We’re all gadget nutbars, aren’t we? I’ve been doing mobile development in homebrew, shareware and commercial arenas for 10+ years and can even today build some of my apps for a dozen platforms all in one shot :) Disclosure — yes, I’m one of the guys who spent way too much time on the Pandora… and also the Wiz, the GP2x F100 and F200, the GP32, and you name it, so I think I’m a pretty balanced (pre)reviewer.

Regarding the Caanoo, I’ve been on the fence – it seemed to arrive a little too quick on the heels of the Wiz in my books so I’ve worried there may be some disappointment from the Wiz community; only time will tell if GPH keeps up support for the Wiz (in terms of WiFi and games on their homespun FunGP store) but it is heartening that they have said that “Yes!” they are still behind the Wiz.. but understandably just a bit tired out in launching the new device. Fair enough! Further, with specs rather similar to the Wiz itself, I wasn’t sure if I needed to upgrade or not.

Well, GPH very gratiously sent me a white Caanoo for development (and no, I do not mark something up just because I got a freebie! This is my ‘first impressions’ but rest assurred I will be fair .. buying me out costs a hell of a lot more than a device! GPH if you’re listening – send me a Camaro and we’ll talk!)

Now, my wordy stream of consiousness ‘first impressions’ .. sorry for the length!

Main stuff:

In hand ergonomics and look: Pretty fine, I have to admit; it reminds me of the old GP32 though of course not as bulky or rounded. It feels pretty solid though does have some creek in a few places when you twist it a touch, but nothing to worry about (and quite possibly is a result of the stylus slot.) I liked the Wiz when it came around due to its pocketability and gorgeous screen (compared against the gp2x), but after the device-honeymoon phase I found the small size and tiny d-pads buttons more annoying than beneficial. In the end when I’m commuting I don’t really have down-time (usually driving or with my little one) and so the pocketability isn’t really of value to me. All told, the Caanoo is a much better looking and feeling machine if you can deal with the size. The larger screen and better button placement is all win. To sum — its actually a pretty attractice machine, is solid feeling, and everything seems placed well. It _immediately_ replaced my Wiz. (Disclosure; I got sent a developer Wiz (GPH is _really_ cool in this regard, they’ve been trying very hard to make good with the developer community; this is doubly commendable for reaching out to the English and Spanish homebrew communities.) I also _bought_ a Wiz to show support and get the same specs as everyone else.)

Size: The unit actually fits loosely into a PSP sleeve, so its smaller than the PSP; it should fit into a jeans pocket pretty well, but it is a little large. This is a benefit to me (since I don’t carry gadgets in pocket for the most part), but may be a concern for some; those people can stick with a Wiz. I’d say the size is a win.

Screen: Sure, its no OLED like on the Wiz (what was a goregeous bright little screen we must all admit), but its nice and big and sharp; it doesn’t have the black levels or intensity of the OLED but as a mobile dev I long ago grew accustomed to these sorts of screens and I think most are in a similar boat – but the size and crispness go a long way. (Okay sure, I’m a purist in some regards and collect arcade machines, with their giant 30 year old fuzzy-pixel monitors, so you’d think crispness wouldn’t matter; but in the small mobile space, crispness works really well. The blur in big arcade monitors is great when your pixels are the size of your finger ;) I did notice in some lighting conditions and on-screen colour situations that it was a touch brighter at the bottom than the top, but its barely noticable. Being a TFT (I think?) screen I thought it would actually be a little worse (more like the PDAs of years gone by) but its an excellent screen without too much ’stage bloom’ on one side like most TFTs have. In daylight visibility is not too shabby, which is a traditional weakness of TFT. It is pretty odd that the screen plastic overlaps the display by a little bit, but I suspect this is to cover another traditional TFT oddity — the ‘white band’;
many LCD screens have a bright white single-pixel boarder round the outside – not too annoying really, but odd nonetheless. Either way, the casing covers probably 4 a pixels on each side which is a little much. (Given a large set of the use-cases will be emulation, video and music playing its not a problem — most arcade or home console games focused most activity on the middle of the screen to avoid bezel problems like this, and of course music doesn’t care. Applicatoins may have to compensate however, and your Galaga game will suffer a touch with enemies who deliberately hide in the bezel. So instead of calling it a 320×240 screen you might want to call it a 310×230 and center it :) The screen is a touchscreen and seems as accurate as PDAs of yore as well, unlike the pretty atrocious touchscreen on the F200 and Wiz. I’ve not worked it hard, but it doesn’t seem to have the big dead-regions of those guys. So its a great screen, but it does have some trim.

