Caanoo Or Psp?

[Akabei]

So please be serious, you don´t want to ask a psp-like question in a caanoo - forum? I don´t know what fucking CFW the PSP needs to work and I don´t want to know how to recover that crap. If I get more drunk than today (which might happen) I´ll consider buy a PSP. And then I´ll ask a PSP-Forum

 

[cutterjohn]

To make matters worse I just decided to try out a Dingoo A320 while waiting to contact dingoo digital USA guy... wanted more info about the A380 situation, and some handheld that he is apparently working on with another company as I found a thread on dingoonity mentioning that it was originally JZ4755 based, but then the last post he made in the thread stated that they were changing to JZ4760 after the A380 had been "officially" specced/announced...

I don't know what happened with the project as that was his last post and it was a while ago, and email to him errored out so I've left a PM at dingoonity waiting to see if he replies...

Probably should've tried the Gemei A330/Dingoo A330EX but it seems as ATM tinkering capabilities are a bit limited, and I didn't feel like popping $130+ for a PSP or Caanoo as they may end up in the never used again(or very much pile) so c. $75 was a more comfortable pricepoint for an experiment. Almost went with a nanonote, but wasn't thrilled with JZ4720 and 32M RAM for $99 plus no WiFi(a MAJOR plus to me for the PSP).

 

[Leonar]

@cutterjohn, I have to agree with some of your issues with caanoo/wiz ;-) I understand that you have super duper tegra based tablet. But consoles made to be consoles used to have hardware controls for gaming. But when you face just flat screen of your tablet or smartphone. It sucks.
I understand while you had PSP, why did you even considered buying wiz or dingoo for emulators? PSP is more popular platform, so it has more developers.
And the price for Wiz/caanoo is not realy good. At the price I have bougth mine i could have psp,xbox 360(all from 2nd hand)


Before I considering Caanoo, i wanted Dingoo but. Dingoo is so messed up. It's hard to get a real information about A380.

 

[Sorandor]

I just got my caanoo today, and have been playing the uae4all emulator a lot. For me this is far better than my psp amiga emu, and this and the mame emulator on caanoo were worth the 80 quid.

Downside is, the psp screen is bigger, its a gorgeous console. But some of the mame stuff and amiga, run real slow on psp, im unsure theyll run entirely well on the caanoo but from what ive seen so far, these 2 emus are better on caanoo. But overall, taking into account the enormous amount of psp stuff (Minis, emus, games and nice net service) id have to recommend the psp if youre short of cash. Personally id go for both (and did!) but it took me a while.. psp is a great machine for the cash. The slim is my preferred model

P.s Emus on psp are actually awesome with sound off. Which is why i like the caanoo in many ways, and hearing "nitro" music at full speed Took me back to the 90's for a few secs

 

[showmanBR]

I just got my caanoo today, and have been playing the uae4all emulator a lot. For me this is far better than my psp amiga emu, and this and the mame emulator on caanoo were worth the 80 quid.

Downside is, the psp screen is bigger, its a gorgeous console. But some of the mame stuff and amiga, run real slow on psp, im unsure theyll run entirely well on the caanoo but from what ive seen so far, these 2 emus are better on caanoo. But overall, taking into account the enormous amount of psp stuff (Minis, emus, games and nice net service) id have to recommend the psp if youre short of cash. Personally id go for both (and did!) but it took me a while.. psp is a great machine for the cash. The slim is my preferred model

P.s Emus on psp are actually awesome with sound off. Which is why i like the caanoo in many ways, and hearing "nitro" music at full speed Took me back to the 90's for a few secs

Could you give us a example about what game you test on both consoles? One more thing, have any emulator that run street fighter 3 3rd striker on caanoo? For Psp have Final burn alpha, have FBA to caanoo too??

 

[cutterjohn]

@cutterjohn, I have to agree with some of your issues with caanoo/wiz ;-) I understand that you have super duper tegra based tablet. But consoles made to be consoles used to have hardware controls for gaming. But when you face just flat screen of your tablet or smartphone. It sucks.
I understand while you had PSP, why did you even considered buying wiz or dingoo for emulators? PSP is more popular platform, so it has more developers.
And the price for Wiz/caanoo is not realy good. At the price I have bougth mine i could have psp,xbox 360(all from 2nd hand)


Before I considering Caanoo, i wanted Dingoo but. Dingoo is so messed up. It's hard to get a real information about A380.

Actually my REAL problem with these dedicated consoles is that they use VERY OLD technology and to make matters worse use SoC WITHOUT a freaking GPU ffs!

