What's up all, I just have a few questions:

Would it be smarter to wait for the XGP to be fully released or purchase the GP2x? I've read that the XGP is able to support the homebrew community as well as do all the other things the GP2x does but it also has a 3d accelerator. Do you think that the XGP will have the same-sized supportable community as the GP2x does? And yes, I've read epicenter's post so no need to link me, I'd just like to hear your opinions on the XGP.

Thank you

EDIT: Doh, I just saw the section dedicated to the XGP, sorry.
EDIT AGAIN: But I'd still like your opinions

Well, the XGP series, with whichever SoC they pick, will be much more powerful .. either with the same CPU, faster RAM, and powerful 2D/3D acceleration, or all that plus a fast floating point/vector processor and DSP. If they go with the VRender-3D chipset it'll be about the same performance level for most tasks, but emulators like PSX, SNES and GBA should be dramatically faster when they take advantage of the accelerated graphics. High-end homebrew games will be able to be FAR more over-the-top graphically while maintaining a very high framerate.

If the newer Samsung S3C2460, the same graphical benefits apply, but there will be much more CPU horsepower so pretty much every stressful program or emulator will get a big boost, especially those that use a lot of floating point math.

As far as software support, yes, they recently reiterated the importance of open-source and freedom to develop homebrew software for the XGP series, which is excellent to hear. If they use a Linux OS, as it seems they probably will, GP2X software will port over to the machines with extremely little effort, so I imagine there'll be quite a community backing the machines .. with Linux support and such similar hardware, building a GP2X and XGP/XGPMini version of a program all in one step should be very simple.

I would not wait for them since they are still being designed. The GP2X has a lot going for it, and should tide you over quite well as it may be a good long while before either XGP surfaces.

Probably very much like these.

For now... GP2X is reality while XGP models are no more than a good dream.

Cool thank you epicenter and tech for info and Park for the link

Hello,

Get a GP2x now. It's a great little machine. So what if it doesn't have 3d graphics. I could have got a PSP. As others say the XGP is way off yet.

I suppose it boils down to what you like to play. If you want retro then gp2x is great for just that as most older 'puters/consoles have the same or similar resolution.

If it's a pmp you want the again gp2x is great for that. It's great that the media players can be replaced.......hopefully

I'm gonna be a gp2x fanb0i from now on.

I don't know about you, but the prospect of hardware-accelerated 2D is much more exciting than the 3D that GPU can do. Won't someone please think of the 2D ...

It's not the hardware that count but the software! Here you have the GP2X with more or less all 80ies computers and consoles emulated and there a nice system, which isn't released and will be more or less closed (like the PSP) but without a big company behind it that could bring others to make good games for money.
Just take a look at the Wii from Nintendo: Less power, more fun! That's the same with GP32 and GP2X.

The key with these handhelds is community backing. The GP2X already has a large community standing behind it, constantly producing software and helping people out. The same thing may happen to the XGP, but so far we only have vague ideas about how the new handhelds will catch on.

Take a look at the software the GP2X has to offer, and if it does the job for you, I say, go for it

- Alex

I would say get the GP2X, wait till the XGP comes out and see what developers do. If everyone starts developing for the XGP I'll propably geta XGP too. At this moment I have loads of fun with my nice GP2X.

I might get the XGP.
If it can emulate PS1 well, and N64 possibly at a playable level (20fps at least), I would probably get it instantly. (Money permitting, or more likely birthdays permitting)

man, people are so naive to even think about n64...

The last update I saw, they had not even decided on the base OS for the XGP. You would be foolish to wait on the XGP. There is no telling when, if, or what it will do when it comes out.
As it stands right now, the GP2X is a great machine, and well worth the price.

I find it a bit confusing about the release, according the thread
http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?showtopic=31916



Do they mean the spec wont be released?

Wow, thanks for all the replies guys, I definately know what I'll be doing now. Your help is appreciated.

Oh my goodness, Epic is stuck in Sally Struthers mode! "Think of the children!"

*chuckles* Well, the GP2X has good 2D and great emulation and great movies and music (with headphones) right now. If you decide you want the XGP later on, you can always sell the GP2X to help you raise more money, too. *shrug* Or keep both and wow everyone with both machines.

GamePark said the system would be open-source and have an SDK provided. If the OS is Linux-based which it seems it will be, most GP2X software would port easily over.


He said '20fps at least' would be nice, that's not at all unrealistic with a true 3D accelerator. Expecting close to 60 FPS would be 'naive'.. PS1's pretty much in the bag.


It's alright; but the blitter is terribly underpowered. It does very little good for improving graphics performance, so when you start doing things like push more than 3 background graphics layers and a lot of sprites onscreen you will see a pretty noticable framerate hit in your games. The 2D subsystem is also the bottleneck of SNES emulation, and apparently Amiga and MegaDrive emulation as well (not that MD isn't full-speed, but without that bottleneck and a boost in CPU speed, MegaCD emulation wouldn't be nearly as difficult as it would be on the current hardware.)

