July 23, 2011
Posted by: foxblock
CircuitCo ships some boards, EvilDragon has the details:
According to CircuitCo, they shipped the first batch of fully tested and working boards a few days ago (along with a couple of new nubs for me so I can do more replacements myself).
They haven’t given us any information yet how many they shipped, so I can’t tell you much about that.
The boards should arrive next week, so that’s when we know the amount for sure 
It also seems they have some clue of why WiFi failed on so many boards, we’re waiting for their conclusion – and you can be sure I’ll let you know.
Moving the production to Germany is also making progress. Some companies are working on the quotation (takes about 3 – 4 weeks, it’s complicated board) and I’m visiting one promising-looking company near Munich next Wednesday.
If I’m allowed to take pictures of their production site, I’ll post some as well here.
As mentioned I’m working together with the GTA04 guys. We found our devices share quite a few parts, which mean we can probably order together in the future to save time and money as well.
I’m doing another newspost for sure on Wednesday after the meeting to tell you how it went.
Source
Posted in Official, Pandora | Tagged Boards, CircuitCo, germany, production, Shipping | 8 Comments »
July 21, 2011
Guest video by: mcobit, post by foxblock
First of all, voting deadline for the RIOT competition is tomorrow, so go vote!
Back in the day there was a time Lucas Arts did not just make spin-off series and special-effect driven sequels to a popular series, they also made games, good ones even.
That was the time of SCUMM, the so called Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion, a framework for creating Point-and-click adventures.
You can easily identify titles made with SCUMM by the verb-based gameplay and interface using actions like “give” (…stylish confetti to heavily-armed clown), “open” or “use” (…staple remover on tremendous dangerous-looking yak).
The Lucas Arts games usually were praised for their great story, challenging, yet solvable puzzles and unique setting – some of those games are said to be the best point-and-click adventures ever made.
You might recall titles like the “Monkey Island” series, “Zak McKracken”, “Loom” and many more.
Sadly that era is over and most of those games don’t run on current hardware, until ScummVM entered the scene.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Games, Pandora, Software | Tagged adventure, click, game, point, scummvm | 5 Comments »
July 16, 2011
Posted by: foxblock
EvilDragon gives us a short update on the situation:
You’re all waiting for some more news, and yes, I can give you some.
It seems like CircuitCo is finally moving forward. They seem to come along well with my new tester and had success in fixing the boards that have issues.
Should finally be time to expect a new shipment from them, huzzah!
I also got a few positive responses from various companies in Germany.
Two from Munich, which is what I prefer, since I can easily visit them there (not far away).
They are all interested in producing the Pandora PCB and are now working on a quotation.
I will probably visit them next week.
The quotation will take a while (about 3 weeks, as the Pandora is no easy board), but we rather spend our time before production and have a rocking fast and stable production later than experiencing the same problems we had with CC…
As usual, I’ll keep you informed. When I visit them, I’ll try to make some pictures as well 
Source
Posted in Official, Pandora | Tagged Board, CircuitCo, pcb, production | 24 Comments »
July 14, 2011
Posted by: foxblock
This week we take a small break from our regular schedule to introduce you to the entries submitted in the RIOT digital tag team homebrew competition.
We already covered the competition quite elaborately and now after the submission time has passed last Sunday it’s finally time to play all of the submitted games and vote on them.
Head over to the RIOT Digital website to take a look: Entries page (tick the check-boxes at the top to reveal games for your platform).
After you played them, also don’t forget to vote and tell your friends about this and get them to vote, too. After all it’s about 1000€ worth of prizes, so make sure the best team wins.
Granted not all entries are available for the Pandora, but most are and the rest are mostly covered by PC builds or your favourite GPH handheld.
You have until next Friday, the 22nd of July 2011 to vote, which is about a week time and more than enough to test-play each of the entries – just don’t get lost playing Puzzletube
Have fun and if you like you can also take your feedback to the forums.
Series archive
Posted in Community, Games, Pandora, Releases, Software | Tagged competition, digital, Homebrew, RIOT, u9i, uni | 16 Comments »
July 12, 2011
EvilDragon, back from a one-week vacation, gives us a look in the past and the future of the Pandora project, mostly regarding CircuitCo.
He describes what problems they had in the past, what went right, what went wrong and what they plan to do in the near future.
As you may recall, CircuitCo promised a certain number of boards per week, which sadly was not met.
Now a full batch of boards had WiFi issues bringing the production to a full stop. This issue was related to corroding boards and would never have happened if the boards had been populated beginning this year as originally planned.