I mean if Hua Wei can sell the Ideo for $80 in Kenya (MSM7225 + Adreno 200) or LG can sell the Optimus(MSM7X27 + Adreno 200) pretty much everywhere for $120, and Archos A43IT(TI OMAP3 3630 + PowerVR SGX530) for c. $200 then these handheld console guys ought to be able to cough up an 8GB unit w/256M RAM, cortex-a8 SoC, and WiFi for under $100 given that I wouldn't be expecting a camera, touch screen(of any kind), GPS, bluetooth, etc. although I'd bluetooth would be nice...

As to tablets etc. ALL of them have bluetooth, so what you do is grab a Sony 6-axis controller or a Wii controller and/or keyboard/mouse and there you go... but I still like the "idea" of the dedicated consoles, just not their pricing for what they offer, esp. given their limited capabilities, excepting Pandora but it's just crazy priced given that I buy a better featured tablet for less. It's nice to have a simple programmer API but man these specs on most of the are unbelievably weak... Heck some PDAs from 10y ago had these specs minus storage...

[EDIT]
I NEVER owned a PSP, just considered one given that it does have the extra co-processor and decent GPU... I DO own a NDS lite though... but it's specs are pretty pathetic too so it's not up to much emulation... but does have the bonus of some good commercial games...
[/EDIT]

[EDIT2]
Dingoo A380: It's slightly better than the A320, but that's why I was trying to get a hold of the Dingo Digital USA guy to see if he knew anything more about the possible future of the A380 as it seemed to have promise esp if they DID release the OS changes made to the version of dingux that it runs plus if China Chip released other details, but my immediate problem is that it's gone from DX, DDUSA guy's page is NOT updated(still mention pre-order for batch #2 IIRC which he should've already shipped out), etc. 64M reasonable, but...

Gemei A330: has some life, but most people seem to be ignoring it... booboo's not really working on dingux on it for the moment(ever?) as china chip changed focus and he lost support resources for the time being... plus there's only an unofficial SDK which doesn't seem to quite fully work yet... bonus of this is that it does have a GPU and ARM11 CPU based SoC so MUCH better than A380, etc. 64M reasonable, but...

Mystery DDUSA hw project: JZ4760 based and thats about it known AFAIK. Which was another thing I wanted to try to get info on.

Then AFAICT the Dingoo A320 seems to be the best overall option as far as tinkering and reasonable emulation going, and still is fairly active.

These guys really need to go 256M RAM in these things, as it'd give plenty of runtime space w/o needing swap...
[/EDIT2]

 

[Marty]

can get the Caanoo for $112Aus delivered to ur door with a 4gig card...bargain

 

[cutterjohn]

I ended up buying the A320 as a placeholder while I see who finally comes up with a reasonably priced, and relatively open handheld w/a 1GHz CPU + OpenGL ES 2.0 capable GPU, be it ARMv7 or something like JZ4770 based.

There really just wasn't a good choice amongst what's available at reasonable pricing. OpenPandora was best but their pricing is nuts and they still haven't finished off batch 1 after 2+y! The Dingo/Gemei A330 lack an official SDK, and have only recently gotten an unofficial one kind of working and not much of a community. The A380 got mired with Dingux and no source yet, but I'm not holding my breath given how few(any?) Chinese Android tablet knockoffs have released the GPLed source parts. PSP3000 seems to me like it'll die off once the Vita is released and VERY quickly I expect once the Vita is cracked open given those killer hw specs...

Caanoo uses relatively ancient ARM9 and really doesn't seem to have much more activity than the A320 plus the best price I could find for it was $130 + shipping which is nearly double what I paid for the A320 + shipping.

DDUSA finally replied to my email and has stated trying to put together a handheld based around the JZ4770 now rather than the JZ4760.

 

[kayuz]

?wtf? the caanoo isn't more powerful then the Dingoo??? eretic!

 

[Exophase]

cutterjohn;

You may think the ARM9 in Caanoo is ancient but it's not like the MIPS core in Jz4732/4740 is faster, quite the contrary..

All this talk about "just use a bluetooth controller and you're set" is silly. If that works for you that's great, but don't pretend that that's somehow perfectly equivalent to using a device that has gaming controls on it.

Selling a phone with a cheap ARM11 based Qualcomm SoC "+ Adreno 200" (it's funny that you list GPUs as if they're separate from their respective SoCs) for really cheap in a very poor country doesn't mean that something much better can be done for the prices you want. Homebrew handhelds can't be priced like phones that are sold in quantities exceeding millions, they won't have access to the same hardware at the same prices. And just because you "aren't expecting" various components like touchscreens doesn't mean that you represent a market that's worth designing a device over. If you feel so strongly about this maybe you should design your own device.

