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bnolen suggested...

I think I'll join in with the crowd of people waiting to see what comes of the openpandora project.

I picked up one of these Chinese knockoff PMPs last year and the manufacturer had silently changed the firmware making much of the information I'd researched obsolete, and removed SNES support (no matter how poorly it was working) --worse still they disabled state saving so I couldn't even play any of my RPGs!

The Dingoo seems to have a vibrant and active community around it, but I'd rather see a device that was completely open from the beginning than one the hackers have to reverse engineer before they can accomplish anything! Also there seem to be some issues with the Dingoo's implemented SNES emulators, which is a deal-killer for me.

--bornagainpenguin

Respectfully, I disagree. These emulating devices are seen as more of a threat to these large game corps because people can play their game by pirating. Why one earth would a greedy company who closed down a fan made Chrono Trigger 2 project be open minded to this.

These devices are not built as a competition to the large corps like Nintendo. It is to appeal to a niche of people, usually for gamers who are nostalgia about classic games or people who like to develop their own game if the device is open source. Currently only a couple thousanands unit of the Pandora is set to be produced, Nintendo and PSP sell hundred millions of their portable devices. I believe there is a different business model to these devices that are made to do many things, as opossed to multibillion corps who don't sell devices that are too open in features, limiting the features and selling new products is how they make money.

I don't own the device, it's just been released, but there is a big forum for the wiz at GP32X.com, try asking about it there.

Edited 2009-05-15 11:29 UTC

What you and a lot of people do not get about this class of hardware (and about linux) is, that it does not need to compete with the big market. It will play the classics and a few open source games and that is all it needs to do.

I don't want an DS or PSP where i have to hack around with the firmware to get the things running that i want to run. I don't want to spend a couple of thousand Dollars on an sdk to roll my own.

Furthermore, there isn't going a too big investment into the hardware. The base is usually a standard setup which is meant to go into PDAs or Cellphones, so they don't need to sell 100 000 units to get even, it's an nice little busyness if they can sell a few thousand which they likely will.

I don't want an DS or PSP where i have to hack around with the firmware to get the things running that i want to run.

-- Hi there. I'd like to introduce you to the Acekard 2 Nintendo DS flash cart.

http://www.iso420.org/nds/acekard2/index.htm

-- I understand "not wanting to hack around with firmware" (read: PSP), but if you're wanting to play homebrew or emulate old games (including SNES, many of which play at full speed) -- A Nintendo DS lite + flash card doesn't get any easier, and is pretty cheap. Especially if you already have a NDS and a MicroSD card laying around.

Admittedly it's not Linux-based (though a friend of mine HAS run Linux on his NDS with a memory expansion card), but it's still pretty neat.

I've mucked around with both the GP2X and the NDS with a flash cart. The homebrew scene for the NDS is definitely the healthier of the two, so it is much more appealing from the perspective of digging up ready to run software. (The reason for a healthier NDS homebrew scene should be obvious: more people have an NDS and flash cart than own a GP2X.)

However, I think the GP2X is a much better system to develop for. At least for the novice. While you may need to reverse engineer stuff to do anything really interesting on the GP2X, at least you have a set of well documented libraries to start off with. Most of those libraries are also familiar if you've mucked around with programming under Linux. For the NDS, it seems as though every library is unique to the platform and every developer is depending upon reverse engineered documentation.

That, and the spectre of everything you do on the NDS is illegal. Even though I think the stuff that I do with the NDS flashcart ought to be legal (i.e. playing homebrew games and using homebrew apps).

It is still too much pain to develop for though, because of the unofficial nature of the SDK.

Unfortunately yes the Wiz is 320x240, but it has an OLED screen, not that it matters too much for me. You can wiki "GP2X Wiz" for the specs. I saw some videos on youtube and it look pretty nice though. The GP2X has a dedicated community so there won't be lack of softwares developed for for the Wiz. Here is the link to the file archive where the softwares and stuff developed for the Wiz will be upload: http://archive.gp2xwiz.de.



I just received my dingoo today and some people complain about tearing for it too. These two devices have different screens, but if the problem is similar probably having to do with the LCD controller. If the tearing they're talking about is what I'm thinking, it doesn't seem to be a big deal and don't happen very often. I only get a tiny bit on part of the screen when there are very fast motion involved, and it rarely happens, same as computer monitor when you have mistmatch of frame rates display and response rate. If it's some other terminal problem then I don't know. If anyone is interested in the dingoo, I would say wait a while until better emulators are developed for it. I'm mainly bought it for music and video so I'm happy enough with those features. The sound quality on this thing is pretty good, too bad it has no AAC support. It plays flash video too suprisingly.

Edited 2009-05-16 00:42 UTC

Actaully I've been testing it a bit and the main problem is every emulator is slow, due to poor optimization. The only one fast enough is NES. But I'm pretty sure there will better version in the future that can run fullspeed. I'm surprised that almost all games I've tried works and they look great, just need better speed.

Also wants to update my previous comment, the device support flash 6.

Edited 2009-05-16 03:46 UTC

There are already a few emulators ready from the GP2x open source scene. Have a look at the community sites from the gp2x, they are already there to download.

And if you mean the rom images from the games... well they don't need to sell those as they are already around.

a ferrari engine in a vw beetle sounds sweet