For a developer like me, the prospect of having the 2D capabilities of the DS or PSP onhand is extremely exciting.

Why not buy both? Play with the GP2x now, wait until the XGP has been out for a while (teething problems over - perhaps 6-12 months) and get one if it plays the games you want that the GP2x doesn't (otherwise just stay with the GP2x).

I agree with this man/woman/child/decorative shrub.

Get a GP2X now, but don't rule out the XGP consoles.

Hey epicenter so whats the major difference between psp and xgp ?

Everything

Ooh! Ooh! I know this one! Okay, so, the peanut said he was insulted! Wait, that's not it...

most important ones i can think of are
RAM
Resolution
and 3D acceleration

What? Resolutions are tentatively the same, and they both have 3D acceleration (tentatively).

The CPU architecture will be ARM9, not MIPS. The GPU is of an entirely different design and would be a PowerVR RS "MBX Lite" in both of the SoCs being considered. It would have much, much more RAM. The resolution might vary between 480x272 and 320x240 or 640x480 .. time will tell. They are thinking of losing the analog stick in favor of a D-Pad as well. There's also the greater likelihood that Linux will be the OS, not some custom-made firmware like the PSP uses. Use of SD cards, not memory stick ... they're really entirely different machines.

The PSP exists.

I guess the Wii and PS3 don't exist either.

Well, duh!

None of you exist either, you are just figments of my depraved imagination.

IMO The XGP doesn't exist until at least one reviewer can get his hands on one.

I'm a figment of Nova's imagination? He must have a really warped imagination. *Nod*

The PS3 and WII are probably in testing/pre-releases, whereas the XGP line are still in last minute development decisions, due to consumer input concerns. Therefore the PS3 and WII will be out for sure sooner, therefore logically a bit more tangible.

However, remember Infinium Lab's Phantom? Last I heard of that is that it was about to be released...

All I'm saying is don't count your chickens...

You know those videos of the XGP running videos and Quake 3? Yeah, those. They don't exist.

Dosnt mean that it couldnt die off in the last moments.
But lets hope that wont happen.

I just really freakin hope gamepark will listen to at least a few of our requests. since it will most likely be open source Im expecting good things. get a gp2x in the mean time though. that is what I plan on doing... I need money though.... damn rent and bills. sometimes I wish I didnt need to eat. that would get me a gp2x a hell of a lot sooner. maybe I should go on a ramen diet for three months?

Since they are entirely redesigning XGP and XGP Mini I doubt they'll hit their goal to launch those 2 machines late this year or early next year-- it should take more time than that to pick the SoC, design the shell and PCB, select a display, control method, and put together a good custom Linux distro (or have someone else put it together. Hopefully not Dignsys. ) Internal accessories like WiFi and TV tuners should be able to connect by fairly simple means to the SoC and shouldn't require That said I can't imagine it not being ready to roll sometime next year. There isn't that much engineering to do with an SoC at the center of the machine.

It wouldn't bother me THAT much if the full XGP used a 480x272 display and analog stick. From their responses it sounds more likely they go to a D-Pad, as for a 4:3 dispay, who knows. I'd love for them to go with my recommended chipset (S3C2460) for the extra features (mostly FPU/VP and lower power consumption than VRender-3D) .. but VR3D wouldn't be too shabby either.

Honestly, the GP2X is a great little machine-- it just really let me down in 3 areas. The 2D blitter provides extremely little acceleration, so the CPU is stuck with all my heavy drawing operations, which I know any design of the XGP will fix .. the miserable stick which the XGP will fix in some form or fashion .. and the low build quality (headphone jack fell off into the unit, and 2 caps, as well..) which if they test the unit at all before they ship out a thousand of them, should be improved...

I just don't really expect GPH to fix any of those faults anymore. The bit about 2D Acceleration they'd need a new SoC to correct, and GPH doesn't really care, apparently. They think people watch movies and listen to music on here, and nothing else. They'd rather sell off all their essentially-broken hardware before trying to fix the stick issue, claiming they can't afford to add D-Pads when they can afford to design weird new BoBs that a minority of their customers will actually buy or releasing weird-colored versions of their hardware (all silver? What the hell?)

Their SoC manufacturer 'broke' SD-DMA and can't seem to fix it, so they just released the MMSP2 faulty. As a result loading anything from the SD card bogs down the 920T CPU so much it can't do anything. GPH accepted this apparently, but don't seem to even have been cognizant of how the 2D blitter worked, or how media decoding on the MMSP2 worked, and just accepted MagicEyes' reference design for a MMSP2-based PMP as-is, resulting in them also accepting their shitty selection for a video scaler and TV-Out chip that suck more power than the rest of the system combined, and drag battery life through the floor during use. They mounted the stick in the wrong orientation (How do you manage that? It boggles the mind) and I'm hearing reports the screen is even mounted the wrong way in MK2 units.