It's kind of unfortunate that you're as preoccupied with specs as you are without actually understanding the capabilities of the components you're evaluating. PDAs from 10 years ago came nowhere close to Pandora in capabilities, you probably think that something with a 624MHz PXA270 could compete with a 600MHz Cortex-A8 because the MHz are higher. In the real world the latter would be much faster than the former in any useful cases. You also seem automatically okay with a Jz4770 instead of something with a Cortex-A8 because it's 1GHz, but we know nothing about its actual performance. For all we know it could perform only half as well as the A8 in real world applications..

 

[jlenoconel]

cutterjohn, I hear you. I was late jumping onto the bandwagon as I bought my Wiz and Caanoo just this summer. I was seriously hoping they would outperform my CFW PSPs.

- Easier software installation: no, it's about the same
- Better emulator selection: no, the PSP has some emulated systems the Wiz/Caanoo do not
- Markedly better emulation performance: no, for every emulator that shines on the Wiz/Caanoo, there is at least one that is worse
- Better stability than PSP homebrew: no, just as many apps require the system to be powered off, a surprise that's not better than hacked PSPs
- Able to store most if not all of the software on a 32GB SD card: no, I've only been able to use an 8GB SD card without problems

Sure, I can run Ginge to get older GP software working, but running an emulator/interpreter to run another emulator is a kludge too far for me.

Sure, I could learn to build my own emulator ports, but unless I got deep into learning how to optimize for the Wiz/Caanoo my ports wouldn't run better than what's already out there. There's no reason for me to invest that kind of time to do something someone else has already done on a PSP or other device I own.

After my first month of use I am somewhat disappointed. Because the Wiz and Caanoo hardware are open source and therefore more easily accessible to developers, I expected the experience to be better than a closed-system PSP that is theoretically much more difficult to create software for. The SD card problems surprised me the most, and wasted days of my time trying to figure out what was going on.

After all of that being said, I'm still not ready to give up on them yet. I've still got a handful of Wiz emulators to fully test, I haven't even gotten to all of the native games, and most of my time has been spent with the Wiz so I've still got a ways to go with the Caanoo before I make my final verdicts...

I currently have a 32gb SD card in my Caanoo and am almost up to 8gb. I haven't experienced any problems yet but what problems can you experience or have you experienced personally?

 

[yoshi41dragon]

cutterjohn;

You may think the ARM9 in Caanoo is ancient but it's not like the MIPS core in Jz4732/4740 is faster, quite the contrary..

All this talk about "just use a bluetooth controller and you're set" is silly. If that works for you that's great, but don't pretend that that's somehow perfectly equivalent to using a device that has gaming controls on it.

Selling a phone with a cheap ARM11 based Qualcomm SoC "+ Adreno 200" (it's funny that you list GPUs as if they're separate from their respective SoCs) for really cheap in a very poor country doesn't mean that something much better can be done for the prices you want. Homebrew handhelds can't be priced like phones that are sold in quantities exceeding millions, they won't have access to the same hardware at the same prices. And just because you "aren't expecting" various components like touchscreens doesn't mean that you represent a market that's worth designing a device over. If you feel so strongly about this maybe you should design your own device.

It's kind of unfortunate that you're as preoccupied with specs as you are without actually understanding the capabilities of the components you're evaluating. PDAs from 10 years ago came nowhere close to Pandora in capabilities, you probably think that something with a 624MHz PXA270 could compete with a 600MHz Cortex-A8 because the MHz are higher. In the real world the latter would be much faster than the former in any useful cases. You also seem automatically okay with a Jz4770 instead of something with a Cortex-A8 because it's 1GHz, but we know nothing about its actual performance. For all we know it could perform only half as well as the A8 in real world applications..

Exactly. Don't judge a computer by it's specs. I started programming on a IBM 4341 mainframe.

This system was able to maintain more than a million subscribers with complete batch and online processing.

Specs: 6.7 MHz CPU with 4 MB RAM

 

[akator]

I currently have a 32gb SD card in my Caanoo and am almost up to 8gb. I haven't experienced any problems yet but what problems can you experience or have you experienced personally?

So far I still haven't gotten around to using my new Caanoo, but I've had my Wiz since early July with with almost daily use.

32GB SD cards constantly get corrupted when used with my Wiz. I've tried different cards from different manufacturers and the same things happens. Things will work fine for a few days, then things I played the day before won't work anymore, then nothing on the SD card works at all a few days later. If I take out the 32GB card, reformat it, and copy the files over it works again but the same thing happens within a few days of use.

