First Play Reports!


abigsmurf

Member
Joined
Apr 4, 2004
Messages
436
OK time for people who've got their consoles and had a play to talk about it.

Console itself:

Without the screen protector on it looks a bit cheapish but when you put it on it looks much much better. The joystick felt a bit stiff at first and had trouble recognising down but when I unscrewed it a bit it fixed that problem and it's pretty accurate.

Face buttons are fairly comfortable although due to the spacing, pressing A and B at the same time could prove tricky. The volume and start and select buttons are raised a bit higher and feel a bit odd but it should stop you pressing start or select when pressing X.

Video playback

Bit mixed here. When it was working the quality was superb, fairly bright colours, silky smooth and the speakers where better than I was expecting (not much bass but then that's a given for handhelds) and I think they're better than the ones on PSP and DS. Unfortunately I tried it with 2 different DivX 5.0 vids and it has a tendancy to crash quite often. This is probably down to the firmware/card reading issues though but at the moment it seems that it's probably no good for watching full length divx videos until it's fixed.

Game (Quake 1)

easy to set up and start playing. lack of mouselook isn't too bad as the singleplayer game was designed to be played without it although asigning L+R to strife in each direction may be handy. Frame rate seems to hover around 20-25 although it drops a bit if there are 4 or more enemies on the screen at the same time. Impressive for an early version though and more than playable.

All I've tried so far...
 
ordered on first day.

Also I've just discovered something that GPH need to address : the movie player doesn't support .mpg's!
 
Just tried Xvid 4, Major audio sync issues and it also crashed.

BTW I'm using a cheap bytestor SD card just so you know. Looking for a Qvga vid to try
 
Yeah, I was disappointed with .mpgs. I hoped they'd be an easy quick test, rather than reencoding something or finding the exact right type of .AVI. I've still not found anything that will actually play on the thing.

I've had no luck with USB connections to Windows XP or to my mac. Just as well I have a card reader.
 
seems all mpeg4 is bugged on it. Just tried an ultra low bitrate QVGA AMV I did on it (divx 3.1) and it gets the same crash
 
try putting the mpeg in a avi container, could work as mplayer is very flexibel with such stuff. download the mplayer package to your pc ( mplayer.hq )
navigate to where youd did unpack it and type "mencoder blub.mpg -ovc copy -oac copy -o blub.avi"
 
Unit:

My first thought was that it's small! Tiny! Actually it's not much different dimensions wise to the GP32, but it feels more compact for some reason. The build quaility's good, no probs with the joystick for me, although it does feel quite tight when you're used to the GP32's stick.

Firmware:

Generally OK... The bootup time doesn't bother me at all, but there are some minor annoyances in the menu - like not being able to push up to go to the previous line, you have to cycle through the options left to right. There's a 1 pixel wide vertical white line present to the very left of the screen, although it's only noticeable on the slight delay and black screen between menus. I think this is fixed by the recently released firmware anyway.

Video:

No problems with DivX for me, tried some I'd encoded myself and some downloaded too. Silky smooth and no sync problems at all. I'll give XviD a try later, although with my old and slow SD card, it's probably going to be painful!

Games:

Downloading NK's Hexen now!

Batteries:

Rechargeables are currently charging thanks to my lack of organisational skills. The included AAs (very cheap looking) were bent over by the GP2X and given a thorough raping - they died inside of 45 minutes. I'm crossing my fingers the 2500Mah NiMH ones will fair better.

I'm having an occasional problem with getting it to recognise my SD card - I have to restart sometimes otherwise it shows as being empty... I'm hoping this is just a dodgy driver issue or something. My 1Gb card should be here within the next day or so, so I'll see if that helps any. Using a 128MB card borrowed from my camera at the minute! :)
 
Newbie question....just got mine and downloaded the quake1bits.......how did you get it to work. I copied folder and files over and run the launcher but ...nothing!!!

Please advise....
 
I'm beginning to wonder about this video crashing issue, is it just me getting it crashing every time during playback?
 
battery life is worrying me. I know it should get better, but it still seems awfully low on my 2300mah rechargables (havent got any specific timings yet though).
Maybe it s because I have been rebooting a lot.

btw- please don't use this post to claim the GP2X has shit battery life. Its just a first impression with not the most powerful of batteries and an un-updated FW.
 
I'm having an occasional problem with getting it to recognise my SD card - I have to restart sometimes otherwise it shows as being empty... I'm hoping this is just a dodgy driver issue or something. My 1Gb card should be here within the next day or so, so I'll see if that helps any. Using a 128MB card borrowed from my camera at the minute! :)
Won't make any difference, it's a driver problem that they need to fix. The card may also stop responding at random times while you're playing a game or watching a movie.

Newbie question....just got mine and downloaded the quake1bits.......how did you get it to work. I copied folder and files over and run the launcher but ...nothing!!!

Please advise....
Have you got everything in the right locations as it says in the readme? and does the launcher contain the correct path to the executable?
 
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Let's not forget that we already know the firmware needs a lot of work. Battery life is one of the many things that will improve because of that. I wouldn't worry about it for now. Being an early adopter requires both the patience to wait for things like that to be sorted out as well as the impatience it takes to want the thing before everyone else!
 
Battery life... just from piecing together all the stuff I've been reading here and everywhere else I can find it seems that there's either no or dodgy CPU speed throttling... the CPU/CPUs is/are going flat out and not power saving even when the device is sat waiting for a user action with virtually zero CPU load/graphics.

I would expect a major improvement in battery life as the basic OS matures :) ... but then I could be wrong :p
 
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