Hello party people,
it is 2025 and I am trying to dust off my GP32s.
I'll try to somewhat document my endeavors here.
Since a lot of sites are down, it's kinda hard to cobble together all this information, but the archive helps a lot.
SMC
Unfortunately, a lot of SMCs are just dead these days.
It looks like some sectors are readable while others just aren't and whatever bad block handling is built into the SMC controller and the GP32 isn't enough to take care of it
Recently there have been new SMCs appearing on eBay and Amazon (link: https://www.ebay.de/itm/236016342255?var=536501911789 ), so it looks like some company finally started making copies.
They are 35 euros for a new 128 MB card. I have no idea yet how they fare, but I think it's a better gamble than buying a used 128 MB card which might die the next day.
PC-LINK
One less known way to run games on a GP32 without SMC is to use PCLINK, although you can't easily load roms etc. like that, so it's of limited use.
Even more so because the damn thing doesn't compile for modern Linux anymore and in my case the precompiled lib can't find the device
Forget the official GamePark tool, it doesn't work on modern Windows.
I'll try to rejuvenate the linux tool.
USB
The GP32's USB port is just terrible. Why didn't GamePark just use Mini USB which was common at the time? Who knows. Maybe they wanted to drive up sales for the cables (lol).
Also, why the heck is the BLU using a slightly differently notched cable which has physically the same pins?
So confusing.
Also I have no idea if it's even making contact anymore. Sigh.
Chatboard
I remember people using a Sony Ericsson Chatboard to type on the GP32. Why? Because it uses UART I guess.
It has a strange connector which needs to be replaced with another strange connector.
EXT Port
The physical connector is identical to the Samsung Data Cable PCB133LB.
However, the pinout is different on the GP32 and the Samsung Spec for that connector.
Why? GamePark decided so.
The EXT Port exposes Pins for Power, UART, JTAG and nothing else.
You can sometimes still get these cables for cheap, so it's a great way to get some debugging going I guess.
Also JTAG can be used to flash the ROM without a ROM flasher.
Unfortunately, I can't find any sources or tools for having fun with JTAG on the GP32. I think cobbleware.com has a flasher, but that's it?
Mods
32MB/64MB RAM
AFAIK Rob of cobbleware.com pioneered these mods back in the day. At least he documented them.
The idea is: Use SD-RAM chips with similar timings (stolen from a PC 133 SD-RAM stick) and solder them in place of the 8MB chip.
Lift the extra address pins and connect them via wires to the CPU pins (0.5mm pitch, great fun).
Rob's chips have a higher refresh speed, so they need a modded firmware to run.
Also keep a JTAG cable handy to reflash the device after the mod.
Seems like the mod is mostly useless except for enabling bigger roms.
AFAIK no game uses extra lookup tables to speed up calculations or such which seems like a waste to me.
Also the address range is kinda awkward since the firmware sits in the upper half of the first 8MB.
GPS
If I see this correctly, then Mr.Spiv experimented with some Samsung GPS adapter thingy.
Nifty, but ultimately useless nowadays.
USB host
The SOC is capable of acting as a USB host.
I'm not sure if that is exposed via the same pins as usb device, though. Using a different cable might work
SD Card
The GP32's SMC interface is realized entirely with general purpose CPU pins. There is no special controller or anything for SMCs.
The code to interface with the SMC is based on a universal SMC driver code by Samsung. You can find it in Mirko's SDK for example.
There *is* a special controller in the GP32's SOC for MMC and SDIO which might both be usable to connect SD Cards to the GP32.
However, as far as I know it would be a pain to get these pins connected to an actual card.
It might be easier to have a hardware adapter which connects the SMC pins to an SD Card, then implement the SD Card controller in software.
Using some napkin math: If the CPU runs at 66Mhz and it takes around 4 cycles to get a single bit to and from the SD card, then the read/write speed is about 2MegaByte/s which seems reasonable.
There are such adapters for olympus cameras which have special support for SD cards, so I'm pretty sure those could be reused.
AC Power Port
The bloody thing is center negative. Many a GP32 has been fried by feeding it center positive voltage. Maybe the damage can be reversed by replacing a diode, maybe not. No idea.
Preservation
AFAIK all the caps in a GP32 are MLCCs or Tantalum caps. They still die at some point.
Also I don't recall anyone having made a schematic or a board view of the GP32.