This, the problems in the past and bad communication lead OpenPandora to cancel production at CircuitCo AFTER batch 1 (about 2000 Pandoras to go until then).
They currently are looking for a new factory to the job, so if you think you can help out in that regard please contact EvilDragon with the details.
Read the full quote: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Official, Pandora | Tagged batch, Boards, CircuitCo, production | 37 Comments »
July 7, 2011
Guest post by: cosurgi, intro info by foxblock
I am happy to announce that PandoraPress finally has its own official YouTube channel and e-mail address.
With the new flow of original content we will upload new videos from time to time so you can subscribe and make it easier for you to follow them and we have them in one place.
The e-mail account can be used if you have a question regarding the blog, want to pitch a topic or general piece of information to us to write about, rant about the decreasing quality of the articles and my jokes, send fan- or hate-mail (preferably the former), just have a chat or do whatever you deem the comment section here is not the right place for.
Please don’t sign us up for any Justin Bieber newsletter.
This has been a public service announcement, thank you for your patience, we will now continue with the scheduled program.
Freedroid is a great game which has its roots in Paradroid on C64, written by Andrew Braybrook.
A giant starship has been overtaken by rebellious robots! Fortunately a rescue team managed to send an influence device of type “001″. Unfortunately this is the weakest robot in the universe! It was impossible to sneak any bigger robot through the high security guarding the ship. Fortunately this influence device can connect to motor controls of any other robot and control its actions for a short period of time.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Games, Pandora, Releases, Software | Tagged arcade, c64, cosurgi, freedroid, game | 6 Comments »
June 30, 2011
Guest post by: mcobit
This is a port of a miniature-golf-game.
It was developed by T3-Games and is based on the Allegro framework. It was written for a display resolution of 640×480, so unfortunately has the black bars at the left and right.
The original author was nice to include new control schemes especially for the Pandora port.
Thanks for that again!
At the top you can see a little instruction video showing some gameplay and the controls.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Games, Pandora, Releases, Software | Tagged golf, mcobit, port, vGolf | 15 Comments »
June 29, 2011
Posted by: foxblock
Yes, I know we are late on the subject, but better late then never, right? …right? Sorry about that.
Anyway, as you may have noticed the Pandora kind of is used to emulate old games so you can play your SNES classics on the go.
Now there is no way you can plug in your cartridges directly into the Pandora so you make use of binary versions of the games – files created by a machine which basically just reads the data out of a game cartridge bit by bit.
Few people own those machines as they are hard to get your hands on and/or quite expensive – you just download “roms” from the internet.
This is the source of a problem as that act can be considered illegal in certain countries (even if you own the original game).
Introducing the Retrode or rather the Retrode2, which is a small USB-device you can plug in cartridges for certain consoles and read the rom-data directly into your PC or Pandora, legally!
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Community, Emulators, Hardware | Tagged Emulator, matthias, matthias_h, Order, retrode, Sega, SNES | 16 Comments »
June 23, 2011
Posted by: may88
With this week’s post I wish to bring to your attention the freshly released port of HomeworldSDL. Forum member Edglex enables your Pandora to experience the excellent work done by the guys at HomeworldSDL.
Update:Edglex requested an update to the post to extend his thanks to pseudonym404, one of the HomeworldSDL guys, who did the opengl es port. I will add the thanks from the rest of the OpenPandora community, Thank you pseudonym404 for making this possible.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Games, Pandora, Releases, Software | Tagged Edglex, HomeworldSDL, pseudonym404, strategy | 15 Comments »
June 21, 2011
Posted by: foxblock
While the deadline on the RIOT homebrew competition is getting closer it might be worth taking a look at… or wait, is it?
In fact, the deadline has been extended by another two weeks, so teams now have until the 10th of July 2011 to finish their projects and get some additional polish on.
If you just heard of this competition or have not started working on anything yet, you still have about 3 weeks time left, which is more than enough if you hit the turbo.
Find yourself a team partner (here, here or on IRC) and get rolling.
The prize-pool also hit 400€ in cash and several sponsors have thrown in some swag (like CAANOOs, DINGOOs and some SD cards sponsored by our very own OpenPandora) to make a total of over 1000€!
Check out the sponsors and distribution of prizes here – the first six teams will be honoured.
You can still donate, of course (all money goes straight to the winning developers).
You can stay up to date with the competition and read more news on the blog.
Also on behalf of the team at PandoraPress I want to congratulate PokeParadox on becoming a father as he just had a healthy baby boy.
Posted in Community | Tagged baby, deadline, extension, RIOT | 3 Comments »