I loaded the 32GB cards with 16.8GB of software and ROMs, so there should have been more than enough space for scratch files. I have tested the cards for bad sectors, and they are not defective. The cards work perfectly in all other devices they have been used with. This is definitely an issue when using them with the Wiz.

If I lock the 32GB SD cards, they work indefinitely and with no corruption. Problem is, some software won't run on a locked card, and the rest that works looses features.

The 16GB card I've used doesn't have this problem as badly, it worked for about 2 weeks before it needed to be reformatted.

The 8GB card hadn't had any problems.

Has anyone else experienced anything like this?

 

[stpat]

I've only had my caanoo for about 2 months, but I have 2 cards, a 16gb and an 8gb.... they're both loaded to the teeth and used constantly, and I haven't had a single issue with either of them.

I currently have a 32gb SD card in my Caanoo and am almost up to 8gb. I haven't experienced any problems yet but what problems can you experience or have you experienced personally?

So far I still haven't gotten around to using my new Caanoo, but I've had my Wiz since early July with with almost daily use.

32GB SD cards constantly get corrupted when used with my Wiz. I've tried different cards from different manufacturers and the same things happens. Things will work fine for a few days, then things I played the day before won't work anymore, then nothing on the SD card works at all a few days later. If I take out the 32GB card, reformat it, and copy the files over it works again but the same thing happens within a few days of use.

I loaded the 32GB cards with 16.8GB of software and ROMs, so there should have been more than enough space for scratch files. I have tested the cards for bad sectors, and they are not defective. The cards work perfectly in all other devices they have been used with. This is definitely an issue when using them with the Wiz.

If I lock the 32GB SD cards, they work indefinitely and with no corruption. Problem is, some software won't run on a locked card, and the rest that works looses features.

The 16GB card I've used doesn't have this problem as badly, it worked for about 2 weeks before it needed to be reformatted.

The 8GB card hadn't had any problems.

Has anyone else experienced anything like this?

 

[kayuz]

i use a 250 GB usb HDD with no problem

 

[Remy803]

I've got a 16gb card that corrupted on me just once, when I switched cards with the device on and running an app (I was being dumb - I had MPlayer on my 16gb card and a video I wanted to see if it could run on another card). I did have the original 4gb card it came with corrupt almost immediately, though, which makes me kind of sad as I never did get to play any of the stuff that was on it.

I've never had any issues on any of the other cards I've used, including 8gb micro-sds in adapters and even an old 256mb card I use for code-testing.

 

[dnlgreenwood]

A couple of times I had corruption problems with one of my 8GB cards (either Kingston 8GB MicroSD C4 or 8GB Lexar C6), but those were in February and I haven't had problems since. Hardly any program would execute, and most of my rom images were corrupt. I then had to format with GParted and restore from a backup (thank goodness my HDD was cluttered with backups).

I've also had some problems with sharing the MicroSD card with my PSP and Caanoo, thought I don't know which system corrupted it.

I don't have NEARLY the amount of SD card problems that I had with my Nintendo DS Flashcart, where I had to format my cards every month or so.

 

[Berserk]

If MAME and homebrew are important to you, then the Caanoo may be the better option.

If superior SNES emulation, superior GBC\GBA emulation, perfect PS1 emulation, and PSP game library are important to you, then the PSP may be the better option.

Other factors:

+ PSP 2000 and up have the best dpad of any handheld
+ PSP has better and larger screen
+ PSP isn't missing rows of pixels like Caanoo
+ PSP's video player is light years better
+ Superior battery life, especially with 2200mAH battery kit (7-10 hours)
+ Huge aftermarket for parts and batteries
+ Speaker holes are in front, as opposed to in back where fingers can cover holes like Caanoo
+ Volume is controlled by buttons, as opposed to an always moving slider like Caanoo
+ Battery charger light turns off when finished charging
+ Controls\buttons don't seem to fail as often
+ Super Mario 64, Wave Race, Mario Kart 64, and a few other N64 titles run smooth on PSP
- PSP lacks touchscreen, pen, and tilt, but use is limited (pen works great with Warcraft 2)
- Caanoo's 3D nub seems better than PSP's
- Caanoo boots slightly faster (I think)
- Caanoo seems to have better homebrew support

 

[BAFelton]

Dosbox hasn't been ported on Caanoo

 

[kayuz]

psp? no no no, only the caanoo! on the psp i can't do anything, i can't make my own games/apps... is CLOSED! DAMN CLOSED! :angry:
no, opensource for life!