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open pandora

evilwallpaper

By evilwallpaper
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sentient

sentient

Posted
Posted
If they emulate the Dreamcast I'll buy one!

Some of the emulator authors think it might just be possible. It'll be the crowning achievement of the machine though!

From where? It's something I struggled to find in stock when I was looking round the other month, same now after a brief check.

I'll get the link asoon as their forum comes back online, I don't have it to hand.

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roadkill

roadkill

Posted
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Yeah, a DC one would be right on the limit of it I'd say. The fact is this new chipset's 3D capabilities are known to be good (lets just say very similar to the iPhone), but exactly how good that is no one yet knows.

The other killer problem with DC emulation is that the pandora doesn't have floating point hardware, which the DC certainly does, so stuff making too much use of that on the DC could run into problems, and that is most likely almost any 3D title. That said the main processor of the pandora is pretty fast, but if it's fast enough to make up for the usual emulation overhead and lack of FP I'd be pleasantly surprised.

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sentient

sentient

Posted
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Yeah, a DC one would be right on the limit of it I'd say. The fact is this new chipset's 3D capabilities are known to be good (lets just say very similar to the iPhone), but exactly how good that is no one yet knows.

The other killer problem with DC emulation is that the pandora doesn't have floating point hardware, which the DC certainly does, so stuff making too much use of that on the DC could run into problems, and that is most likely almost any 3D title. That said the main processor of the pandora is pretty fast, but if it's fast enough to make up for the usual emulation overhead and lack of FP I'd be pleasantly surprised.

Ha! I believe the 3D capabilities are known to be loads better than the Iphone. It even has pixel shaders you know.

The Pandora also has the NEON instruction set which is floating point I believe.

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roadkill

roadkill

Posted
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The Neon thing is very tied to Texas Instruments though. Conceivably useful for aspects of DC emulation, but TI keep the programming details too closed, whereas ARM is a generally known instruction set. Some of the demos they've done with video decompression on the beagleboard have been seriously impressive though.

Pandora's 3D is merely an increment further on from the iPhone, not a quantum leap in performance over it. Honestly the iPhone stuff hasn't shown it's potential yet at all, but that's because it lacks floating point too, and most games on it try to use software floating point, which kills performance but is much easier to code, and frankly most programmers today are too lazy.

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dan_tm

dan_tm

Posted
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This thing has WiFi right? It must have.

I'd be sorely tempted to pick one up if that was the case, regardless of the emu capabilities. Decent web access on the move would ba amazings without needing to lug the laptop around, not to mention the obviously superior battery life.

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roadkill

roadkill

Posted
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Software floating point? Wow, are we back in the Amiga 'mathieeedoubtrans.library' days?

In a sense. A lot of hardware on the fringes of desktop computing has abandoned floating point stuff, if it ever got it. Even some modern high end server systems don't have it, because for pushing websites it's unnecessary, although the next versions of those (wacky Sun kit with rather extensive SMT stuff) will have it again.

Fact is the IEEE standard is hopeless for use in software, performance wise, and you're much better off just using fixed point on devices where there is no floating point hardware. The positively worst thing you can do is try to use both, since converting one to the other and back again is an expensive waste of time. This is why OpenGL ES has a fixed point profile, so you can avoid using floats altogether, as is common on embedded systems.

The whole area is fascinating though, since both fixed point and floating point have a whole host of completely different traps it's really easy to fall into.

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dan_tm

dan_tm

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do eet!

In regards to doing a bit of game development on it...

I currently work with C++ and DirectX, on a Windows platform. I've never really done any development with Linux, other than a few scripts with Unix, so how difficult is the crossover going to be? Obviously I'd have to port everything from DirectX over to OpenGL, but what about the rest of it, how can I go about compiling C++ on Linux and are there any decent resources on the web you (or anyone) could point me towards?

I should note that I've never even really used Linux properly before, other than as a Boot CD when having problems with Windows...

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dan_tm

dan_tm

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This interview seems to suggest that they've had Quake 3 running in software at full speed, they say they haven't even touched the GPU properly yet. Even if I've misunderstood regarding the GPU, that seems like a heck of an achievement in its own right.

12-14 hour battery life for basic tasks like web browsing was mentioned too! :(

I'm right on the edge here, I could cave in at any moment. Hopefully I cave in before it's too late and there aren't any left...

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MGD

MGD

Posted
Posted
This interview seems to suggest that they've had Quake 3 running in software at full speed, they say they haven't even touched the GPU properly yet. Even if I've misunderstood regarding the GPU, that seems like a heck of an achievement in its own right.

12-14 hour battery life for basic tasks like web browsing was mentioned too! :(

I'm right on the edge here, I could cave in at any moment. Hopefully I cave in before it's too late and there aren't any left...

They will have more later on right?

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des

des

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Regarding the floating point issues mentioned above; it appears that the ARM Cortex-A8 CPU used in the Pandora is based on the ARMv7, which apparently has floating point instructions. Or is that not enough?

I depends on whether they've asked for floating point support in their asic design as you can pick and chose features. I've been using three different forms of ARM 7 chips and none of them support floating points instructions. Course for something being used primarily as a gaming platform it might make sense to have them. I don't know what the cost of adding it would be though so it could have been something that got the chop?

Wasn't it microsoft that were saying the need for floating point instructions in games had been drastically reduced since the advent of GPUs? When they were having their willy waving contest with sony they seemed very keen to push their integer performance over anything else. I'm blethering from a position of partial ignorance so feel free to debunk anything I've said.

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Strawp

Strawp

Posted
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Okay, I fucking bought one. I hope you're all happy now.

I know I certainly am :wub:

:wub: Thank you for documenting your thought processes as you caved, it was a fun read :)

If anything, there are less barriers to C/C++ dev on Linux because Linux is designed and built by C developers. I'd have thought the move from DX to OpenGL would have been that hardest part.

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clare

clare

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Regarding the floating point issues mentioned above; it appears that the ARM Cortex-A8 CPU used in the Pandora is based on the ARMv7, which apparently has floating point instructions. Or is that not enough?

The OMAP3 has a pretty bog-standard Cortex A-8. It has a slightly slower floating point unit, but if you want to it can do up to 2 sp floating point ops per clock, but that's only if you use it in NEON mode (think SSE), otherwise it's not as fast at doing floating point.

So, if you tune it, you can do quite well. If you don't tune it, it is not as good as it could be.

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