Anyone Else Interested In Gizmondo At All?

[bast525]

Man... you know, I saw this thing at E3, and thought... MAN that thing looks crappy. The few playable demos they had on it looked horrible. And they were talking about $300 for it... like... WHAT??

Yeah well it's out now, at least in the UK, and man... that thing looks SWEET now!!!

Starting to wonder if I wasn't a little premature in buying my GP32.....


So... dig this, 400mhz, integral Nvidia GoForce 4500 3d chipset, runs on SD cards, 4 face buttons and two shoulder buttons, backlit screen 320x240 resolution...


Sounds like the perfect portable emulation machine!!!

At $400 USD!!! UGH! Well, just barely more than the Zodiac, but seems to be much more powerful. They have some screenshots up on their website... one racing game looks... well... like a PS1 or DS game. But then there are screens from other games coming soon, and one rally game already out, that look squarely up there with the PS2/PSP!!!

Not sure how 'open' it's going to be but I have little doubt that there will be emulators galore for this thing at some point, and there doesn't seem to be a limit to the size of the SD like there is with the GP and SMC... so plug a 1GB card into that puppy and have enough games to last the rest of your life



I

WANT

ONE!!!

 

[skysnapper]

Some good tech, but with a creen the size of a postage stamp and fugly looks, theres no way i'd pull that out in public. So a big fat resounding No. Dead and buried.

 

[bast525]

who says the screen is so small? Close to 3" diagonal... seems it would be just a tad smaller than the GP's screen. yeah I'm not super fond of the look either but I'm not looking at the casing while I'm playing all my favorite old games on the thing

I'm gonna keep a close eye on the 'scene' for this thing, for sure. If it gets good emu's (people are speculating it could handle PSX and possibly even N64... mame, SNES, neo geo should NOT be a problem) I may sell my GP and DS as a package so I can get one, seeing as I only bought them for their emu capability.

 

[johncross85]

It'll bomb and then the price will drop through the floor. If large retailers are stocking them to begin with (which apparently they are) and they can't get them off their shelves they will drop the price to cost just to get rid of the things.

So by the time there is actually an homebrew scene developing for the thing it might actually be quite affordable

J(ohn)

 

[spray]

homebrew = not gonna happen

1) its not open source, despite a few petitions and no doubt tons of emails, tiger decided to make the gizmondo completely closed and provide no way of writing for it.

2) but, i hear you cry, the gba is no different, that still has a load of emus etc, yes, i counter, but the gba has sold millions world wide, with higher ownership comes the resources and demand for a homebrew scene, the gizmondo will never gain this.

 

[finty]

Plus most of the prominant homebrew coders from this scene and the GBA one have ignored it completly, instead looking at the PSP or DS for their next platform.

 

[bast525]

Agreed, the odds would seem to be against it.

Well, on it's own merits, the thing seems to be a very powerful, capable system, with graphics capability close to, if not better than, the PSP, judging by screenshots and videos. Also, I've been reading up on some other forums, seems they are getting some big time backing with this thing, apparently Microsoft will publish or produce games for the unit.

Not that it would really compete with PSP or DS, simply because of it's outrageous price. Well... I still think there will be at least some sort of homebrew/emu scene for the thing, I mean, there are already emu's for the Zodiac, I dont think that is open source, and it's definately not a big seller like the GBA was. Of course... Zodiac has a lot more in common with Palms or whatever so is more of a cross platform.


Still, I put my money that there WILL be both a homebrew scene, and some decent commercial games released for the thing. And hopefully Johncross is right, and it will do badly enough at first where the price will drop fast... if they hit $200-250 there's 99% chance I'll be buying one.

 

[finty]

The Zodiac is open to Homebrew coders, they just have to get their work signed by Tapwave.

 

[johncross85]

If it sells badly then it won't get much third party software support. In fact it would be lucky to get much third party support even if it sells quite well - dev costs for handhelds is a hellova lot higher than it used to be (flashy 3D graphics et al) and if you were a third party software house that could only support one or two platforms which ones would you choose?

So it'll sell badly, the little third party support it has will dry up and Tiger will be left wishing they had actively supported a homebrew scene. Prices will end up very low but with nothing to run on it - why bother?

J(ohn)

 

[spray]

decent commercial games, possibly, unlikely though that it will be big name companies releasing them.

i think it'll be like the zodiac with a few small companies releasing compilations of arcade games, snails (worms clone) and a few other rpg and tactial style games. as finty said, most devs have shown little to know interest, re the zodiac emus and things, the most prominent ones, guineapig and yoyo's one et al, were done by gp32 coders who mostly ported stuff.

 

[johncross85]

The GP32 is quite a strange case really... Not officially available outside Korea until recently, not even very many in Korea, sod all support from Gamepark, and yet a very active scene producing some excellent software.

The Gizmondo thing initially seemed to be GP32's spiritual successor - more powerful hardware but still a real underdog of a company, originally was going to be opensource (allegedly), probably hard to get hold of so has that 'exclusive' feel etc etc...

In my mind it made a lot of sense that GP32 devvers would port their stuff across to the Giz, we'd benefit from Gix devvers porting to the GP32 and the world would be a lovely place with everyone holding hands and dancing a merry jig. So what happens? Every man and his dog says the Giz looks rubbish, Tiger say that it won't be opensource, and all the devvers say that the DS and PSP look much more appealing.

Ah well...

J(ohn)

 

[finty]

Is the Giz an ARM device?

 

[bast525]

Giz is 400Mhz ARM 9


I'm really shocked and saddened to hear that devvers aren't even showing any interest in the thing. Hell it runs faster than the PSP and DS combined, and looks like it has a graphics chip closely rivaling that of the PSP. Go to the gizmondo homepage and check out he screen shots of the Rally racing game... tell me that's not PS2 quality... NOT PSP (compare to ridge racer with blurry textures on the cars) but PS2!


Agreed, they are shooting themselves by not making it open source at least as far as the Zodiac is.

 

[johncross85]

...and being that the GP32 does everything with it's ARM 9 (ie no seperate graphics processing etc) GP32 software would be pretty easy to port given the right dev environment - at least as far as I understand it.

Still, no opensource means virtually no devvers, means it probably won't happen.

J(ohn)

 

[finty]

Its dead already anyway, and kknd_fc claims that them videos are fake.