, I also tried Wing Commander 1 -- peachy. Civilization 1 -- perfect. Wizardry 7 Crusaders of the Dark Savant -- perfect. System Shock 1 chugged it, but thats fair .. its all software math emulation to do the 3d mode, but possibly with high enough clock and optimization.. maybe. We're just scratching the surface here.

The only thing thats chuggy at all is scrolling around the screen by mousing to the edge; was that smooth back in the day? Its possible with more units it would suffer more as this first campaign is nothing, but still.. this is quite an achievement.

Pandora was set to 800MHz .. and the Panda can go higher still; I probably should've tried for 900 or more to see if it corrected that one nit, but I was too busy drooling :)

Edit

For those of us so mightily curious, here is Dune 2 running; it is also playable (though I didn't complete any levels, it seemed just fine to play.)

[ Category: / entertainment / gaming / pandora ] [link] [Comments]

Holidays: Nerd tips for Christmas decorating
Sun, 07 Dec 2008

We were decorating the house today for the Christmas season; the baby was out with grandma so we diug out the tree and ornaments, the garlands and lights, the figures and wreaths. We're not Chevy Chase'ing it but someday my frienbds.. some day!

When it came to running garlands up the stairway we decided not to wrap them around the the banister as we've done in the past - it makes the total length shorter, and the wiring in the thing tends to scratch up he handrail a touch. So what to use? String would be too slippery and we didn't have any dark colours around to stealth it in there. Being a good little nerd and eletrical junkie I had a good assortment of nylon cable ties around, including some black ones of 12" length. I have to say, they were perfect -- fast to apply, good and strong grip with no slippage, and easy to trip to the appropriate length to avoid nasty bits sticking out. And being black, they hide right in there against our dark coloured banisters. Perfect! (You can of course use the standard dirty-white nylon colour, white, black, and even brown ties.)

So there you go.. being a geek does have some use!

[ Category: / living / holidays ] [link] [Comments]

Pandora: Easy as pie to port to (ie: Linux to Linux port)
Wed, 03 Dec 2008

Was chatting with cpasjuste in IRC and he'd noted that before he even received his pandora devkit, he'd done a few 'quick ports.'; ie: Just getting them to compile in the tool chain we're all switching to for the device. I offered to give them a run so he wouldn't have to wait until tomorrow to find out if they worked and to our surprise.. they did! (You would think a run before even testing it once would fail...)

So I've already ported OutcaST (gp2x version that uses SDL that I was doing Wiz speed testing with) to the pandora last night (a quick port!), and now cpasjuste has ported Hatari (another ST emu), HUGO (TG-16 emu) and SMS (Sega Mastersystem emu.) His Hatari worked pretty well out of the box (including sound!), and the SMS as well pretty good; HUGO had some minor oddities easy to fix when he gets his dev board. FWIW, a USB mouse plugged into the Pandora worked on the GEM desktop, too, right out of the box. How hot is that?

I've got performance numbers for my OutcaST but I'm not sure I want to post here about them yet. Suffice to say that the pandora _blows the hell_ out of other handhelds; same clock, same naive port, same unoptimized SDL used for the display backend, so on and so forth (I have details in a private thread.) Much more blown away than I thought, too.. so the Pandora is both easy to port to, and frighteningly fast!

Cheers cpasjuste for your quick work, and to notaz for the pandora kernel and SDL ports!

Some quick shoddy pics (Sorry!):

OutcaST running, displaying the GEM Desktop

Hatari, in A_133 Automation loader for Xenon 2

[ Category: / entertainment / gaming / pandora ] [link] [Comments]