History of video games/Platforms/Pandora

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  A mass production Pandora console.

History

Development

A prototype Pandora on the left, compared to a production Pandora on the right.

Much of the early Pandora community was formed at the GP32X forms, where the team making the console began polling users about their ideal console by 2007.

The Pandora was mostly made in either the UK or Germany, with some plastics being sourced from China. This choice increased costs, but was made so the developers could be close to production.

Launch

The Pandora logotype.

Around early October of 2008, 2000 orders within 6 hours of ordering availability resulted in temporary site unavailability.

The Pandora began shipping in May 2010. Production of the Pandora ended in 2013, and was succeeded by the Pyra project. Around 5,000 consoles were produced by 2013 before a large branch of the project was dissolved after 7 years of operation, though the German branch remained active.

Legacy

The schematics for the Pandora PCB were open sourced in 2014.

The Pandora is notable for being among the first a community oriented consoles that actually made it to production. What is especially notable about the Pandora is successfully doing this in an era before widespread online crowdfunding and easy access to home rapid prototyping hardware, proving that mass production of a community oriented game console was possible, though with significant challenges and delays. Furthermore the Pandora was among the earliest open source oriented game consoles to run a fully featured operating system.

Technology

Compute

The Pandora cleverly took advantage of increasingly capable mobile oriented SOCs as a base for its design, a strategy that would later see widespread use in other mobile consoles and microconsoles.

The Pandora is powered by a ARM Cortex A8 processor clocked at one gigahertz. The CPU is complimented by a PowerVR SGX 530 GPU clocked at 110 megahertz.

The Pandora has 512 megabytes of RAM and 512 megabytes of built in NAND storage.

Hardware

The Pandora uses a 4.3" color TFT LCD resistive touchscreen with a resolution of 800 by 480 pixels.

The Pandora was designed with special care in regards to audio capabilities. The system uses a Burr-Brown DAC to achieve an SNR of 100dB, as well as a built in microphone and stereo speakers.

The user replaceable 4200 mAh capacity lithium ion polymer battery lasts about 10 hours of heavy use, or 20 hours of light use.

At the time the Pandora had impressive connectivities capabilities for a handheld console. The Pandora has a full size USB 2.0 Type A port and dual SD card readers. The Pandora has b/g Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR.

Notable games

The Pandora plays most open source Linux games that run on ARM architecture computers.

Gallery

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  Pandora Classic