I have been looking into buying dreamboxes. What is the SIM card in them for and what's the difference between the 2.10 and the A8P . These are clones I'm looking at.
It's basically a security measure. The SIMs are reverse engineered from the DM originals and once upon a time the clones could run the same images without any patching but those days are gone with 2.1. SIM 2.1 has lots of support and works just fine. A8P is supposed to support the offical images (for now...) but I've no experience of it and don't see a need for it.
Oh that's fine. So with an A8P I can install an original image and the 2.1 I can only install spurious images is that correct? Other than that does it affect the performance of the box in anyway?
Yep any decent image will have CrossEPG installed. With minor configuration you'll get 7 day EPG for supported providers. Note there's no real series linking for recording though, there's a plugin called autotimer that attempts to emulate it but I've not used it.
I have a sim 2.1 dreambox 800se, theres loads of images out for it so as far as clones go, you can't go wrong with either a8p or sim 2.1
As for epg crossepg will pull in the epg data and personally I use a plugin called cool epg guide which gives you a nice looking channel guide to use the data from crossepg. i'd start with an openpli based image, I always find them easiest to setup and use.