The screen is pretty dumb, it takes the color data, blanking signals and power and that's it.
The SOC is capable of driving a lot of different such screens, so with firmware hacks it might be possible to fix a broken screen with a modern replacement.
So far all replacements I could find on Aliexpress are too clever, though. They have a built-in ILI9341V controller or similar which implements an SDI interface.
Emulation
GeePee32 has been around forever, but recently it's core has been merged to RetroArch. Apparently by the same author (Firefly).
Pretty cool, but GeePee32 crashes all the time and the retroarch core runs rather slow reportedly
Development
devKitArm is still around and still seems to support the GP32
Unfortunately, Mr.Spiv's site is down (parts of it are in the internet archive), so I'm not sure if all the needed tools to create GXC, FXE and whatnot files are still there.
Mr.Mirko's SDK is floating around and so is GamePark's official SDK.
https://openhandhelds.org/ still has a lot of GP32 stuff and so has the Resources section of https://pyra-handheld.com
Motivation
Why go through all this when there's so many options available these days?
Over the years, I've collected a GP2X, a Caanoo, an OpenPandora, most of the nintendo devices and then some, but nothing has captivated me as much as the GP32.
As time went on, one site after the other disappeared from the web. #GP32Dev is empty of course and all things GP32 are hard to come by these days.
All the while, I have some unfinished business with my GP32.
I still want to implement a media player (port of mplayer/ffmpeg or whatever) and a 3D fighting game (napkin math tells me it's more going to be virtua fighter than dead or alive ).
And I really miss playing videos on the little bugger. Don't ask me why, it's just an itch I couldn't scratch for years to watch the music video of suteki da ne on my GP32.
That's it for now.
I'm waiting for my cheap knock-off SMC and data cable to arrive and in the meantime trying to connect to my GP32s via USB.
As you may have noticed, I am the worst imaginable person to write about this.
Unfortunately, there is so little useful info on how to properly use a GP32 in 2025 that I get the urge to write this.
PROBABLY the easiest way to work with a GP32 nowadays would be to use an SD card adapter and a usb c port mod, but neither has been done AFAIK and I am inherently lazy.
People have reportedly dabbled with MMCs before. If you have, please tell us about it.
it is 2025 and I am trying to dust off my GP32s.
I'll try to somewhat document my endeavors here.
Since a lot of sites are down, it's kinda hard to cobble together all this information, but the archive helps a lot.
SMC
Unfortunately, a lot of SMCs are just dead these days.
It looks like some sectors are readable while others just aren't and whatever bad block handling is built into the SMC controller and the GP32 isn't enough to take care of it
Recently there have been new SMCs appearing on eBay and Amazon (link: https://www.ebay.de/itm/236016342255?var=536501911789 ), so it looks like some company finally started making copies.
They are 35 euros for a new 128 MB card. I have no idea yet how they fare, but I think it's a better gamble than buying a used 128 MB card which might die the next day.
PC-LINK
One less known way to run games on a GP32 without SMC is to use PCLINK, although you can't easily load roms etc. like that, so it's of limited use.
Even more so because the damn thing doesn't compile for modern Linux anymore and in my case the precompiled lib can't find the device
Forget the official GamePark tool, it doesn't work on modern Windows.
I'll try to rejuvenate the linux tool.
USB
The GP32's USB port is just terrible. Why didn't GamePark just use Mini USB which was common at the time? Who knows. Maybe they wanted to drive up sales for the cables (lol).
Also, why the heck is the BLU using a slightly differently notched cable which has physically the same pins?
So confusing.
Also I have no idea if it's even making contact anymore. Sigh.
Chatboard
I remember people using a Sony Ericsson Chatboard to type on the GP32. Why? Because it uses UART I guess.
It has a strange connector which needs to be replaced with another strange connector.
EXT Port
The physical connector is identical to the Samsung Data Cable PCB133LB.
However, the pinout is different on the GP32 and the Samsung Spec for that connector.
Why? GamePark decided so.
The EXT Port exposes Pins for Power, UART, JTAG and nothing else.
You can sometimes still get these cables for cheap, so it's a great way to get some debugging going I guess.
Also JTAG can be used to flash the ROM without a ROM flasher.
Unfortunately, I can't find any sources or tools for having fun with JTAG on the GP32. I think cobbleware.com has a flasher, but that's it?