Joystick: An old rant is that I actually liked the wobbly top heavy GP32 joystick, and really liked the Neo Geo Pocket stick; but its been years since I really used those so I can’t fairly compare. The Caanoo has a joystick and not a d-pad or discus-of-control, and it is clearly superior to the GP2x F100 stick and the really goofy F200-button-pad-thing; the Wiz d-pad was not too mechanically bad, but just too small for my fingers and so just worked out not to be too good. With all of this behind, you can pretty much argue the Caanoo stick is right off the top better than anything GPH has done, and more to point — it turns out to be a fairly accurate controller as well. The material is grippy enough to not have your thumb sliding off and feels good, without sticking too far out. Now, I’ve not looked into the APIs or hardware to know ‘how analog’ it is or if the firmware or apps are mapping to digital ordinals on their own and with what approach etc etc, but with Mame4all (the only app I’ve tried so far as not much is natively available yet) it works out quite well; trying hard-ordinals like Pacman, no problem; trying shmups like Sky Shark / Flying Shark (one of my favourites, and actually the first actual cabinet I bought :) works pretty well though a little diagonally at times; I tried to get a good feel for the stick using Gauntlet (I own two of those cabinets ;) and while a thumb controller can never compare to a real joystick, it works pretty well when trying to line up shots to the creature-spawn points. Now, I suck at playing games, so not being 100% precise is probably a large part my fault (I’m nbever all that precise with dpads either), but this is a good stick, one of the very best mobile controllers I’ve used. (I’ve not really used a NDS enough to say, but I find the PSP d-pad anoying in the first few iterations but pretty good on the PSP-slim (PSP-2000); I’d say this stick is about that good, though a totaly differenyt kind of animal of course.) I’ve not tried the stick in a more purely analog mode, and will have to get to coding before I get a good feel there, but I feel confident in saying — GPH did good here. Controls are a traditional weakness of GPH, and I think they nailed this one pretty well. The stick does have a push-for-button, and its pretty stiff so might be usable; in general I just hate push-me buttons on a stick since I want to whale on the stick and not accidentally press buttons, but this one may be okay (like in an xbox or ps2 controller .. stiff enough you don’t hit it normally, but good in a pinch.) the corresponding d-pad buttons are well placed and well spaced (the opposite of the Wiz), and work well.

Battery: I’ve not measured to see the lifespan, but it seems pretty good; the only point I can make is that it is not designed to be user-removable. I’ve not disssembled yet to know if it in fact _is_ user changable or if its custom and hard to access, but its important to note. I think the PSP did it well where batteries are available on every corner, but most devices have a built-in and unremovable battery, so you can’t fault the Caanoo for it. Still, I prefer otherwise. But its not like the battery will not last as long as you’re using the device (a few years), so not really a concern.

Specs and Utility: It perhaps need to be said, the unit is more or less similar to a Wiz in specs; its sort of a Wiz v 3.0 — larger (a win in my book), with improved interfaces and buttons and the g-sensor and so on, but still more or less a Wiz. Technology is not moving forward too much here, but ergonomics is. This is a game-playing device, really oriented to 8- and 16-bit style of games (witness the emulated games in the FunGP store), and not a general purpose gadget per se. I honestly don’t think it’d make a good book reader due to the low rez of the display (and the built in book reader is really what I’d call a ‘text file reader’ since it doesn’t do any ebook format of note), but as an mp3 player, emu player, etc, it is well designed. Obviously, and especially being Linux based, you can push its limits and go nuts (that _is_ why we’re all here, right?), but I don’t think it’ll really be _fun_ to use as a VNC terminal say. But for your retro gaming and general hacking, it actually seems pretty ideal, what with that screen rez being pretty ideal. I don’t mean to suggest the unit is designed for Linux geeks, it is _very_ accessible for avergae joe.

Boot time: Very fast! I’ll have to check what they did there.. nice :)

Minor stuff:

SD Slot: Good old solid SD slot, and with a port cover (like most ports on the unit, nicely done!); a minor beef is the slot is a little over recessed so hard to push the SD in that list little bit to stick it in place or eject it; not something to concern over.

