First Play Reports!

[Rayek]

that would be a minor bug that GPH is promising will be fixed with the new firmware upgrade, whenever that comes out. it would be nice to have it out before i even get my unit so i don't hace to experience the whitey line.

 

[Winterkid]

Kill Whitey... line.

 

[digitaljez]

Either I am the only one or everyone is too scared of being flamed for blaspheming against the God of Handhelds......but......

The joystick is not centrally placed in relation to the hole in the casing. It is slightly offset to the left. If the plastic pad is fully engaged (pressed down) on the joystick shaft it is prevented by the casing from registering left.



Since the joystick functions as a button the likelihood of it being pressed down is high. This is not a major problem in my opinion. A lot of people are already considering replacing the pad. GPH could issue a replacement with a slightly longer stem or you could just stick something up the hole to prevent it from being pressed down so far on the shaft.

 

[Mark1970]

You guys are forgetting that the GP32 didn't have any 2d accelarator at all.

The 2d accelarator will make emulating faster so we don't need all the processor clocking.

that means that we will get our 100% emulation with sound, and battery life to go with it.

​

One could also treat the gp2x as a gp32 with 4 action buttions when emulators are concerned from a programmer's perspective. At 144Mhz quite decent genesis emulation is possible on the gp32, look at drMD and that will no doubt also be possible on the gp2x if similar techniques are used. Added to that is a 2d accellerator and a dedicated sound device, which lifts quite a bit of strain from the cpu perhaps even lower cpu clock rates!

I think we'll see pretty decent battery life!

p.s. Hexen looks plain magnificent on the gp2x!

 

[i3oxxy]

Either I am the only one or everyone is too scared of being flamed for blaspheming against the God of Handhelds......but......

The joystick is not centrally placed in relation to the hole in the casing. It is slightly offset to the left. If the plastic pad is fully engaged (pressed down) on the joystick shaft it is prevented by the casing from registering left.



Since the joystick functions as a button the likelihood of it being pressed down is high. This is not a major problem in my opinion. A lot of people are already considering replacing the pad. GPH could issue a replacement with a slightly longer stem or you could just stick something up the hole to prevent it from being pressed down so far on the shaft.

​

Just looked very closely at mine; it's slap bang in the middle :huh: Perhaps yours needs its innards rejiggin'?

 

[digitaljez]

Just looked very closely at mine; it's slap bang in the middle :huh: Perhaps yours needs its innards rejiggin'?

​

Thanks for the response. At least that means it is just an assembly problem not a design issue. On the bright side it throws light on the 'joystick' rumour and effectively lays that one to rest. Another minor niggle blown out of proportion. Perhaps just loosening the screws will allow the required adjustment - don't want to send it back for something like this. (Don't want to void my warranty either though).
The 'rotating the joystick' fix appears to work by levering the pad up the shaft. This is all very well until you use the button functionality and it gets pushed back down. The best solution is going to be if your suggestion is possible.

 

[Eolair]

Just looked very closely at mine; it's slap bang in the middle :huh: Perhaps yours needs its innards rejiggin'?

​

Thanks for the response. At least that means it is just an assembly problem not a design issue. On the bright side it throws light on the 'joystick' rumour and effectively lays that one to rest. Another minor niggle blown out of proportion. Perhaps just loosening the screws will allow the required adjustment - don't want to send it back for something like this. (Don't want to void my warranty either though).
The 'rotating the joystick' fix appears to work by levering the pad up the shaft. This is all very well until you use the button functionality and it gets pushed back down. The best solution is going to be if your suggestion is possible.

​

Sounds like the solution given by GPH is just away around the real problem? :huh:
Maybe some more people could check their units to see how the joystick is placed.

 

[abigsmurf]

Thanks for the response. At least that means it is just an assembly problem not a design issue. On the bright side it throws light on the 'joystick' rumour and effectively lays that one to rest. Another minor niggle blown out of proportion. Perhaps just loosening the screws will allow the required adjustment - don't want to send it back for something like this. (Don't want to void my warranty either though).
The 'rotating the joystick' fix appears to work by levering the pad up the shaft. This is all very well until you use the button functionality and it gets pushed back down. The best solution is going to be if your suggestion is possible.

​

The joystick is on a screw, it shouldn't get pushed back in when pressing it (mine doesn't)

try rotating it in the other direction, see if that does anything

 

[junker]

Do you watch many Bollywood movies? Because normal movies usually aren't much longer than 3 hours.

​

:lol: hahahaaaa


and hey, nice video, mark! what game is snatch btw?

 

[digitaljez]

The joystick is on a screw, it shouldn't get pushed back in when pressing it (mine doesn't)

try rotating it in the other direction, see if that does anything

​

The joystick pad - plastic part - just slides on and off a metal shaft, not a screw thread in sight. Problem is it can slide too far down the shaft and then catches on the case before activating the switch.
Rather than trying anything too drastic I have opted to roll up a RIZLA+ (green) into a tight roll, insert it into the hole in the pad, cut half the length that fits in the hole from the RIZLA+ and ram it down the hole. Problem solved.
Does this mean there are different joystick components being used ? Mine definately has no screw. It just slides on and off a metal shaft which has a half-segment cut from the top few mm.

 

[i3oxxy]

Thanks for the response. At least that means it is just an assembly problem not a design issue. On the bright side it throws light on the 'joystick' rumour and effectively lays that one to rest. Another minor niggle blown out of proportion. Perhaps just loosening the screws will allow the required adjustment - don't want to send it back for something like this. (Don't want to void my warranty either though).
The 'rotating the joystick' fix appears to work by levering the pad up the shaft. This is all very well until you use the button functionality and it gets pushed back down. The best solution is going to be if your suggestion is possible.

