Back From The Front: Gp2x Vs Psp

[zx-81]

QUOTE
7. How does the community of the PSP compare to the GP2X one? Are the forums as friendly as this one?

If you ask me, the PSP community is much, much worse. On a whole the forums are probably less friendly, but overall just much more grating. A large percentage of people there come off as young and completely clueless. I personally like these boards a lot more than the main two PSP ones (on DCEmu and QJ.net), hence why I'm here all the time instead of there (well, aside from that I'm focusing on GP2X dev instead of PSP)...

Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of good people in the PSP community too. I've even got beta testers to stay up all night with me while I fix games, and they've been very supportive. I think there are just so many more new users that flood the place, and a lot more people who want to develop for it but don't have the first idea how to. I guess that's the consequence of being more mainstream.


I do agree 100% !

 

[chaos engineer]

however, if I had to chose between gp2x and psp I think I would opt for my psp (with 3.10 OEA plus 4GB memory stick and exphase's wonderful gpsp and NJ's cps-1, cps-2 and mvs emus); although it is close as my sympathies are for gph and against sony.

It is too bad CPS1 never made it to the GP2X. CPS2 does run great on the GP2X , CPS1 would run even better due to the fact that is slightly less powerful than CPS2. NeoGeo MVS could also be better than it is now on the GP2X. GP2X has a better suited screen for NeoGeo as the resolution matches near perfect, no blurry filtering needed, and it doesn't ghost. Too bad it appears abandoned on the GP2X. This is where the PSP truly wins, There are alot more coders doing alot more ports for it. The small (but good) scene on the GP2X is a big knock against it. Many more emus go un-finished, or are even missing, on the GP2X than on the PSP.


I think I agree with you, except that we have a different perception regarding the ghosting. The ghosting is noticeable but not too bad. YOu are right, the screen size of the gp2x is way better for neo geo emulation; in this context it is nice to hear that pepone is still working on it.

My wish is of course that the gp2x wins over the psp. However, at the moment I would say that the psp is slightly ahead, especially if you consider the stand by mode. I just love it to be able to switch it off, leaving it for several days, switching it on and being back in the middle of the action. So what? cometition among different systems is a good.

@imhotep: not enough time at the moment to really answer your question, but I think on the forum you will find a lot of posts with comparisons between the different emus. just to give a short answer without being complete: gba, nes, psx, cps-1, cps-2 are better on the psp (gba and cps 2 are close though). general mame, atari lynx, megadrive, mega cd are better on the gp2x; there is no clear winner; if you love psx (I don't btw) go for the psp; if you love old school mame games, go for the gp2x

 

[DaveC]

My wish is of course that the gp2x wins over the psp. However, at the moment I would say that the psp is slightly ahead, especially if you consider the stand by mode. I just love it to be able to switch it off, leaving it for several days, switching it on and being back in the middle of the action. So what? cometition among different systems is a good.

Maybe it varies by system. The ghosting is pretty bad for me. Then you have the whole screen filtering thing on PSP which you need to do to get the same image size as on the GP2X without the stretch/filter. That tips the scales for me to GP2X on stuff that is close between the two. The stuff that the PSP wins big for is PSX (which I am not mental over anyway, nice to have though) which will never come anywhere close on the GP2X and GBA which will probably always be better on the PSP due to the PSP's more powerful hardware.

Actually that standby mode is one of the things about the PSP that I hate. I never use it. It seems to drain pretty fast even when "off" though too just not quite as bad. If you go a few days without charging it the batteries are dead or low. I hate having to "babysit" handhelds by feeding them constantly. Just one more thing to remember to do. I can go a week or so without playing them. That is one thing I like about the GP2X, when it is off it is OFF. Loading a save state is no big deal to me.

 

[jbrodack]

while its nice to hear that pepone is still working on new geo he already had done a great job with neo geo for the gp2x. it plays great for me and is one of the things that is great about the gp2x. i can only overclock under 260 so i don't need really high speeds to get good performance. it could always be improved but i still think it is damn good already

 

[DaveC]

while its nice to hear that pepone is still working on new geo he already had done a great job with neo geo for the gp2x. it plays great for me and is one of the things that is great about the gp2x. i can only overclock under 260 so i don't need really high speeds to get good performance. it could always be improved but i still think it is damn good already

GnGeo is good but NJs NeoGeo emu is faster.

