Orkie
Super Duper Mega GP Mania
No!
Several people seem to have this idea into their head that 3.0 is terrible and so, when they buy a value pack with it pre-installed they decide to downgrade to 2.0, hearing how much better it is. The truth is, 2.0 has only a few seconds faster boot time and the menu is a little faster. Other than that, there is next to no advantages.
Now, you can downgrade but to do so is to take a huge risk.
The reason why it is so dangerous to perform the downgrade is that the NAND drivers (particularly in u-boot) are very poorly written. This means that it very frequently marks parts of the NAND which are fine as bad purely due to the buggy code. Ever seen the ECC errors when looking as dmesg on your GP2X? This is what they are indicating. A few incorrectly marked blocks won't do any harm, but when downgrading from 3.0->2.0, a very large number of blocks are incorrectly marked. This will result in there not being enough space to store the firmware so the GP2X will be 'bricked'. It isn't a given that you'll end up with a brick, but it is fairly likely - I've heard of about 10 GP2X units bricked in this way and that is just from casually catching bits of conversations (i.e. it's fairly likely you will brick your GP2X downgrading).
If you are lucky, you may be able to reflash 2.0 and boot that (since 2.0 uses a lot less space than 3.0, and it's pretty much an all-or-nothing thing is a firmware upgrade). If you are unlucky, you'll get at most to the green kernel loading screen and that will be the end of that - your GP2X will be bricked beyond normal repair methods.
In this situation, the only way to repair your GP2X is to send it to somebody who has a JTAG connection as well as the specialised tools, not included in the standard JTAG packages due to their potential to cause a lot of damage, needed to totally blank the NAND IC and remove all the bad block markings (including those from real bad blocks, but this isn't really much of a problem). This will likely cost you money and you'll be without your GP2X for a few weeks.
So basically, don't downgrade your firmware from 3.0->2.0 unless you want to brick it as soon as you have got it. If you do, you will live in shame forever more, not having read this post
.
Several people seem to have this idea into their head that 3.0 is terrible and so, when they buy a value pack with it pre-installed they decide to downgrade to 2.0, hearing how much better it is. The truth is, 2.0 has only a few seconds faster boot time and the menu is a little faster. Other than that, there is next to no advantages.
Now, you can downgrade but to do so is to take a huge risk.
The reason why it is so dangerous to perform the downgrade is that the NAND drivers (particularly in u-boot) are very poorly written. This means that it very frequently marks parts of the NAND which are fine as bad purely due to the buggy code. Ever seen the ECC errors when looking as dmesg on your GP2X? This is what they are indicating. A few incorrectly marked blocks won't do any harm, but when downgrading from 3.0->2.0, a very large number of blocks are incorrectly marked. This will result in there not being enough space to store the firmware so the GP2X will be 'bricked'. It isn't a given that you'll end up with a brick, but it is fairly likely - I've heard of about 10 GP2X units bricked in this way and that is just from casually catching bits of conversations (i.e. it's fairly likely you will brick your GP2X downgrading).
If you are lucky, you may be able to reflash 2.0 and boot that (since 2.0 uses a lot less space than 3.0, and it's pretty much an all-or-nothing thing is a firmware upgrade). If you are unlucky, you'll get at most to the green kernel loading screen and that will be the end of that - your GP2X will be bricked beyond normal repair methods.
In this situation, the only way to repair your GP2X is to send it to somebody who has a JTAG connection as well as the specialised tools, not included in the standard JTAG packages due to their potential to cause a lot of damage, needed to totally blank the NAND IC and remove all the bad block markings (including those from real bad blocks, but this isn't really much of a problem). This will likely cost you money and you'll be without your GP2X for a few weeks.
So basically, don't downgrade your firmware from 3.0->2.0 unless you want to brick it as soon as you have got it. If you do, you will live in shame forever more, not having read this post
.
Last edited by a moderator:
