I just got back from a month-long backpacking trip through Europe. Last week, I happened to pick a UK edition of FHM (" For Him Magazine ") with brief reviews of four handhelds - Nintendo DS, Nokia NGage QD, PSP, and our own GP2X. They gave GP2X the lowest score owing to their difficulties making it work. No mention of this community, nor of Linux, and they concluded that GP2X is "too geek for us". Not surprisingly, NDS received the highest rating of the four. In fairness, though, I picked up an NDS in Cologne, Germany, and quickly became addicted to "Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney".

Anyone else see this article?

I didnt see the article but I'd like to add that i seen the GP2X on the COVER of a Linux magazine here in the UK.. its was a suprizing sight for me lol

Oops, double-posted. Could one of the ops please delete the redundant thread? Thanks!

The N-Gage QD scored higher than the GP2X? Blasphemy!

What's wrong with that?

I can't say that I could fault anyone for saying that the GP2X is geekier than the other contenders. "You just have to download the emulator, unzip it to an SD card, download some ROMS, put them in the right folder, turn on the power, go into the emulator, go to the "Load ROM" menu, and just like that you can play the game!" - We might not mind doing it, but it's a heck of a far cry from "Insert cartridge. Turn on. Play"

I'll happily advocate the GP2X to anybody in my local Linux group, but I couldn't hand it to my mother and tell her that it's the perfect way for her to get her daily Suduko fix. . .

You forget, it was FHM

It's a shame, though. Such a high profile magazine making the cheap shot of "we couldn't get it to work - it sucks, not us".
Crag, any chance you could persuade them to retry it with some help?

Rofl, FHM is just ridicolous.

This is like with my mom and explanations. I call it the "5 second" rule. If I can't explain something to her in 5 seconds, she gets lost, confused, and angry at my poor explanation skills. Ditto with the gp2x...

OBJECTION!!

It's confusing, though. Assuming they had a GP2X from gp2x.co.uk with FW2, they'd already have Vektar and (if I remember rightly) a link to this here forum... doesn't take a genius (oh, wait... FHM)

You're complaining that the writers of a men's mag didn't read the instructions or ask for directions??? Are you a woman in disguise or something??

if it didnt come in a basket of porn, they dont like it

So wait...The DS comes in a basket of porn? Which kind? The Princess Peach on Zelda kind or the Mario on Link kind?

They're right. Few of their readers would like the gp2x. Only a small fraction of the general population should even consider getting one, at least right now.

I'm that way about my car. For me, it's a thing where I turn the key and with a few simple controls I can get safely and quickly from A to B. If it were more complicated than that, I'd trade it in on a new car that was simple.

Link!

Edit: Okay, that was "post a link", not "Link from Zelda"... how confusing

Bah! no porn for you!

HOLD IT!! [Pound table with both hands, lean forward, look pissed] Their testimony is that the GP2X is too "geek" for them to figure out...yet the text beneath the rightup clearly displays "http://www.gp2x.co.uk", which makes frequent reference to *this* very community. And yet, no mention of gp32x.com? Did they *even visit Craig's site*? Did they even make a basic effort to USE this device?! [Pointing dramatically] I THINK NOT!!

BTW, I'm up to episode 5. How many are there?

Episode 5 is the last one. Phoenix Wright on the DS is a remake of Gyakuten Saiban on the GBA which originally had 4 episodes. The fifth one is part of the remake.

FHM is fine and dandy when you want to see almost naked women, but beyond that I don't think is has much credibility so I don't think anyone here should fret about their opinions.

haha!!! almost naked women!!! You guys kill me.... oh wait. If they can't use a gp2x they would hardly know how to use bit torrent to get free porn of the internet, right? poor chaps...

I think they have a point somehow. I take much affort to download, install and set up games (emunlators) on GP2X. To make this easier we may make installers to help install these emulators. May be something like ITune. Is someone interested?

I like Dzz's example with the car. We all have our areas of interest. Whatever is outside our area of interest is several times more difficult and annoying to understand. I'm interested in computers, so I learn quickly. I'm NOT interested in cars on a technical level, so I find those hard to learn much about.

