Thursday, July 29, 2010

Ensnared by the magic box

The magical Pandora's box surely worked its magic on me. I am now on the waiting list for the Pandora Console having just pre-ordered (and pre-payed) it. Now I just have to bear with the incredibly looong waiting time. (Supposing I do receive the console, it will be a pleasant surprise if I receive it this calendar year. Surprise me.)

When I bought the Neo FreeRunner it was mostly for the sake of porting HelenOS to it as I am not really into smartphones. It is still a cool device, though, thanks to the integrated Wireless Ethernet, GPS and accelerometers (and the openness, of course).

With Pandora the situation is a little different. I really like old games and this is the retro gaming device. The real selling point for me is the keyboard (although it probably is not a great one). Pandora also has gamepad controls, but I don't really like gamepads, anyway. It also has integrated WiFi (just imagine the multiplayer possibilities!) So I definitely want to use it on gaming (you could call it love at first sight).

Porting HelenOS to Pandora should be relatively easy now, I should think, as I've already fixed the bugs that prevented HelenOS from running on a real ARM processor (despite working in emulators). Also, Pandora uses U-Boot just as FreeRunner does, so bootloader should not be a problem either.

Anyway it will be long before I have my Pandora, so I still have plenty of time to improve FreeRunner support :-)