Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonprins | Hacker News Reader

Neat project... except for the 8 games available on it. Why develop for something with 20 users when you can develop for a (more powerful) mobile phone with several orders of magnitude more potential customers?

Pretty cool that it's open and finally (after what.. three years or so?) shipping units, but I doubt it'll ever gain steam.

View on HN

It came out of the retro emulation community, so it has a couple of magnitudes more games available than that. Whether those old games appeal to you is a very good indicator for whether or not the Pandora is for you.

I spent about twenty minutes googling around trying to find a central repository/library/listing of games available/ported to it... with no luck. That would probably be important for gaining traction.

http://dl.openhandhelds.org/cgi-bin/pandora.cgi

A community around these small handhelds such as the GP2X Wiz and the Dingoo A320 [0] has sprung up over the past couple of years. These small devices are cheap (about $100) and typically made in China somewhere. They are almost exclusively used to run emulators for classic games.

The OpenPandora is basically a response that the existing solutions (such as the GP2X Wiz) just aren't that great (which is true, I have a Wiz and I really don't like it). The OpenPandora will almost exclusively be used to run emulators, a smidge of web browsing, and that's about it.

[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-33IdcH3Wb8&t=6m36s

Yeah, I don't think you'd be targeting your latest masterpiece at this. Probably it will receive mostly ports of existing software.

It will also support a lot of retrogaming.

The specs (SoC, display) are almost identical to N900 and Palm Pre, so you can play games made for those. Palm Pre games run already on the N900. You could also put some other flavor of Linux on there such as Maemo or MeeGo when it comes out.

FWIW, that processor is easily overclockable to 1GHz.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com