Last week I found on sourceforge that Dgen, an old Megadrive/Genesis Emulator from the late 90s was actually still alive and kicking after its development was stopped in the early 2000s. In fact the project had been restarted to provide an open-source, multiplatform alternative emulator since there was somehow a gap in terms of offering. I just compiled it for Pandora a couple of days ago, out of interest in performance, and I’d like to share a few observations with you on performance and how to package a command line application like this one.
Month: July 2013
Weekly Software News – July 22th to 28th
We are almost at the end of July. Didn’t this month pass by super fast? Well, I think so. I was probably too busy getting drunk to forget the heat in the past couple of weeks. Anyway, seems like the community has been hard at work since we have now a fair amount of new releases in this past week.
Software Review: StepMania 3.9
StepMania – the premier dance simulation / rhythm game. Used in arcades worldwide, and now available in the palm of your hand. But how does it fare on the Pandora? Find out in this software review. (version reviewed: 3.9.0.3, 15/7/2013; model used: Rebirth Pandora)
What LibGL Brought Us So Far
LibGL is a new wrapper library developed by our community star lunixbochs, and it has been open-sourced recently. Basically it enables support of OpenGL code on the Pandora hardware (which support only OpenGLES) without having to change the original OpenGL code. Now it’s time to take a quick look at what software has been made possible so far using his library.
Weekly Software News – July 15th to 21st
One could think that summer would slow things down. But it’s not ! We still get many updates and releases on Pandora! I see two trends recently: a lot of OpenGL games ported using the excellent libGL from lunixbochs, and lots of good, serious applications to do real stuff with your Pandora apart from simply gaming. There’s even a new distro available. Summer is great.
FBReader + Artha: Better eBook experience!
I did a comparison between reading ebooks on the Kindle and on the Pandora a couple of months ago, and one of the key strengths of the Kindle was the integrated dictionary function. A tap on a word, and you get access to the dictionary definition. Unfortunately it was not possible, so far, to do the same on Pandora, but the recent release of Artha changes everything.
What Kind of Software Are We Missing?
A year ago, in July 2012, I started a thread on the boards about what software we may still be missing on Pandora. Now, it’s been 12 months. You might be wondering what has changed since then. Good question. Let’s see what has happened since then and whether we are still in need of some special magic… follow me.
Big Update on the Selected Software Page
You know about the awesome “Selected Software” page on Pandoralive, right? If you don’t, you have been missing one of the best features of this website, namely a carefully chosen list of pretty good software for the Pandora that you can install blind-folded and readily enjoy. The last update was from May, and I just decided yesterday it was time for a big update.
Masters of Doom
Today I wanted to share some thoughts about the latest book I have been through, called “Masters of Doom”. No, this is not some kind of fantasy story, it’s rather a retelling of how the game “Doom” came to be, through the lives of their creators, John Carmack and John Romero.
Weekly Software News – July 8th to 14th
Another week passed by, and this one was rich in new offerings. Lunixbochs has been busy with his opengl library and released several ports. PtitSeb has been keeping himself busy with games using the Quake3 engine (after the first Jedi Knight II) and that’s already a lot to keep you busy for a while.