This being said, it's a well-known fact that the most read magazines in any country are populistic pseudo-journalism at best. People aren't interested in a "thorough" or "fair" review when a bunch of things are tested. They want to see a few lines saying how good or bad it is and what kind of a dice-throw it gets. They want to be able to read the WHOLE review in one minute flat. The magazines know this, and this is why they sell so damn well.

I get people in my photo store all the time who want "that camera that was best in test yesterday on TV", but never anyone who's seen the latest review on DPreview.com and wanted to check out that camera. And when you're doing a 30-second TV-review of a camera, you're not likely to spend a lot of time thoroughly checking out how everything works. I know of several cameras that have won prestigous awards which got last place in TV multi-reviews.

Just a fact of life, I suppose.

Nawa> IMHO, if you want to make emulated games easier for the average non-geek, you need to hide things from them: Instead of firing up an emulator & loading the ROM within it, you need to think up a way so that you can just select a game direct from the menu, and it automatically gets launched within the emulator.

So, e.g. if you want to play Dizzy via a Spectrum emulator, you wouldn't go to the Games menu and select a Speccy emulator and then load Dizzy from within it. You'd go to the Games menu, click on Dizzy, and it would be run via the emulator automatically, or give you a "You need to download a spectrum emulator" error message.

That would probably win a higher rating from the FHM gang, and it'd probably be reasonably popular with the rest of us who'd find it a convenient shortcut. But it'd probably be a PITA to code. . .

1+1=2, what an awesome idea that is.

And actually, that shouldn't be too hard, pseudoprogramming-wise..
Here's how I should do it:

Make a program with a simple to navigate directory structure. You can either set the program in "Directory mode" (where it only looks for games in your current directory) or "SD mode" (where it looks for games throughout your whole SD or all subdirectories of your current directory (so if /mnt/sd is your current directory, the whole SD will be looked at. It'd be more practical to have this set to /mnt/sd/roms though). The program will check wether a game is supported (by fileextension) by looking at a .def file which is supplied by the emulators authors. The games browser should/could also include a little bit of information about the game, aswell as some screenshots of it.

The .def file should include all information needed for the Master Frontend to properly identify a game and launch the emulator with a proper commandline so it automatically opens up your desired game. The file should be a bit like this:

drmdx.def
name=DrMDx
extensions=.sms .bin..................
commandline1=<commandline here>
commandline2=<alternate commandline here>
commandline3=<yet another commandline here>
defaultcommandline=1

The alternate commandlines could be used for better finetuning of games (say, some emulators might support --soundoff, etc).

When a user opens a game through the Master Frontend for the first time which is being supported by multiple emulators, the user will be asked which emulator to use, which will then become default. When the user holds L while opening a game, he/she can change the emulator to be used with this game only or games with this fileextension in general. Holding R while opening a game will do the same, but for the commandline being used.

.zip files should get opened and checked for files within.
Complex files such as .iso and .bin should be checked on what kind of game they actually are (maybe using an external program).

The fun thing about a system like this is that it could aswell be used for movies. Add a little "type=GAME/MUSIC/VIDEO/TEXT/OTHER" line to the .def files and you can allow the user to easilly open up most things he's got dropped on his SD.

So, in other words, the general "viewing point" of this frontend is to automatically assume that the user is totally stupid, and leave the user with as few options as possible, unless he specifically claims he wants to have some control over things, by holding down the shoulder buttons.

...whoa offtopic..

"No mention of Linux".

Hahaha. FHM is a lads mag. It's target audience is not linux geeks and linux would mean nothing to the majority of its readership.

When they reviewed the gp32 they got it to work, and gave it a full page 5 star review, i guess tech standards have slipped since then...

Let's be honest with ourselves. gp2x is for geeks

well FHM is not the kind of magazine i would read for getting any useful information.

But i think its positive to see the gp2x in that many magazines.

