Few people have heard of it, yet many consider John Blankenbaker's KENBAK-1 to be the first commercial personal computer.
Now Shipping: Pandora Open Source Game System
By James Grahame
I first wrote about the Pandora open source gaming platform over two years ago, excited by its retro gaming possibilities. For a while, I feared it was vaporware, but they're finally shipping the first units from the UK.
Pandora 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.
An open source gaming platform means that 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.
What do you guys think? Will you buy one? This thing appeals to me far more than a netbook, 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.
