It took a long time to get to this point, but ED and his team has finally achieved it! A fully working Pyra prototype! Looks like you won’t have to wait too long now to get your hands on something tangible (hopefully within 2016) to replace your existing Pandora, or to jump on the ship if you did not have any Pyra-like handheld until now.
After last month’s crazy run of updates and releases, this past month looked quiet instead! But do not kid yourself there was still a lot to talk about, such as the release of OpenFodder, a remake of the engine behind Canon Fodder on the Amiga back in the days! Oh and by the way, It’s been 3 years that Pandoralive.info launched !
So, what, maybe you are thinking “are you kidding me, there were already fun racing games on the Pandora so far!“. Sure. Like one of my all-time favorites, Super Cars III (actually a remake of Super Cars I and II) as pointed out in my earlier article. And there’s the excellent F-1 Spirit Remake, very challenging but very fun as well once you get the hang of it (and it’s also a very nice example of how PtitSeb optimizes his ports for the Pandora). But these two games, as excellent as they are, are 2D racers, and while we have a good collection of 3D racers (TORCS, Ultimate Stunts, Super Tux Cart, Skunks, and more…), even the FOSS-loving person in me faces the harsh reality that we all know too well: it’s not because it’s Free Software that it’s great.
With the recent recompilation of DosBox 0.74, bundled with the DBGL GUI interface, PtitSeb has provided better support than ever for DOS games on the Pandora. There’s a bunch of stuff that simply was not running too well before to be playable, that it’s really worth coming back again on what this new release can do and what this changes for the Pandora.
I hope that line is not trademarked by LEGO… anyway, the point is that Slackware 14.1 on the Pandora is a great distro. I had tested it in the past but I had not given it enough of my attention then, and I now realize my mistake. Don’t get me wrong: Super Zaxxon is great and all, but if you want to enhance the utility factor of your Pandora, Slackware is one of the best ways to do it, without losing much of SZ either.
While I have not been as active as I’d wish on Pandoralive in the past few months, it’s very clear we have had another blissful year for the Pandora. Who could have imagined one year ago that we would be running some of the stuff we are now using ? Here’s a quick review of the top releases in 2015.
BAfelton posted an excellent tutorial on the Pandora boards on how to set up and use UAE4ARM on Pandora. I thought it was great and deserved a full post here as well. You’ll find the exact same instructions below, with some additions from my part as well… and new screenshots, since I replicated all steps to make sure it worked as expected on my side too.
I hope you guys had a good break for Christmas, if you celebrated it, and that you are now looking forward to celebrating New Year very soon. The Pandora is not getting any younger, but there’s still a bunch of software that came our way in November/December, including notable releases such as Diablo II from Notaz, and Wing Commander Saga from PtitSeb. Yup. that’s right.
A little late update again. There were actually a bunch of updates in the past month on the repo, while not too many new releases. Note that Codeblocks has seen a major update recently – this is a great toolchain if you are interested to port things to the Pandora.
Notaz has once again taken everyone by surprise. After Starcraft and Diablo which were already pushing the limits of static recompilation, he has managed to port Diablo II to the Pandora and released it without prior notice on the repo – It took him a month and a half to get to the current point. End 2015 and it’s still amazing to see what can be done on this little machine.