We took a trip from iTech Post to the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) in Boston over the weekend to give you the inside scoop on some of the consoles and hardware the yearly gaming festival had to offer — including the fully open, handheld Pandora, made by OpenPandora.
The Pandora first appeared in 2010. For those unfamiliar with the device, it's basically a completely open (no rooting necessary) Linux-based handheld that lets you play hundreds of free OpenSource games along with thousands of classic games using emulators. It's also designed for homebrew gaming through a Standard Linux System with X, SDL, GTK+, Alsa, OSS and Python, making it easy to develop and port programs. OpenPandora definitely markets the device toward retro gamers and developers.
In terms of emulation, you get PSX, Amiga, C64, Atari ST, SNES, NES, GBA, MegaDrive/Genesis, SegaCD, Spectrum, Colecovision, PC-Engine, NeoGeo, NeoGeo Pocket and Wonderswan along with lots of Arcade, N64 and Nintendo DS games and others. Needless to say, our retro gaming nostalgia level kicked into full gear trying out the device.
For our hands-on session, we tried out a classic version of Zelda, which looked great, along with Duke Nukem 3D. Duke Nukem played well with clear picture and smooth controls and benefited from the Pandora's two analogue controls, DPAD, ABXY-Buttons, L/R and Touchscreen.
Another game the OpenPandora reps were touting was a fun asteroid-blasting game that worked well with the Pandora's controls. The device even comes with a full keyboard.
The Pandora is also spreadsheet- and word processing-compatible. It can even handle emails, Web browsing, music and photos. It has over ten hours of active battery time and is German-built, making for a pretty solid design. You can definitely feel the sturdiness of the device when you get your hands on it.
Needless to say, it's a beast of a device. That said, Pandora doesn't come cheap, with the 1GHz device retailing at about $460. And for a $460 device it kind of looks like, well, not a $460 device. But that's not the point. If you're a retro gaming geek or someone into developing who wants a device with no restrictions, then the Pandora could be for you.
