I don’t really do game reviews on Pandoralive, especially for emulated games, but I have to make an exception here to talk about Time Hollow, a Nintendo DS game I have just recently completed for the second time on the Pandora (after playing it on DS a couple of years ago… and playing it even before its release at one of the previous TGS). Thumbs up to Konami for making this great game, and to DraStic and Exophase for making this possible on Pandora.
Yeah, I’m talking to you, the Big Loser in front of your small or big screen. How do I know you are a Loser? Well, obviously you are not using virtual desktops on your Pandora, if not you wouldn’t be reading this article. Well, rejoice, you can become a little less of a loser after reading this, so come and join me for a trip in Xfce.
It’s been a long time I use TaskWarrior and since this is one of the best to do list managers out there , I thought I may share with you some of my experiences with it, as well as how to make proper use of a to-do list manager. First, you see a lot of very funny articles in the recent past saying “todo lists don’t work” and shit like that. Well, it’s because most people have usually no idea how to properly write their tasks in the first place into a list. The common mistake is to make your to-do item too broad, too vague. Like “Become the president”. The key thing when writing tasks is to respect the sacrosanct S.M.A.R.T. principles. Got no idea what this means?
Not a ton of new updates or releases this week, but that’s expected when PtitSeb takes some vacation! Nevertheless there were some interesting developments on the firmware side. There is a new firmware (only for development at this stage) available, including the binaries to use the DSP from now on. There are potentially exciting things to expect from that space, but we’ll have to let developers experiment with it for a while before we see something tangible. Anyway, back to this week’s news.
When I first installed Slackware on a PC, around 2002/2003, I already had some experience with system usage. C64, TO7/70, MO5, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Amiga 500, DOS 6.22, Windows 3.11 to XP, Mandrake (now Mandriva), Suse, Red Hat, and I may forget some. So at this time, it was just another experience. A good friend of mine recommended me this Linux version I barely heard of, so I went downloading and burning the .iso with confidence. The ncurse (semi-graphical) installation went flawlessly thanks to the always-clear on-screen explanations. I was surprised that all was fine, fast, without the inherent hesitation induced by new things. Then the real work began at first boot.
Not too many releases in the past week but there is still a healthy flow of updates for existing applications now and then. Apparently there’s a new ScummVM that should be ready to be released with Eye of the Beholder support (oh oh!) and we are waiting for the PND to be updated on the repo.
You may be aware I released BGS, Backup Games Saves, a couple of days ago. It’s a tool that enables quick backup of your saved games and savestates in emulators and native games running on Pandora. You never know when your Pandora’s SD Card is going to crash and be corrupted, therefore this backup system saves the data file on your two card slots to remedy against this problem. Allright, now let’s get to PyZenity, one of the tools I used on this project for the first time.
PPSSPP, the PSP emulator has been around for a while, but I had more or less disregarded it as the first versions were so far away in terms of performance to be remotely interesting for us. Things have changed significantly in the past few versions, with performance now very close to what I would call “playable” in several games. So, how good is PPSSPP (version 0.9.1.30) at this point on Pandora ? Should you be paying more attention to it ?
Mid-october already and we have seen a number of good ideas flowing around recently. Using the DSP on Pandora seems to be a good direction to further improve the throughput for a number of applications. We’ll have to see what people come up with in terms of real applications. Talking about real applications, _wb_ came back on the scene with a new picture viewer application, the fastest for Pandora. But there’s more.
Earth has faced a very serious threat in XCOM’s first installment back in 1994. But the organization saved us from this threat ! Did you take part of the organization and miss those thrilling moments ? You wish you could go back to this time to experience this ? Your Pandora can bring you back at this time and allow you lead Earth defenses !