As gamers we’re used to vaporware. Duke Nuke ‘Em Forever has been coming out forever. The Phantom was a vaporware console that never saw the light of day. Now we have an improbable story that has turned into a real console.

A few years ago a handful of people on the GP32X.com Forums got together and decided to work on creating an open source handheld gaming system. They then realized that this endeavor would cost more money than they could afford so they sold pre-orders for these units. If I had heard of this back then, alarms would have rung loud about this being a scam. Fortunately I didn’t because these guys did it!

After several years they have created a handheld device that is a mixture of a PC and a console. It has a completely open source operating system. It’s a perfect emulator for old Atari, Commodore 64, old PC games, old arcade games, Nintendo and Playstation games. Most emulators will work on this device. It can be used to surf the web and even do some word processing.

They’ve sold out of their initial pre-order run and are taking orders for the next batch. It’s amazing to see a project like this make it all the way to production. Congratulations to the Open Pandora crew.