Indeed. To see that it's being recogniced at all by the bigger, mainstream magazines that don't normally handle things like this is a plus in itself.

And once you're old enough to buy real porn it's not even good for that.

I love porn... *sigh*

I bet if there was an Denise Richards Skin installed, it would score higher then the DS.

@ Mr. B - How old are you?

I don't get why people cry about how hard the GP2X is to set up. It's about the same process you go through on a PDA or Pocket PC. Just download, unzip, copy, turn on, click, play. I don't know how anyone with at least a High School education could think that is too geek for them. It doesn't matter though, we wouldn't want the typical FHM reader to buy a GP2X, or we would get the dreaded, "i wantz xbox 360!111!" or "ps3 anyone!!?" and dear God not," wat bout nintendo wii???"

It has nothing to do with your level of education, really. And you really shouldn't just assume that just because someone isn't interested in involving themselves in the GP2X to the degree you have to to make everything work, that they are then automatically stupid people. I know a bunch of highly intelligent people who know nothing about computers or how to use them. Those old professors farting about in various universities... I'd say they're pretty intelligent folks. They wouldn't know how to even turn on the GP2X, though... I also know a whole lot of intelligent people with very little education.

It's to do with level of interest, not intelligence or education.

There seems to be a very prominent population of people on this forum who look down their nose at all those who can't even write a fucking SCRIPT (Like me, for example) and who immediately assume very unkindly things about people who simply ask questions you might think are stupid. Also, Google search is NOT an obvious choice for searching the forums, no matter how elementary it is for you. Not everyone has the time and energy to research all the functionalities of Google. I'm not saying everyone here is a snobby prick. I'm just saying there seems to be a lot of pricks around. Maybe it's just that there are a few pricks who make a lot of noise.

22

Ugh stop complaining, really there was no need to insult anyone there, even though you weren't specific, just no need there. People get frustrated when the same question gets answered several times and sometimes they act a bit rashly, they're human and all that raz-ma-taz. Anyway, calm down.

If you feel insulted, though I'm not saying you SHOULD, as I can't remember any of your posts specifically and so have no opinions on you personally... Uh... What I was trying to say is that if you feel insulted, maybe there's a reason you do. I think that if you pay attention, you'll notice what I'm talking about. It's not just a question of exarperation, as I've seen that before. It's a question of bloody snobbery. I've been on many forums through the past twelve years, most of them experiencing some degree of sudden surge in popularity, leading to a lot of new people with no clue, and I feel most of them reacted admirably as a whole. Just not this one. Maybe I'm percieving things wrongly, though.

Also, I'm perfectly calm, just a bit tired of seeing rampant elitism on the web first-hand.

one additional point: Everyone is saying how easy it is to unzip an emu, copy it onto your sd card, copy the roms and start it up... sure that's easy. but then you also have to navigate the menu for each emu, which, with no form of standarisation, can be very frustrating for each new emu you try.

Maybe they tried the neogeo emulator?

I must have been lucky with the neogeo... Got it right first time

Ok, if so many people here believe that setting up the GP2X is difficult, then why not make some sort of community quick start guide? That way we could get less topics about the same question over and over again. We could put the basic how-to's, such as navigating the menu, downloading, extracting, placement of basic items, and we could also put the more advanced steps, such as setting up the Neo-Geo emulator, overclocking, etc.

I bet if the Jessica Alba skin was installed it would score higher than the 360

me too, exremely easy

Let's be fair Craig, they've been ahem 'checking' the quality of the nearly nude pics for quite a while since then, so I imagine they've lost a few brain cells

There are a few quick start guides around, and there's the excellent unofficial manual. I guess we need a 'simple' central point of reference for these things, one which isn't bogged down with all the other stuff.

As for the idea of the installer, I made a similar point in a different thread and I still think it's a good idea. A package system similar to RPM. Obviously this wouldn't be a catch all for emulation, but there are a hell of a lot of stunning non-emulation titles out there now.

Yes lets not forget FHM's purpose...to supply those too young or too embarrassed to buy porn with a small degree of titillation.