The problem with GnGeo is is the sound is not right, it can get plain bad on the metal slug games where it gets staticky/crackly. It seems like it is clipping or something. It also needs a relatively high OC to get it to run w/o frameskip. The CPS2 emu on the Gp2X runs alot smoother and from what the specs say it is a higher spec machine with more sprites, higher CPU speed, and the Q-sound chip. If you compare both NeoGeo to CPS2 you would think NeoGeo could at least match CPS2 in performance on the Gp2X. Maybe there is some other hardware that the Neo has that is causing the difference? Not totally sure. As it is yes GnGeo is great, it is just that Neo is still faster on PSP.

 

[Jaguarandine]

Hey, I have a PSP question Exophase.

Do any apps use the Media Engine in the PSP? How is it compared to the second CPU in the GP2X; is it hard to utilize?

 

[ste_167]

"GnGeo is good but NJs NeoGeo emu is faster"

The framerate really slows on Metal Slug X with raster effects on, on the PSP.

I was getting good framerates at 250Mhz on the GP2X last night, even with 22 000 sound rate

 

[Yod4z]

while its nice to hear that pepone is still working on new geo he already had done a great job with neo geo for the gp2x. it plays great for me and is one of the things that is great about the gp2x. i can only overclock under 260 so i don't need really high speeds to get good performance. it could always be improved but i still think it is damn good already

GnGeo is good but NJs NeoGeo emu is faster.

The problem with GnGeo is is the sound is not right, it can get plain bad on the metal slug games where it gets staticky/crackly. It seems like it is clipping or something. It also needs a relatively high OC to get it to run w/o frameskip. The CPS2 emu on the Gp2X runs alot smoother and from what the specs say it is a higher spec machine with more sprites, higher CPU speed, and the Q-sound chip. If you compare both NeoGeo to CPS2 you would think NeoGeo could at least match CPS2 in performance on the Gp2X. Maybe there is some other hardware that the Neo has that is causing the difference? Not totally sure. As it is yes GnGeo is great, it is just that Neo is still faster on PSP.

the new version of gngeo use the same YM2610 core from last mame (and then NJ) and now the sound is more clear. The GP2x version is realy great it just need some work on the sound part (like ASM YM2610 and z80 optimisation) to be The god of neogeo emulation ^^ without sound i can run all game without overclock and some with little overclock at fullspeed

 

[Exophase]

Hey, I have a PSP question Exophase.

Do any apps use the Media Engine in the PSP? How is it compared to the second CPU in the GP2X; is it hard to utilize?

Yes, but only a few. Notably the SNES emulator (which apparently is still really slow in some games )

Its clockrate is asynchronous with respect to the CPU, so you can set it between 1 and 333MHz. It's less crippled than GP2X's ARM940T because it has as much cache as the main CPU and its own 2MB of eDRAM. I assume that it being embedded memory means that accessing it doesn't interfere with the main bus. Unfortunately I don't know for sure of anyone who actually uses said RAM for anything, although I don't know what some implementations are doing.

The media engine CPU isn't really trivial to get started on because Sony doesn't want games to use it for their own code. First, you have to be in kernel mode. These days (on any given custom firmware) that's not a big deal but back in the day there were firmware versions that couldn't be downgraded and could only be exploited to run user code. From there you have to set it up yourself and you can't use syscalls from it (or at least not all syscalls, I don't know how it works exactly). Finally, you can't access VRAM. The kernel doesn't deal with the ME CPU, but on the plus side this might free up the k0/k1 registers for general usage.

GP2X's second CPU doesn't really sound natural to utilize either, so I don't know how different it is there.

