Pandora Open Source Game System: Retro Gaming Heaven?
By James Grahame
Shanon Shoffstall gave us a shout today about Pandora, an open source gaming platform that promises to be a retrogamer's paradise. It crams a 4.3-inch 800x480 LCD screen, qwerty keyboard, 128MB RAM and Wi-Fi into a clamshell case only slightly larger than a Nintendo DS.
Pandora is Linux based, so it'll support numerous browsers and developers are expecting it to be an extremely capable platform for running emulators (Super NES, Playstation 1, SEGA Genesis and many others) along with homebrew titles. Best of all, they're predicting a price of £199 / $320 / €212 when it's released later this year.
If the dev team manages to pull it off, this might be the machine that puts open source portable gaming on the map. Gamers will no longer be at the whim of Nintendo or Sony, and there's a very real chance that some skilled independent developers will be able to eke out a lucrative market selling affordable original titles for the machine. It includes dual SD card slots and TV a TV output, so it's possible for Pandora to act as a media hub, too.
Even though the product pics are rendered, the system has moved beyond the vaporware stage thanks to the recent release of the Pandora dev board to select GP32/GP2X/Zodiac developers. The site claims a March or April 2008 release, but I suspect we'll have to wait until late summer at the earliest to see the final system.
What do you guys think? Will you buy one? This thing appeals to me far more than the Asus eee PC because I think it has a good chance of sparking a fervent following much like the C-64, Radio Shack CoCo and Sinclair Spectrum did in the early 80s.
Pandora: The Cortex A8 Powered Handheld Linux Console
The latest specs on atomicthumb's wiki
