FreeGameDev

For one who no knows what it is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora_(console)

Also there's goodly information:

http://boards.openpandora.org/topic/164 ... more-open/

And they are making it precessor now, called "Pyra".

I have a Pandora (the original model that they label "classic"). It's a small computer with a keyboard (though it isn't a very good one) and some gaming controls. The base install becomes a completely free system if you remove the wireless (WiFi and Bluetooth) firmware and the OpenGL ES library; of course, built-in wireless and 3-D acceleration don't work in this case (I don't know about 2-D hardware acceleration).

The purpose of the Pandora is kind of sketchy, though. I was in that community for a long time, and while "open source" is supposedly liked, it's not a very important factor to the members there. Obviously, they up-front champion it as a device for emulation to play old proprietary software games, sometimes with even proprietary emulators (like MAME and the Nintendo DS), but even excluding that, there are a lot of proprietary games in the OpenPandora app store (which they call the "repo") that the community around it appreciate greatly. I once did a count of the top 100 rated apps and found a large percentage of them (I want to say 25%) were proprietary. If anything, the OpenPandora actually more of an "indie and retro games" system, than an "open source games" system.

I don't know much of anything about the Pyra. I wouldn't expect it to be much if at all better on the hardware freedom front; part of the problem is simply limited options for ARM SoCs, from my understanding. I wouldn't expect it or its community to become more of a champion of "open source" or freedom, either. Basically, I expect the Pyra to be the same as the OpenPandora, but better on the practical convenience front. I'd recommend it over an iThing, a 3DS, or even pretty much any Android device if you want a small computer to play games with, but I don't think it's worth paying any particular attention to in general.

Another similar device, which as far as I know is about the same in terms of its mission and freedom-respect as the OpenPandora and Pyra, is the GCW Zero. The OpenPandora is really the spiritual successor to the GP2X, while the GCW Zero is more of a spiritual successor to the Dingoo A320.

Used to own the GP32 and GP2X (The ones the OpenPandora community grew from), and they were certainly fun. The OpenPandora itself though never felt quite like a good deal. Besides being late and relatively expensive it couldn't really run any games/emulators significantly better than the GP2X could, as even though the hardware is much better, the full OS is slowing it down a bit and there is a large gap in emulation requirements going from the 16bit 2d ones to the next gen.

I am somewhat following the Pyra thing also, but the market for heldhelds is much different these days and I don't think they will manage to come up with something thats competitive on a price/value level. Sure it's a small "garage" company and for that it is quite great, but these days the setting is different. There is actually decent hardware being build by large companies at a very competitive price point (Nvidia Shield or those tablets with gaming controls) and I would much rather see effort being spend to make these run a proper OS (mer with plasma active for example) instead of annoying Android.

Pyra now seems to be almost ready to ship:
https://liliputing.com/2020/11/dragonbo ... month.html

I wanted the Pyra but I don't think it is in the budget. I hope it does well.

I pre-ordered one, a bit more to encourage an european garage initiative than a fully fledge powerfull handheld computer/console.

Compared to other handheld computers, it seems quite ergonomic though and I have some needs for that.

Yeah, the guy behind it is super cool. I bought a few things from him in the past, always great service.

However by now I own a first generation x86 GPDWin (also bought from his shop) that runs Linux perfectly fine and is quite a bit faster than the Pyra (and was much cheaper too). So yeah, you got to be very enthusiastic about the Pyra for it to worth buying...