I wasn't around in the GP32 days but from what I've seen, there were not these catastrophic problems; with the exception of the backlight/frontlight mini-fiasco things went over pretty smoothly. What we honestly seem to need is GP's execution of GPH's idea in a more carefully thought-out fashion-- because GPH hasn't proven themselves to be a competent company in any regard. And since GP's cleared up that GPH did NOT leave because they wanted to make an open-source system and GP didn't, it's hard to think of them as the oppressed little-guy anymore.

But, the GP2X will HAVE to compete with one of the GP's line products(probably XGP Mini) and one of them will have the lead at the end. The XGP mini will only have a chance IF it solves the current problems the gp2x has(poor build quality,stick,headphone jack falling off,etc..) otherwise, I don't know what is GamePark thinking..

As far as I know the MK2s don't have the headphone jack problem. We know GP will use an analog stick or D-Pad, so that's taken care of. Overall build quality .. well, the GP32 looks very solid internally. I think GPH could've avoided all the problems by taking more time to test their machines. According to Craig, they had no money to fix problems found in their PROTOTYPES, and went ahead to build final units with preorder money. There was no budget to fix the issues in those, either.

Now, that's a confusing statement, however-- how did GPH produce the line of MK2s? What paid for them? Craig ALSO said the GP2X hasn't turned a profit. So there would be no income to make more machines until finished units were sold to distributors .. which then wouldn't exist with no money to BUILD them. It doesn't add up. But what it all boils down to is, if they had not been in such a rush (maybe trying to race GP to market?) they'd have time to get venture capital and make the machines less faulty...

Actually the last big glitch for the GP32 was the BLU / BLU + problem. They switched LCD manufacturers for the BLU and as a result, not everything that was made for the GP32 worked on the BLU+. Even now, there's often a displaced line at the bottom of the screen where one of the lines wraps up from the top of the screen in some games. *shrug* But that's all semi-ancient history.

Mostly I use my GP32 for MP3's and Sudoku and the odd Colecovision game. *laugh* The GP2X has picked up the rest of my port-a-gaming needs.

As for the headphone jack, I did manage to solder mine back on, but notice the stereo is reversed on any movie I watch. Sounds meant to come from the left speaker come out the right speaker and vice versa. *shrug* I mostly just try to ignore it or turn my headphones around.

I reattached my headphone jack and now the Left channel is entirely broken. I know they're good connections; I measured nearly 0 ohms resistance between the pin connections on the TOP of the jack where they run to the inside, and the solder pads. So the jack itself is just broken, too...

Yes the stick was mounted the wrong way (45° off) in the first units but that is now fixed as I posted that fact originally on these forums. Yes it was me that first pointed out the error, and they did fix it.

The screen is mounted the correct way in M2 units, that was just a rumour started by some forum members.

Epicenter, make sure you didn't actually solder the left channel to ground as well - that would still give a 0 ohm connection to the left output

I checked, Left and Right have infinite ohms between themselves and ground. The jack, however, has a fault where a metal pin shorts against the channels and grounds them out. There is no discernable reason for the pin to even be there.

The pin usually is there to connect the internal speakers with the amp. When the plug is inserted the pin disconnects the speakers and delivers the sound only to the earphones.

That's not the one I'm referring to. It's a seemingly pointless chunk of metal.

Hmm...I soldered my headphone jack back on to my MKI GP2X. I never noticed this pointless chunk of metal you are referring to? I might have to open mine back up and take a look.

Epicenter, most of your hardware-related beef is MK1-specific, there's a reason why pre-MK2 was for early adopters willing to accept such quirks.

- Alex

The stick is the same in MK2, it's just rotated. So the awful swing-time from one ordinal to its opposite, the huge dead-zone, and the inaccurate, sloppy feel are still there. The new stick caps makes it feel a bit less awful, but it's just ultimately acting to try and lessen the blow. For me, it doesn't really work.

Yes, components aren't falling off left and right like they used to. But the headphone jack is still the same, as far as I can tell, it's just soldered on properly now. The jack itself is a faulty design though and requires a lot of playing with the plug to get both sound channels working, or the speakers off, or both. The brittle, easy-to-bend battery connectors remain, and make a lot of people think their machine is dead when the connections to the batteries are just bad. There's a reason most devices use a piece of bent metal and a spring, but GPH doesn't seem to have picked up on this, even though just about every 2xAA powered device made in the last 20 years has been built that way..

The design flaws like the mediocre voltage conversion hardware, part of the battery life issue, remain. So does the broken SD DMA-- which appears to be a hardware flaw in the MMSP2 itself. The scaler and TV out circuitry is still the same, meaning power draw from those components is still awful. If you try to watch a video that isn't 320x240, the scaler will cut your battery life roughly in half. If you are using TV out, you'd be lucky to break an hour, with good batteries...

The MK2 is a step in the right direction but it's far from a real, complete solution as it's often made out to be. There's a lot more work to do.