Power Switch: big and Battlestar Galactica style, I dig it; a big orange switch on the side .. nice and easy to work, no sloppyness. When I saw pics I thought it looked goofy, but in person.. great. On the left side of the unit is a big LED to indicate on or charge state, and and again .. big and BSG style, and awesome. The looks are good.

Headphones: As with most devices, the headphone jack is on the bottom; I wish otherwise, but what can you do? Typical for these kidns of devices.. I don’t know why :)

Shoulders: The ‘trigger’ buttons are mechanically fine, but as with any small handheld, they’ll be positioned in an awkward place; theres nothign a mobile can do about it, so these are pretty good in terms of the mobile space.

Menu and software: its ‘just a menu’, which is to say it works, swooshes nicely and has some animation, but it stays out of the way and gets to the point pretty well, so good enough; I’m not a UI guy (as in, I’m a pretty forgiving guy when it comes to menus and hardware; sometimes I wish I was more picky, but blessedly I’m not!) So the menu seems great. I mostly look at a menu as — its either there, or its bad, so this is good — I don’t notice it, so it did the right job!

Disliked:

The Speakers — this is the achillies heal of the Caanoo. It doesn’t sound too bad, but it does sound a little weird — like sound coming from the next room over down the hall; its obvious the sound is being pointed out the back and sounds a little muffled as a result (especially if your hands accidentally cover the grills, but thats not too much an issue.) A few times I found myself wanting to subconsiously flip the unit over to hear clearer. The sound is crisp in headphones of course, but the speakers facing backwards is just wrong. I appreciate the mechanical realestate challenges, but it has to be said .. the speakers are of good quality, just placed in the wrong spot.

Untested:

I didn’t try the motion sensor or feedback-buzzer.

I didn’t try Wifi since their Wifi-module is not available yet; I must say I find it very distasteful to list the unit as having Wifi (with an asterisk saying an external module is needed) — check the review sites and videos, and you’ll see most of them miss the asterisk and assume the unit actually has Wifi, when _it does not._ Anyway, browsing on the small res screen is not the best thing ever (check your PDAs of yore on 320×320 of 160×160), but it’d be handy for multiplayer gaming or game-ladders, etc. It should be pretty good on the Caanoo as with any Linux device, but its not something they should push in advertising per se. *shrug*

I didn’t try the GPU (or really try to push hard performance. This sort of machine is not designed to be a speed demon, but is instead designed to have the specs good enough and then some for its target of games.)

Final word:

In the end — I thought the Caanoo might have come too soon and not been enough of an upgrade; if you’re tight for cash or pocket space this might still be the case. But I gotta say – given a Caanoo, _I_ would never go back to the Wiz — the larger size is great for me and I really think they’ve got a hit for ergonomics and changes. Its not a giant leap forward, but its definatley the way to go for new buyers or those looking for a change.

The seminal Turrican for the Commodore 64 was released in 1990. The venerable and future-altering Atari 2600 was still in production in 1989. These two facts are astonishing for the fact the Atari ST, Amiga, Megadrive/Genesis and SNES were all available by 1989 (with the Atari ST and Amiga being in 1986!), and the fact the GP2X puts them all in your pocket. Right now.

While the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS duke it out in the public eye, there still exists a quiet subculture of alternative devices; sure, they’re harder to find and have their share of flaws, but this is where the real freedom lies – the non-mainstream is where you find the Henry Rollins of handhelds. Sony and Nintendo have a legal obligation to crush homebrew in their markets, so if you want Nethack in your pocket.. you need more. If you want SOCOM though, stick to your PSP for mobile gaming – Wipeout Pure and Nintendogs are true modern classics and a joy to behold. But if you want to fire up Gley Lancer or Bomberman 94 or Dungeon Master or Black Tiger, or you want to experiment with your own homebrew on a mobile mini-Linux platform.. the GP2X is for you.

OKay, enough with the sales pitch ;) I’ve not posted a tonne about the GP2X of late due to all my other assorted rants, so do let me know if you’d like some more information that direction. This post, instead, is more to talk about a little hardware mod than a fine lad has put together. (Disclosure: He sent me one for free; but thats because I’m lazy, and he sells them for $10. Not a free TV here. Not that I’m opposed to anyone sending me a TV.)

