As requested a compilation of some arcade games running on the Pandora hardware (sorry no case available right now) showing how blur free and fast the LCD is.



The chosen games are running in their true wide screen modes and with no filter.

CPU is at 500Mhz and the FPS is between 100-150.

The emulator is not optimised for the Pandora and does not use any hardware acceleration yet, even the 2x resolution is done in software.

Music by /Passenger http://passengerofficial.com.

OK, well due to talking myself in to a corner over on the forum I've got to make an update on here today and thus the prophecy is true.

So what's been going on? Well more dev units have shipped now, we have decided on how to solve the analogue nub issue too.

The f5 crew might have noticed that we have changed the retail preorder date from June/July to August, this is to allow us to deal with the recent changes to the hardware and make sure everything is going to live in harmony together.

We will send you all an email via the newsletter list before preordering to allow you to fake your own death and claim the life insurance. I won't be doing that though. I don't have life insurance. I really don't see the point. Unless I was going to fake my own death. Then I'd get some.

Did they ever pay out on Lord Lucans policy I wonder? I always found John Stonehouse to be a much more entertaining case of a faked death, I mean what are the chances of faking your own death then being arrested on suspicion of being someone else who faked their own death? Hang on, on the entertaining side I forgot about John Darwin... Anyway, back to the point...

Yes, so, some advance warning with a date will be given.

Oh, and after many a request here is a photo of the wifi & bluetooth chips:



On another note we are planing to set up a Developer Fund for Pandora software development.

When ordering your Pandora you will be given the option to donate $20/£10 to the Pandora development fund.

This will give you access to a (voluntary) beta testing zone (where you can try software early) and the money donated will be used to reward Pandora software developers for their work.

Developers of course don't have to use this system, but I think it is a good way of rewarding them all, no matter how they release their software it will qualify to be rewarded from the fund. The Pandora team will throw in several thousand dollars to start it off.

Exophase summed up this idea in a nice way on the forum:

"The way I'm seeing this (and craigix please correct me if I'm wrong), this isn't meant to just provide a way to reward developers of software that you like. Instead it's supposed to strengthen the software library on the Pandora as a whole, acting as a motivator for good software in general. Which is why it's being offered with the purchases of the Pandoras themselves."

Well, back to work for us, we should be posting more videos in July.

Things have straightened out nicely:



These are ready to go out in to the wild with the other MK0 boards which are already prowling around.

As you may have heard we have decided to add Bluetooth to the Pandora, this added some cost to the project and to the cost of the final board but we won't be increasing the price of the system. The USB host issue might be solved we hope to give an update on that pretty soon.

In other not so great news the people making the analogue nubs ceased production so we are having to change over to a slightly different nub but it should not cause any delays.

There is a good article on the Pandora in this months GamesTM together with an interview with me and a 6 page look back at the GP2X scene. Well worth checking out.

And finally dear readers, we have been getting some feedback saying we don't update this blog enough and it's often very minimal when we do, alas there isn't too much in the way of exciting things to post at the moment, a lot of our time is spent waiting on parts and doing rather boring work. Things will of course get a LOT more exciting in the coming 2 or 3 months. Consider this the calm...

This is what happens when you ship some $1000 Pandora prototypes via a well known american courier company.



We probably won't be using them again.

The hardware itself is shaping up to be very stable so far. A new board revision is planned for the near future and has a couple bug fixes, numerous clean ups to remove the extra parts I placed for testing, addition of the final wifi module and changes to final connectors and headers (smaller JTAG, different expansion connector, AV connector). Product launch is likely to be delayed for the reason explained below and this gives us even more time to make sure absolutely everything is perfectly functional.

Anyone who has been following the Beagleboard progress will know that the USB phy chip has issues and is likely going to need a new rev in silicon. Any TI customer using the OMAP chip for its built in host capabilities is waiting for a solution because the OMAP uses a non-standard clocking scheme to drive the phy that only one or two companies is trying to support at this time. As usual these parts are covered by NDA for a while so I can't say too much more than is public with the Beagle.

The bad news is more of a delay, the good news is that early adopters (first 3000 and even the next batch of 3000) should feel very confident that their Pandoras work just as well as systems made a year from now since we have more time to test them. Craig has also just pointed out that if it is defective from manufacture, it will be fixed under warranty.