I have been thinking about getting a Pandora for a while, and I have just lost my EEEPC charger so its getting more urgent LOL.
The thing is if I was to get one I would want to make a game for it, and I would want to use blender to do it! how would one go about making a game for such a platform? Its a linux distro at heart but its not running on a x86 processor. Is there a blender build that would run on it? or would I need to do something different?
What sort of graphics could I exspect to achive? its OpenGL 2.0 conplient so GLSL shaders might be a possability No?
I’m cant do things like build my own blender builds, I’m more of an artist so any advice would be great!
Number of produced Pandoras yet: 0. (Not even a final prototype.)
Release date: Unknown, former announced release dates reach back to the beginning of 2008.
“Urgent” does not work well with the Pandora.
Let’s see what it is capable of when it is ready or if it is outdated by then.
Yes, the development of the Pandora takes way more time than initially claimed… I ordered mine September 08 and it seems that it might finally come September or October 09…
Well, it’s beeing developed by a handful of people and is a perfect handheld for me, so I don’t mind waiting until it’s finished.
I still wonder though: how I could port my game (see sig) to the pandora. These are the specs of the system:
ARM® Cortex™-A8 600Mhz+ CPU running Linux
430-MHz TMS320C64x+™ DSP Core
PowerVR SGX OpenGL 2.0 ES compliant 3D hardware
800x480 4.3" 16.7 million colours touchscreen LCD
Wifi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth & High Speed USB 2.0 Host
Dual SDHC card slots & SVideo TV output
Dual Analogue and Digital gaming controls
43 button QWERTY and numeric keypad
Around 10+ Hours battery life
The main problems for blender GE could be the ARM CPU and the PowerVR SGX OpenGL 2.0 ES compliant 3D hardware I guess…
Is there a Blender version that would run on the Pandora??
Btw: the beagle board has almost the exact same hardware…
but what about the Pandoras OpenGL ES 2.0 ?
Is Blender fine with that or is that a problem as it may only run if the hardware supports a full blown OpenGL?
Can anyone estimate the complexity of converting Blender to use OpenGL ES 2.0??
blender compiles for ARM no worries, tested myself not long ago. I was expecting some fun porting work but no such luck, it built and run oat of the box :).
I have preordered ‘neverending story’ pandora too… and hope so I can run blender itself on it, I’m little afraid 'cause of openGL ES too
imagine to have your favorite 3D app on a go woot…
I ordered one about a week ago - it’s expensive compared to other solutions ( eg Wiz / Dingoo - even though Pandora is more fully featured with keyboard etc ), but was worth supporting a completely open source solution.
It’s a shame that an accellerometer was left out of the spec.
Can’t wait to see if some-one gets either Blender or the stand-alone GE ( or both ) working on Pandora.
Sure, you could always add some additional hardware and fancy stuff, but it would keep getting more expensive and you really don’t need an accelerometer for 100% of the emus that run on the pandora…
but you can mod your pandora if you really need one, of course that’s the beauty of it!
But finally, if you really think it’s outdated already and there is some other device with even better specs (highres touch display, arm CPU, gaming controls, keyboard, open drivers, wifi, bluetooth, linux, usb, s-video out, 2 sd-card slots, 256mb ram, big batterpack etc) GET ONE! and please tell me about it, I would think about canceling my Pandora too
When it was designed mobile phones looked different than today - where there are phones with 1Ghz of processor power. So the 600Mhz Arm is not that impressive any more.
The emulators are crutches while there is not so much native software. Emulators for decade old systems? Sorry, nice to see, fun to fiddle with, but not something to show around.
Accellerometers, gyro controls are one of the evolutions that make devices like the Wii or the iPhone interesting. A little more processor power, some polygons more per second? No one really cares except for some nerds.
Yes, it is a nice open system. But if I add a piece of hardware - how much software will be there that supports it? - The base package has to be complete, and the (my) definition of a complete base package changed in the last two years.
Er… GET A Pandora :-P. (Quote from the Current Status on openpandora.org: “last updated: 2009-05-11 23:52:10”.)
Yes, there is no gaming handheld with full qwertz keyboard. All the other features are not that impressive per se any more. (The battery lasts only 10 hours - says the specs, no one tested it yet!) Maybe there is no system that meets all of your specs together (I don’t need to say there is no other system that meets all your specs.)
But: Any other gaming handheld that is available is better. Because it is available. (And, because of mass production, there is enough software available, so there is no need for emulating old systems just to raise the software count.
Well, I won’t try to convince you that you should get a Pandora… Just note, that there are people (e.g. me) who look forward to it
For me, it will be the perfect handheld. It’s not finished yet but I trust it will be soon. Maybe Pandora will be like DukeN, but in that case they still have like 11 years to go until they admit that it won’t come
These are all good points and I’m glad to hear that blender “Might” run on a pandora.
But I was thinking If someone Has Ported blender to the ARM architecture, would this not have wider implications that it just running on Pandora’s?
A quick search on the net reveals that the IPhone among other small devices use an ARM CPU Link.
Blender running on the IPhone would probably make it the most powerful app in the app store. But I was thinking more along the lines of making games or apps for small devices using the blender game engine!
I remember seeing someone ported Blender to the Windows Mobile OS “but no game engine :(” LINK
Any Ideas on how this would be done or if its possible?
@MCHammond, blender source compiles and runs unmodified on 32bit ARM, or it did ~8months ago when I tried last.
The issues will be linking to the libraries that these devices use, especially OpenGL ES, though its been done a few times before so I expect its not that hard.
We could maintain support for OpenGL ES and have some option to enable it for scons/cmake/make
whoooho, that would be awesome Campbell!!
BlenderGE could get the engine of choice when developing games for pandora. Probably not the most efficient but still the best for people who can’t code more then some basic python (me )
Lets see when pandora gets shipped and try it!!
PS: If anyone would offer to port Blender+BGE to be able to run on Pandora, I guess you should contact Evildragon; I’m sure he would supply the one with an early final unit (for free?) since Pandora would benefit greatly from Blender!!!
Pandora dev-forum: http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?showforum=64
Evildragon address: [email protected]
I ordered mine September 08 and it seems that it might finally come September or October 09…
.
that’s the beauty of it!