Now, with the preamble out of the way, let me delve right into the DaveC cap. The GP2x features a joystick-nub which works pretty well — its low to the surface so doesn’t get worn off from bouncing around a knapsack, and works pretty well. The one problem is the GP2X internal joystick gadget is slightly askew so it tends to favour diagonals more than it should, and it offers some ‘dead zones’ where the stick must travel fairly far in order to indicate a motion to the internal sensors. These design gotchas annoy some to no end, but I didn’t find them particularly cumbersom, though in a tight Xenon 2 session the angling would aggravate me. Enter DaveC.

DaveC is a stickler to attention if nothing else; a perfectionist for retro – the human Occam’s Razor for emulation. He also seems to know something about a lathe, so has crafted an alternative joystick ‘cap’ for the GP2X to help remedy these slight issues. At first I just avoided taking an interest, since I didn’t quite get what it was — let me explain.

The discussions surrounded the idea of ‘pulling off’ the cap, and pushing in or on a new one. The idea sounded like work, and risky, to me — I steered clear since I’ve been so insanely busy of late, the idea of even a slight risk to crushing the joystick mechamism steered me away. However, once more information came out it became obvious what in fact goes on during the installation, so hopefully this article proves useful to someone. The joystick mechanism is really just a little metal shaft rising out from the GP2X casing (with a series of microswitches at its base, of course) with a plastic cap popped on its end – I had assumed the shaft and cap were all one, but this is not the case. DaveC’s replacement cap is just another cap that you can pop in instead of the other, more or less. I’m fudging over the actual details, since I’m in a rush, but that explanation should illustrate the concept well enough — its not hard, its not really risky, and it takes all of 2 minutes. No MacGyver needed.

The cap itself is wider and concave, so your thumb can rest more inside of it than atop it like with the original cap. Thus you get a better grip. DaveC’s literature suggests the cap is a stronger plastic and yadda yadda performance, but I’m extremely anal about my gear so thats not important to me. Most important is the diamater of the cap surface, which is much larger than the original.. a very large ’spoon’ as it were. The end result being that you can grip this sucker easier, and it tilts the given direction further and faster, so play is more accurate and much more responsive than ever before. Really, I would almost say the joystick is almost too sensitive for my big fudgy fingers. (I’m not much of a gamer.. I’m a wannabee gamer who can only handle a single firebutton :)

So if you need a homebrew fixin’, fire it up on your NDS or PSP with appropriate hacks and mods (until such day Sony and N shut these down.) If you don’t have one of those, and/or want to get a gadget that has a fiercely independant community thats 100% homebrew focused, dive in and get a GP2X or GP32. And if you’re doubly a nerd and want to improve performance on your GP2X, get DaveC’s cap — at $10 its not a big drop, and it could just double your enjoyment. Take it from a guy with arcade cabinets in his basement — UI is everything.

Hook up with DaveC on the GP32x website.

After much delay in shipping (thanks US Postal Service!) and subsequent re-shipping via FedEx, I now have a GP2x console to attack. Many thanks to jr2swiss for rescuing the shipping disaster, to Prophet for working out the details of getting a developer a unit, and to all the many people who kicked in to fund this for me. I’m posting this very quickly as I need to head out in just a bit so will write up more comprehensively later on, but for now — thanks to everyone. It is appreciated, and I’ve got a little gift for everyone later on as a little payback.

Anyway, in my haste the best I can offer you is the photostill blow-by-blow. I must say that gp32z packaged the living hell out of the unit, so if this is how he normally operates.. no one need worry about shipping damage :P

Heres a box, presumably with a gp2x inside; this is after I’d already removed the heavy paper wrapping and the styofoam bits and the heaby FedEx carrier box.

Continue…

Ahh, the sleek Apple-like gp2x packaging; I do admire the total lack of useful information on the carton – clean, black, simple. You gotta know when to hold ‘em, and know when to fold ‘em.

I dismembered the packaging and extracted the nugget within; the screen assembly was easy enough to perform. At first, the screen cover you pop in looked _nasty_, but it too had a very fine screen protector on it.. the Screen Protector Meta-Protector. Took awhile to get a fingernail under it, but as you can see.. the gp2x is a pretty good looking machine. Surprisingly light too — I’d say they went out of their way to clone the Neo Geo Pocket as much as possible in the physical layout. The photo is for comparison to the Sony PSP — similar in size, though the PSP has a larger screen and is heavier.. perhaps a little more awkward to hold as well. Really, I think shoulder buttons on all devices should be on the bottom corner, not the edge of the device.. but thats just me.

