The Gentoo Pandora Project becomes Neuvoo

Posted by: gruso

After nigh on a year of sweat, tears and beer, Viridior, JavaJake and the rest of the Gentoo Pandora team have restructured, repurposed and renamed their project Neuvoo. (Newbie tangent: What’s Gentoo? It’s a linux distro which, if your geek-fu is strong, you can install instead of Angstrom). The new broader focus will see other platforms join Pandora on their target list (think Beagleboard, Touchbook), giving their code more fields to frolic in, and its users a wider range of software. In addition, they’ll be bending over backwards to make sure you don’t need “I compile source code for breakfast” printed on your t-shirt to get in the door, with a binary repo in the works so you won’t miss out on the Pandora apps your Angstrom friends are using. Bravo.

Source | Neuvoo website

PandoraPanic puts the call out

Posted by: gruso

Remember Alf? He’s back, in pog form. Remember PandoraPanic? It never left. The WarioWare-inspired community project has been bubbling away in the background for the past year, absorbing new talent and minigames along the way. Recent developments include some retrolicious 16 bit graphics from Dragons_Slayer, and a WIP gameplay video from Rockthesmurf. Ubiquitous porting machine Pickle even has his hat in the ring.

More droplets of Lerp

Posted by: gruso

If Benjymous thought he was going to sneak some new Lerp footage past us, he thought wrong. Despite being quite short, each video introduces us to new elements of the game, and accordingly, gives us new reasons to want it. Like, now.

Pandora/Wiz Softcases

posted by: PlopperZ

Andrewe1 has been hard at work on his embroidery machine making some very nice Pandora and Wiz softcases. He plans to sell some in small quantities, assuming he gets permission from GPH and the Pandora team.

These are just prototypes he whipped up in a day, and he’s looking for input, so post in that thread (source link) if you’ve got any ideas!

More pics and Wiz case after the break.

Source

Video: Super Mario War

Posted by: gruso

Another video, and another huge thanks to Pickle for keeping the cameras rolling. Today he brings us Super Mario War, the fan-made multiplayer plumber stomper that struggled on the GP2X but looks just ace on Pandora. If you’d like to try it out, chances are it’s already been ported to a platform near you.

Not THE video, but a video. With sisters.

Posted by: gruso

Are you old enough to remember The Great Giana Sisters? They were the controversial counterpart to Super Mario Bros, back in the days when people managed their household budget on a Commodore 64. So legendary is this game, that a band of GP32X gurus have been working for years on an unofficial sequel, called Giana’s Return. It recently went beta on the Wiz, and as far as old school platforming goes, it’s about as good as it gets. And guess who already has it running on Pandora?

Thanks Esn for the tip.

Lerp gets prettier

Posted by: gruso

Remember Lerp? He’s back, and he has candy for your eyes. Benjymous has posted an all too short glimpse of the Lerp intro sequence, which is guaranteed to please at least two of your senses. Read on for a slightly older video featuring a dash of gameplay.

Give snega2usb a better name, win one

Posted by: gruso

You’ve seen it on Engadget, Crunchgear, Hackaday, and the rest. But what those guys don’t know is that we saw it first on GP32X. Yay us. For those who came in late, the snega2usb is a USB interface for SNES and MegaDrive/Genesis carts, allowing to you run your own games in an emulator (on PC, or Pandora) direct from the cartridge! But packed with science and magic as it is, the one thing it lacks is a good, snappy name. So creator Matthias_H has put the call out for a new moniker, with the best suggestion winning a snega2usb prototype!

If you’d like to enter, visit the snega2usb blog and submit your entry via email. Please do not post your suggestions in the comments below; they will be ruled out instantly. Get2it!

NAEV, the space game.

Posted by: gruso

Some time last week, a fellow by the name of Bobbens quietly slipped into the Pandora wiki and added an entry to the Projects Under Development page. The project is NAEV, which (to borrow the remainder of the sentence) is “a 2d action/rpg space game that combines elements from the action, rpg and simulation genres.” There’s no official mention of this one on the forums yet, so it should come as a nice surprise to those who have requested it in the past. If you haven’t heard of NAEV before, here’s the good news: It’s already a well established multi-platform project, which means you can check it on out now.

NAEV project page

Pandora: The clamshell cell from hell?

Posted by: gruso

Here’s an interesting project. Every month or three, the idea of a “Pandora phone” raises its head in the forums. Each time around, the idea attracts responses from “sure, in theory” to “good god man, why?!”  This time around, though, someone’s asking the right question: Why not? That someone is jb0yx, and the project is Pandaphone. He aims to bring full cellphone functionality to Pandora with the help of an external cell modem, offering the following features:

- GPRS/EDGE/3G data connectivity
- Voice based cellular calls
- SMS messaging
- Access to phonebooks stored on SIM card
- BlueTooth connectivity for calls and voice command

It’s all looking more viable than you might think, with a range of off-the-shelf hardware and open source software just waiting to be prodded into compliance. And no, you won’t be expected to hold Pandora against your face like our friend pictured above. Read more and follow progress in the Pandaphone thread.