​

The joystick is on a screw, it shouldn't get pushed back in when pressing it (mine doesn't)

try rotating it in the other direction, see if that does anything

​

digitaljez is right, I 'unscrewed' my joystick right the way off, to find there's no thread on the metal shaft beneath. The thumb piece just slips on and off, but its tight which is why rotating it makes it easier to loosen. If it really was sitting too low and causing problems, you could easily take off the stick and put something inside the slot for the shaft to lengthen it out a bit.

 

[i3oxxy]

Great minds? :lol:

 

[digitaljez]

:lol:

Didn't some GP32's need a wadge of paper to sort out the joypad ? It must be a GamePark engineer thing.

 

[fishybawb]

Mine's just a shaft too, no screw thread. Luckily for me, it's also centrally mounted. Nice work with the ghetto fix, those Rizlas are handy little things

 

[gfxpulse]

The firmware is going to make it so that when you are in menus or don't need full speed it will use less power by slowing down to less than 200 MHz. This will help for some stuff. Unfortunately when you are doing stuff that *NEEDS* full power like SNES, Megadrive, NeoGeo emulation, Quake etc the battery life will still be poor because both CPU cores will be running full power.

Firmware won't be a fix-all, it will only help in some situations. For CPU intensive stuff like emulation the battery life on GP2X will make the Game Gear look good. Maybe we could hack it to use 4AA batteries, 2 in parallel for increased power.

​

yea, i am confused about this. I assume that Video decoding uses most of the cpu power on the system? So, why the low numbers on watching videos (their original numbers had stated times for watching videos).

or.. is decoding high res avis and scaling down to a small resolution an operation that only takes 30% of the Gp2x's cpu power? (I know my desktop has trouble keeping up some times).

EDIT: this is not to say that it wont get better, but i would like some clarification as to how intensive video decoding is on this thing..

 

[abigsmurf]

Decoding Videos should only use the 2nd CPU at full power and have minimal use of the first one.

As it is both CPUs are at full speed which is a waste of power. There also seems to be issues with the amount of power being taken from the battery simply being too much at the moment but this is probably also caused by the SD slot not working as it should due to bad drivers, as well as the CPU usage.

I'd expect the next firmware patch to stop the frequent video crashing and also make the console function better when the power is low.

 

[nubie]

The firmware is going to make it so that when you are in menus or don't need full speed it will use less power by slowing down to less than 200 MHz.  This will help for some stuff.  Unfortunately when you are doing stuff that *NEEDS* full power like SNES, Megadrive, NeoGeo emulation, Quake etc the battery life will still be poor because both CPU cores will be running full power.

Firmware won't be a fix-all, it will only help in some situations.  For CPU intensive stuff like emulation the battery life on GP2X will make the Game Gear look good.  Maybe we could hack it to use 4AA batteries, 2 in parallel for increased power.

​

yea, i am confused about this. I assume that Video decoding uses most of the cpu power on the system? So, why the low numbers on watching videos (their original numbers had stated times for watching videos).

or.. is decoding high res avis and scaling down to a small resolution an operation that only takes 30% of the Gp2x's cpu power? (I know my desktop has trouble keeping up some times).

EDIT: this is not to say that it wont get better, but i would like some clarification as to how intensive video decoding is on this thing..

​

The data sheet for the MMSP2 says that the hardware video decoding pulls most of the heavy calculation for the compressed video, the second processor is concerning itself with things like frame tags and stream data, not video decoding per se. As such I am curious to see how fast the ARM9(one or both) really needs to be going while the other hardware takes care of the decoding.

I would like to point out that hardware beats software, so comparing to any other systems is moot,( except maybe standalone divx players )

The scaling is also a function handled by a hardware processor, so the power consumption should actually be quite small.

By the by, please give the mmsp2 data pdf on the magic eyes website a good read, it answers many hardware questions.

 

[clippa]

The 'rotating the joystick' fix appears to work by levering the pad up the shaft. This is all very well until you use the button functionality and it gets pushed back down

Yeah, that's what I found, you use it for 10 seconds and it's back to where it was.

Rather than trying anything too drastic I have opted to roll up a RIZLA+ (green) into a tight roll, insert it into the hole in the pad, cut half the length that fits in the hole from the RIZLA+ and ram it down the hole. Problem solved.

Aha, yes, the rizzla trick seems to make a big difference, thank god for bodgers. It really makes you kick yourself.

Ta gaterooz for the hint, but I don't have a screwdriver small enough. My scissors used to fit my gameboy but not this. I'll have to get myself down B&Q and get some smaller scissors

Cheers Mark, got snes running after your help

edit: Yeah, the hexen port is amazing, it's like playing a gba

 

[craigix]

I'm not too happy with the joypad, I think it has blank areas and feels a little like the zodiac analogue stick, i think i'll be reducing the 'blank' area on mine so when i press 1mm left it registers left! (rather than about 1cm like now)

-Craig

 

[clippa]

Yeah, you do have to push it some, and one of those crosshair joypad deals would have been nicer. I find pressing left, with a smidgen of up sees me going forward and left instead of left. I'm sure davec drew us a diagram to show how the joystick was shit maybe for that kind of thing, maybe it's down to software, but 4 way stuff (which is the majority of the emulatable (word?) to your mother systems) like mario on the snes emulator seems fine. Usually the control system is the make or break for me, and it's not in the bin yet, so it mustn't be that bad.