Heres the box contents, though I imagine most people don’t get the serial connection adapter; gp32z threw that in for me, since everyone knows I’ll need it after bricking my OS a few times ;) Notice the purple kleenex for cleaning off your friends drool.

An important test — does it turn on? Is it pre-bricked? No, we get a menu!

Doesn’t everyone have a first test they always inflict on a device? As a developer we always produce a Hello World program first, but for testing a unit.. first up against the yardstick is Parodius on a PC Engine / TG16 emulator. Heres sn00p shooting down the cat-pirate-ship. Notice the bone in the cats hair. Classy.

Finally, a really creepy picture of doll arms taken at a local surplus store. The real human arms are in an adjoining room.

While the gp2x is still in its infancy, the emu count is climbing and the homebrew is starting to show. Its a safe time for most people to jump in if thats the sort of device they want — commercial games may arise in awhile, but if you want Tony Hawk.. get a PSP or Nintendo DS. This is for the real (wo)men.

I’ll post more in-depth info later as I hack it up some, but for now.. its a Linux (kernel) based device running on a dual-core ARM CPU ranging from low (66?) to about 240-266 MHz speed, with a Magic Eyes chipset for doing video trickery. Theres no 3D-GPU like you might want so 3d games will be in software only, but it should be very good at flinging sprites around and doing video playing and such. Note that it features a huge amount of RAM by todays standards, which will be very handy indeed.

More later.

I’ve done a tonne of interviews over the years – mostly for my Palm OS software of course, but a fair amount for little gaming magazines or the like. Release an emulator or homebrew game and be popular for a day or two. (Fame, riches.. not here!) Sadly, it only occurred to me late to actually keep copies of interviews around so I don’t have most of them on file, but one of these days I’ll try and dig up the ones I do have and hoist them up. After all, is not a blog for organizing bits of text? :)

Below is the email-interview (can you call it that?) for a little to-be-zine about the very soon to be released GP2x mobile gaming console. I spewed it out quick before heading into the office, so I’m sure its full of typos.. what can you do :)

Who are you?

Damned if I know ;) Some Canuck* who has too much retro-electronics in his basement, from arcade cabinets to mountains of Atari gear. Folks might recognize my main website/blog that houses most of my shareware and freeware projects (GP32 and soon GP2x of course, Palm OS, Pocket PC, Sony PSP, Windows, Mac OSX, Linux and the BSDs) – http://www.codejedi.com

* Canuck: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canuck – it doesn’t mean “jackass” as some would suggest ;)

How long have you been doing this? (developing)

Too long, or not long enough, depending on how much support mail I’ve answered that day ;) I’m 33 (sigh) these days, and have been coding since I was a wee tot on the Commodore Vic-20 and theres-abouts; I sold my first shareware around 1988 or so for the Atari ST, and have been professionally coding for various platforms since the early 1990s (and oddly enough, still coding on the Atari ST once in awhile.)

What is your favourite game of all time?

Ouch, thats a tough one of course, so I’ll give a few; for retro I’d have to say Dungeon Master (Atari ST) amd Wizardry 7 (DOS) off the top of my head (unforgettible to me), though how do you factor in Civilization since it was around back in the day and still today? (Civ I through Civ IV rule my world, alongside Alpha Centauri.) More modern I’d say Wizardry 8 (PC) and Halflife 2 come to mind as true favourites. Theres a lot in-between of course.

What are you working on for the GP2X?

Another long list; Atari ST is of course my pet project, so there will be CaSTaway/gp2x right up front, trhough I expect to also bundle in STonX and Hatari under the same hood.. and perhaps my own Atari ST emulator. (Its a non-graphical TOS-only emu thats for running ST text applications like BBSes ;) I’m also working on a Retrocade port – MAME wasn’t the first nor fastest arcade emu around so on small devices Retrocade coudl fill a nice tasty niche. I may brig along my XCade for old times sake, but with MAME and Retrocade around its not as necessary. I’ve done a preliminary port of Descent as well, so when I get a device we’ll see how that goes. For new projects, I built a new tile-brick puzzler engine (Manticore*) for gp2x that I’ve just released on other platforms (Pocket PC, Palm OS, Windows, Linux) for testing sake (while waiting for the gp2x, might as well release it ;) I’ve got a musician and artist on board so hopefully Manticore will start to look and sound sharper ;) Lets see.. what else – if no one tackles other Atari 8 bit machines (Atari 800, 2600 etc) then maybe I’ll just turn CaSTaway into a big fat Atari-Everything emulator, who knows? So off the top of my head, its CaSTaway, Manticore, Retrocade and Descent on my plate right now.