 

[DaveC]

the new version of gngeo use the same YM2610 core from last mame (and then NJ) and now the sound is more clear. The GP2x version is realy great it just need some work on the sound part (like ASM YM2610 and z80 optimisation) to be The god of neogeo emulation ^^ without sound i can run all game without overclock and some with little overclock at fullspeed

To me there is no point playing games with no sound :rolleyes: The GP2X can run Neo just as fast as the PSP, with one tiny difference, the sound is off on the GP2X That is not a good compromise, so that don't count.

 

[Huxley]

QUOTE
It also needs a relatively high OC to get it to run w/o frameskip.


Don't know which games you've been playing, but almost everything runs fullspeed for me @ 250 or below (200 is plenty for most older titles). And that's WITH sound.

There's maybe a little improvement to be done on the quality of sound, but through the speakers it's not really so noticeable (which is how I play).

 

[DaveC]

QUOTE
It also needs a relatively high OC to get it to run w/o frameskip.

Don't know which games you've been playing, but almost everything runs fullspeed for me @ 250..

Right, relatively high OC like I said. Especially if I can't even get to 250 MHz Metal Slug games need it.

 

[Huxley]

Well, personally I'd consider 250 to be about average. And like I said it varies wildly depending on the game you're playing...Metal Slug is about as demanding it gets on the system so it's a bit of a harsh yardstick.

 

[Yod4z]

the new version of gngeo use the same YM2610 core from last mame (and then NJ) and now the sound is more clear. The GP2x version is realy great it just need some work on the sound part (like ASM YM2610 and z80 optimisation) to be The god of neogeo emulation ^^ without sound i can run all game without overclock and some with little overclock at fullspeed

To me there is no point playing games with no sound :rolleyes: The GP2X can run Neo just as fast as the PSP, with one tiny difference, the sound is off on the GP2X That is not a good compromise, so that don't count.

Yes but with my last words i want to say with some trick we can have all game running with sound at 200Mhz and some at 240MHz ^^

 

[imhotep]

Can WiFi on the PSP be used for link up multiplayer on emus or the direct utilization of a rom collection over LAN, i.e. no need to store the roms locally?

These would be advantages over the GP2X I don't think we have talked about.

 

[daibo]

Yeah it's surely possible. Many emulator already have this feature. IRshell makes use of nethost too.

 

[ninja_sauce]

argh - as much as i hate to, im going to have to get a psp now. having been teased with psx games almost running and having got hold of a lot of rpgs i am dying to play, im just going to have to get one.

no fair though, they look pretty ugly to me...will still keep the gp2x for everything else, just a shame that i couldnt have everything in one box - will have to get a sticker for the psp saying "my other handheld is a GP2X"

 

[sam fisher]

argh - as much as i hate to, im going to have to get a psp now. having been teased with psx games almost running and having got hold of a lot of rpgs i am dying to play, im just going to have to get one.

no fair though, they look pretty ugly to me...will still keep the gp2x for everything else, just a shame that i couldnt have everything in one box - will have to get a sticker for the psp saying "my other handheld is a GP2X"

Just admit it, you want a PSP. If you didnt you'd just download epsxe for yours PC. Stop whining and spouting crap.

 

[ninja_sauce]

no, i want to be able to play vagrant story on the train actually and if that involes a psp then so be it.

i already have epsxe, very nice it is too - not sure what that hostility was all about, but nevermind.

 

[Lodis]

<--snip-->

Like DaveC said there's a PSP d-pad mod, which I'd like to try sometime.. I've heard from a friend that it actually does improve things noticeably and it's easy/cheap to do, I don't know for myself though.

About those emus, maybe someone can port the GP2X versions to PSP. (in fairness it happened to the CPS2 emulator for PSP so yeah)

I have done exactly the same Dpad mod on both of my Psp's a very long time ago, the mod is very easy to do and makes a huge difference. After this mod you will find doing Dragon punches and Fireballs on Streetfighter II easy for example. You find that you dont need to press the pad as much to get a response and diagonals now work with no strain. Although you can cut the material to the sizes you want yourself, there is also a Dpad fix kit on Ebay but it will cost $8.90. You just need to be careful of dust and I advise having a can of compressed air handy and be careful if you use anything to clean inside of the screen because it scratches very easily.