Mods
32MB/64MB RAM
AFAIK Rob of cobbleware.com pioneered these mods back in the day. At least he documented them.
The idea is: Use SD-RAM chips with similar timings (stolen from a PC 133 SD-RAM stick) and solder them in place of the 8MB chip.
Lift the extra address pins and connect them via wires to the CPU pins (0.5mm pitch, great fun).
Rob's chips have a higher refresh speed, so they need a modded firmware to run.
Also keep a JTAG cable handy to reflash the device after the mod.
Seems like the mod is mostly useless except for enabling bigger roms.
AFAIK no game uses extra lookup tables to speed up calculations or such which seems like a waste to me.
Also the address range is kinda awkward since the firmware sits in the upper half of the first 8MB.
GPS
If I see this correctly, then Mr.Spiv experimented with some Samsung GPS adapter thingy.
Nifty, but ultimately useless nowadays.
USB host
The SOC is capable of acting as a USB host.
I'm not sure if that is exposed via the same pins as usb device, though. Using a different cable might work
SD Card
The GP32's SMC interface is realized entirely with general purpose CPU pins. There is no special controller or anything for SMCs.
The code to interface with the SMC is based on a universal SMC driver code by Samsung. You can find it in Mirko's SDK for example.
There *is* a special controller in the GP32's SOC for MMC and SDIO which might both be usable to connect SD Cards to the GP32.
However, as far as I know it would be a pain to get these pins connected to an actual card.
It might be easier to have a hardware adapter which connects the SMC pins to an SD Card, then implement the SD Card controller in software.
Using some napkin math: If the CPU runs at 66Mhz and it takes around 4 cycles to get a single bit to and from the SD card, then the read/write speed is about 2MegaByte/s which seems reasonable.
There are such adapters for olympus cameras which have special support for SD cards, so I'm pretty sure those could be reused.
AC Power Port
The bloody thing is center negative. Many a GP32 has been fried by feeding it center positive voltage. Maybe the damage can be reversed by replacing a diode, maybe not. No idea.
Preservation
AFAIK all the caps in a GP32 are MLCCs or Tantalum caps. They still die at some point.
Also I don't recall anyone having made a schematic or a board view of the GP32.
The screen is pretty dumb, it takes the color data, blanking signals and power and that's it.
The SOC is capable of driving a lot of different such screens, so with firmware hacks it might be possible to fix a broken screen with a modern replacement.
So far all replacements I could find on Aliexpress are too clever, though. They have a built-in ILI9341V controller or similar which implements an SDI interface.
Emulation
GeePee32 has been around forever, but recently it's core has been merged to RetroArch. Apparently by the same author (Firefly).
Pretty cool, but GeePee32 crashes all the time and the retroarch core runs rather slow reportedly
Development
devKitArm is still around and still seems to support the GP32
Unfortunately, Mr.Spiv's site is down (parts of it are in the internet archive), so I'm not sure if all the needed tools to create GXC, FXE and whatnot files are still there.
Mr.Mirko's SDK is floating around and so is GamePark's official SDK.
https://openhandhelds.org/ still has a lot of GP32 stuff and so has the Resources section of https://pyra-handheld.com
Motivation
Why go through all this when there's so many options available these days?
Over the years, I've collected a GP2X, a Caanoo, an OpenPandora, most of the nintendo devices and then some, but nothing has captivated me as much as the GP32.
As time went on, one site after the other disappeared from the web. #GP32Dev is empty of course and all things GP32 are hard to come by these days.
All the while, I have some unfinished business with my GP32.
I still want to implement a media player (port of mplayer/ffmpeg or whatever) and a 3D fighting game (napkin math tells me it's more going to be virtua fighter than dead or alive ).
And I really miss playing videos on the little bugger. Don't ask me why, it's just an itch I couldn't scratch for years to watch the music video of suteki da ne on my GP32.
That's it for now.
I'm waiting for my cheap knock-off SMC and data cable to arrive and in the meantime trying to connect to my GP32s via USB.
As you may have noticed, I am the worst imaginable person to write about this.
Unfortunately, there is so little useful info on how to properly use a GP32 in 2025 that I get the urge to write this.
PROBABLY the easiest way to work with a GP32 nowadays would be to use an SD card adapter and a usb c port mod, but neither has been done AFAIK and I am inherently lazy.
People have reportedly dabbled with MMCs before. If you have, please tell us about it.