* Manticore is http://www.codejedi.com/manticore

What do you want to see most on the GP2X?

Well, Quake 3 is too much to ask, so I’m looking for a good pollished long lived emulation and retro and homebrew platform; the Sony PSP is a pretty sweet machine, but with Sony out to kill homebrew at every stop its just not a viable platform despite its mass appeal. (Mass appeal you say? Yes – we want the masses to rememebr they too can _create_!) Remember when we were all kids and BASIC and Logo were around for homebrewing? Thats what I want to see.. simple but reasonably powerful platforms for peopel to screw with and create things. The XGameStation and other projects are doing very cool things, and I love to see people homebrewing on retro machines (see Atari Age for actually buying new Atari 2600 games!), but I expect the gp2x to fill the homebrew niche for many of us. Mobiles are inherently cool, and with Unix/Linux being built by developers its always been very dev friendly – so the gp2x will get some wider audience due to the Linux influence, and its coded with SDL (cross platform and easy to use) so we’ve really got a shot.

Hell, I’ve always been big on community involvement – the GP32 community built up quite an amazing Atari ST games database for CaSTaway.. a project which has proven useful to other ST emulators as well. Although my Zot scripting system failed to appeal, the whole modding scene could grow more and more on the gp2x.. Fenix shoudl come along, and I expect the OrR’s of the world will keep making new levels for everything, and peopel will forever make new characters for SmashGP variants.. and don’t lets get into BoR Mods. With the gp2x I expect we’ll see some Quake mods or engine derivations, so coudl be good times.

Aside from loftier goals, I of course just want a good Atari ST platform ;) Sure, a good fast SNES emulator would be nice since I missed a lot of the SNES and Genesis years. We already know Reesy will bring DrMD along for Genesis. So I’m pretty well covered. (OKay, bring it on – ST, Amiga, SNES, Genesis, Commies (C64, Vic20, etc), Atari 8bitters, Neo Geo, TG16, PC XT, etc etc.. we want it all in our hand.)

So as always, my interests are mostly in development; to me, the fun is in building the game, not playing. Yes, I know, I need to slow down and play sometime ;)

No Linux or no coffee?

I don’t care for coffee; food should be hot, and drinks should be cold. Its all cola for me, baby.

A lot of people are planning to move over to the GP2x handheld console – be they former or current GP32 (the companies prior device) owners or people coming completely in from the green. As a GP32 owner and fan this is great news — GamePark (now GamePark Holdings) are fairly clueless in a lot of ways, but (like Commodore!) they know to keep prices low to the ground and encourage third parties to get into the mix. (Yes, you read right, a company who actually encourages you to rip open their devices knowing you’ll enjoy it, tell all your friends, and need to buy another when you kill your SMC slot.. right Squidge?)

Anyway, for now, I’ll try and avoid going over what a GP32 is in any great detail, and what the GP2x will be… except to summarize something I’ve been saying a lot lately. So now I can just point to this posting and say “see there” :) Oh, and that the GP32 ’scene’ is a lot like the old Amiga and Atari ST and Commie scenes were — its _fun_.

The past

The GP32 is well loved by its fans as being the top emulation machine around right now, despite its rather anemic specs. An ARM CPU with no FPU (and that can usually only clock up to 160MHz or more) attached to 8MB of RAM and an SMC slot – not much and all off the shelf.. but it does feel pretty good and offers controls that don’t cramp you up (I’m looking at you, Tapwave.) It offers a really sexy bright screen (too bad its sideways in RAM!), and a really simple SDK thats free and Free courtesy of the Free Software Foundation and gcc (again, I’m looking at you Tapwave!), though it lacks the sexy black finish and touchscreen (again, looking at you with sad eyes, Tapwave!) Due to the ease of coding and familiarity of tools, the GP32 quickly became ‘the’ machine to port homebrew games and emulators to.. it was easy to do, fast to do, and the result was loved by the scene members and really.. the emus are a total blast. Course, only a few dozen developers are active at a time but this helps create mystique and makes for a tight friendly scene of people hacking away and helping each other. (And thank god for gp32x.com and Evil Dragon!)

