Korean company GamePark Holdings have finally released the GP2x Wiz portable games console, the successor to the popular, but abruptly end-of-life’d, GP2x. What makes these portable devices special is that they run Linux, and are more or less aimed at the enthusiast and homebrew markets.
Specification-wise, the GP2x Wiz packs a serious punch. Taken directly from Wikipedia (as that’s the most complete list I could find):
Chipset: MagicEyes Pollux System-on-a-Chip CPU: 533MHz ARM9 3D Accelerator NAND Flash Memory: 1 GB RAM: SDRAM 64 MB Operating System: GNU/Linux-based OS Storage: SD Card (with SDHC support) Connection to PC: USB 2.0 High Speed USB Host: USB 2.0 Power: Internal 2000mAh Lithium Polymer Battery (approx. 7 hours game/video playback) Display: 320×240 2.8 inch AMOLED Touch Screen Microphone Input Physical size: 121 mm wide, 61 mm high, 18 mm deep Weight: 98 g (without battery), 136 g (with battery) 3D Acceleration and TV Out Chipset supports OpenGL ES 1.1 133M Texel/sec, 1.33M Polygon/sec.
It comes with lots of audio and video codecs built-in, as well as an implementation of Flash 8. However, the real potential for this device – from my perspective, at least – is its ability to run several emulators. This means you can have lots of amazingly good games, all in your pocket. For me, that would mean SNES games, but the possibilities are endless.
That’s a very neat little platform. I still have the original F100 (w/o touchscreen and 3d chip). And the fact that it’s able to emulate PSX is pretty impressive.
Now that the Wiz has a 3D chip, PSX emulator might be getting to full-speed emulation.
This looks great, but I am looking forward to the Open Pandora, which has a faster ARM cpu, dual SD card slots, and a thumb-sized keyboard. It runs Quake III at full speed.
And another one that’s been out several months…the dingoo A320 (~$83 at dealextreme). Apparently they copied the DSlite’s controls…be interesting to hear more about how well people like/dislike the wiz’s controls.
Rumours about an a380 for $100 that has an analog nub…
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
I for one am looking forward to getting me one of these. I was a bit sad to find out that the GP2X was stopped. Nothing beates emulated games on the go, a bit Neo Geo here and a little more SNES there, and a MAME to top it off!
If they’d released this a year ago it might’ve stood a decent chance of homebrew greatness or beyond but as it is now I’m sure it must only be a matter of weeks until we (those who pre-ordered) receive our Pandoras which of course have 4X the RAM, clamshell design, wifi/bt and a mini keyboard to boot. For a few quid more the Pandora is an entirely different, superior class of device.
You can now see a video of the 98% finished Pandora in the latest openpandora video blog entry
http://openpandora.org/blog.php
IMO the Pandora looks likely to be the long awaited ‘portable Amiga’ OS newsers have long dreamed of!
Too bad no developer will take it seriously and it’ll be used mainly to emulate older systems.
Software sells hardware. If they can get big developers like Bandai Namce, Square Enix, Capcom and Konami to support it, I can see it succeed as a platform.
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.
I heard there was some defect on the screen of the Wiz that causes tearing when scrolling. Anyone know anything about this?
Unfortunately yes the Wiz is 320×240, 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
Why on earth did they implement a flash 8 engine? Wouldn’t a (pure) Flash 9 engine have been much cleaner (cleaner “DOM” tree and event handling etc) and been more efficient (thanks to typing etc)?
There seems to be little information available on the web. For instance, the stores that sell it do not give the screen resolution. I hope it is not 320*240. With its 500+Mhz engine it would be like putting a Ferrari engine in a VW beetle.
Also I assume this can play emulated games but I can’t find any stated info this. How do they expect to sell it?
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