The present

The GP32 is pretty much unheard of by most gamers and coders, since its created by a small Korean company and distributed only through little importers such as Lik Sang, GBAX and various individuals. Good kachet, but not so good for sales. Naturally, people have hacked away at their Palm OS and Pocket PC PDAs, and done wonders on the GBA and Sony PSP consoles. The PSP could be king (and really is a _great_ emulation platform right now) were it not for Sony constantly trying to suppress the scene and homebrew development – eventually, users will have to decide between getting new games, or sticking to old games and homebrew, and thats just not cool. But for now, the GP32 is the king of open handheld game consoles, and the PSP is tops for handheld consoles with bastard intentions.

The GP32 has no special hardware and is relatively limited, but works well due to the dedication of its developers and scene. The Tapwave Zodiac was a better machine in almost every sense, but the company business model just couldn’t hold up against the tide that is Sony and Nintendo. The Zodiac, over the GP32, sported 200MHz (a little clockable as well) processor with fast architecture, a bright touchscreen with a 2d GPU for scaling, smoothing and blitting, and rechargable battery and enormous pile of RAM. The Zodiac was pretty good kit for emulation and homebrew, but the companies choice to back a commercial compiler suite pretty much made homebrew non-existant.. so the GP32 remained king.

The PSP on the other hand is easy to develop for due to the hard work of the PSP SDK team (among others) and is also based on gcc-and-friends. With a fast CPU (333Mhz!) and aggressive chipset as well as full 3d GPU, its a sexy piece of machinery. No touchscreen, but long rechargable battery life, a gorgeous bright display, analog and digital controls.. its a great emulation platform — and lets face it, theres millions out there so lots of potential admirers for your homebrew. Too bad Sony is out to get the scene…

Nintendo’s DS is another good solid platform; a little harder for people to homebrew with since they need to first acquire a special adapter to enable homebrew to occur (ie: additional cost and effort), and a little harder to develop for.. its still a popular machine due to the dual screen and touchscreen action. Like the GBA (though superior to the GBA in every way), the NDS doesn’t have a beefy processor so no serious emulation will occur (ie: Amiga etc.)

The Future

So I would argue that the near future of mobile emulation essentialy boils down to two main contenders – the Sony PSP and its ‘now it works, soon it might not’ mentality, and the GP2x which hopefully will adopt the mighty GP32 community.

So how does the GP2x stack up?

The GP2x is another machine built mostly from off-the-shelf componentry.. no touchscreen but another big and bright screen like seen on the existing GP32 ‘BLU’ (backlit) models. This time she’ll have lots of RAM (64MB seems to be the goal), which puts her in the same boat as the venerable Zodiac – enough RAM for SNES and NES by far.. but also enough for Amiga, Atari ST, and even Neo Geo CD (oh baby!).. even enough for emulating a number of classy Capcom arcade games and the like. Gamepark has always been pretty good with controls, so we expect the GP2x (to be released soon) to have good controls, and this time a SD/MMC slot instead of the long out of date SMC card system.. media will be cheap and fast.

The point

But as we all know.. emulation is about processing power, and the GP2x could shine here.. but not right away. The GP32 faired pretty well on its lowly 160MHz or so, but everyone wanted more. With the PSP we see that 333MHZ can do pretty well (especially with a GPU behind it), but I’ve long said the sexy point is about 400MHz and up (maybe even 600). The GP2x takes a twist – rather than offer a single piece with high speed, it will offer two 200MHz processors with some specialization in function. (Clocking may be possible, but we won’t know until we see the machine.)

What does this mean?

(This is why I made this post –>) A direct port to the machine will run about as well as any other 200MHz machine, such as the Tapwave Zodiac. The machine has the potential to work really well, with the dual processor arrangement.. but it will take some work for developers to port a single-threaded application to a multi-CPU arrangement to actually use that second CPU effectively; in fact, we can assume most applications will be single-CPU based and run at 200MHz, while a few others will use one CPU for heavy lifting all the time, and use the second CPU for ‘bursts’ to save on performance (say, for audio generation or screen scaling, while the main game engine does its business.) After a bit of time, the second CPU will be used more heavily, and after even more time I’m sure both CPUs will be working double time.. but right up front, it’ll act like a 200MHz machine.

But for those developers who take care, it could really pay off. Lets just hope Gamepark provides some cache for the chips, and arranges the system bus so as to minimize contension between CPUs. Otherwise we lose a lot of performance hopping on and off the bus..