First Play Reports!

[OrR]

Sorry, but I'm going to have to jump on DaveC's back and pound my chest on this one. Think of the difference on the GP32 between 133mhz and say 166 or 172mhz. That difference takes away about an hour of my battery life. Now crank that up to 200... dare I say 400 mhz? Firmware updates will help, but aren't going to solve the problem. No matter how you slice it, (better technology, better efficiency), 400 mhz is going to chew through 2 AA's in short order. It should have been 4 AA's from the get go... I even wish the GP32 had 4AA's. It has the room internally(at least close to it)

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That's stupid. You can always carry more AAs around if you want to. <_<

 

[Eolair]

I think the two cores would be using a shared clock to keep them synchronized. So if one core was running at 200mhz the other would have to be running at the same speed

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Looking at the MP2520F databook I'd say it's possible to set them at different speeds (chapter 5 for those who are interested). I could always be wrong though.

 

[chris_r]

I was just taking a guess though. From what Ive read i thought you could only use both processors at the same speed

 

[icurafu]

I was just taking a guess though. From what Ive read i thought you could only use both processors at the same speed

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Is it Duel core or duel CPU?

The difference is that with Duel CPU, you should be able to powerdown one CPU if you are not using it. Which would help a lot because currently we are not using it.

 

[craigix]

There is loads of room for optimising the battery life.

Yep the CPUs can run at different speeds and the second one can be shut down.

 

[gaterooze]

While we all know DaveC is perceived as a doomsayer, I think he's more a sceptic. Give him a break even if it's nonsense.

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Fair enough. Guess I was in a cranky mood

 

[icurafu]

There is loads of room for optimising the battery life.

Yep the CPUs can run at different speeds and the second one can be shut down.

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omg, that's awesome news. Care to write a quick tutorial on how to play shutdown and change CPU speeds in ANSI C?

 

[clippa]

You can find the hexen wad file by typing
abandonware hexen stare gry
into google. Is it ok to say that? I don't want to get anyone into trouble. It says it's abandonware but I'll not provide a direct link just in case. Feel free to edit my post if I'm on shakey ground.
For people still waiting: It was a bit of a slog getting things up and running, a lot of guess work and trawling through threads on here, but I got there in the end with most things, still no joy with the snes emulator, but I understand that's running really slow so I'm not too bothered. Chuffed to bits so far. The battery life is a bit shoddy, hopefully that will be ironed out with future firmware updates. The only thing that puts me off is the joystick, I've tried turning it until I'm blue in the face but it's still quite stiff, maybe it just needs to be broken in and I'll get used to it too, would have much prefered a joypad kind of thing. I see the top comes off, a vectrex style joystick attatchment would be good to put on there I think. If gph could manufacture replacement tops in different styles, that would be nice. Bar all that, the thing screams potential. xvid has been fine for me, no synch problems so far, I encode with cbr lame mp3 at 128kbps if that makes a difference. I've only watched like 5 minutes though, so I don't know how long it takes to go out of synch.
I'm in awe of the screen, if anything the backlight is too bright and washes out the colour a little, and you have to tilt it slightly forward from the comftable playing angle. I suppose that's because the light shines up from the bottom, would it make a difference if you could turn the light down slightly via firmware?
The speakers are quite tinny, which is to be expected, only noticable when listening to music really, but mp3's sound great through headphones.
No cd, no big deal, it's all on the net, but the case was a bit of a dissapoinment as I was expecting the official gp2x snazzy hard case, nobody told me, I must have just assumed, and got a gp32 wallet deal.
So, 9 out of 10 so far, might sound a bit high in light of what I've just said but the good really outweighs the bad, or temporary setbacks. Despite the few niggles, I'm really happy with it, you won't be dissapointed.

Edit: Oh yeah, and trying to get windows xp to recognise it as an usb mass storage device was a nightmare, I gave up in the end as luckily my sisters camera had an sd slot. So maybe get yourself a card reader or something similair, I imagine this will all be fixed soon.

 

[gaterooze]

clippa, re: the tight joystick, perhaps try loosening the screw in the back of the unit on that side? Might let it move more freely.

 

[Mark1970]

Here's my little video(2Mo) of my 1st experiences.

and an animated gif with some comments:

TIP: actually removing a thin vinyl layer from the screen protector actually created a super brilliant smooth screen protector - I whined a little too early in my animated GIF!

Tip: When using the Alpha snes emulator, make sure you put a top.smc file into the emulator's folder, it'll only be able to load a game file named top.smc. Also the libraries have to be installed. Those have to be put in the root of the memory card otherwise they won't install. Take a look at the scripts with a text editor to see why.

 

[TelcoLou]

Thanks for the vid, Mark!

(you seem to have an American accent ... )

 

[Mark1970]

Thanks for the vid, Mark!

(you seem to have an American accent ... )

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Well my accent is actually all over the place ranging from UK British to American. Been living in the states (St.Louis MI) for a while way back on and off between '93 and '98. Having had an American girlfriend for like 9 years also does the trick.
So probably still no gp2x's in the US... yet!

 

[reaper79]

Oh so your saying that the reduced battery life is a non-issue on the 333Mhz PSP, and a major problem on a GP2X.

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Batteries are a problem for any power hungry mobile device, and will more than likely include the GP2X. By the way, what does any of this have to do with the PSP? It does get poor battery life, and is an issue for it as well, but I can't say I really care about the PSP.

That's stupid. You can always carry more AAs around if you want to. <_<

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And that there is the benefit of the GP32/GP2X over other devices, the ones with built in batteries that is. I for one don't like carrying extra batteries, nor do I like to have to change them when I'm in the middle of watching a movie or playing a game. My GP32 doesn't even warn me when they are going dead, it just shuts off mid game. Personally, I don't see why adding two extra batteries to the device is stupid. It's twice the life, you don't have to change them, and they're in the unit meaning you dont' have to "carry" them.

The device will probably achieve comperable battery performance to the BLU when operating on a single processor. Then maybe one day run a PSX emulator at 400mhz, and you won't play for more than an 2 hours. I'm not entirely sure on this, but I could believe that if Fenix is ever ported over to the GP2X, then that could definetely use 400 mhz with all the overhead.

Cheers!

 

[TelcoLou]

None here yet ... GP32z get's theirs tomorrow, shipping same day.

... thus your vid was much appreciated

* watches it again, drooling *

 

[DaveC]

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.

None of that even uses the second CPU yet. And why would Megadrive need to run that fast? It's full speed @ 133mhz on the GP32!

For CPU intensive stuff like emulation the battery life on GP2X will make the Game Gear look good.

Confirmed by Anarchy:

Actually about 4~5 hours on 2500mah batteries and 3~4 playing video

So if it's ALREADY 4+ hours now and will only get better (6+), how does that make the Game Gear look good? The PSP only gets 2-3 hours running homebrew, so the GP2X will be double that!

You really want to see the GP2X fail don't you?

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Yes Megadrive needs to run that fast. Many games are still choppy at 166Mhz with sound. Don't believe me? load Vectorman, or Sonic 3 then come back and tell me it doesn't need more speed Or try Quake and say 12 FPS is enough

SNES DEFINETLY needs all of the speed it can get. It is choppy and slow and has no transparencies at 166 now on the GP32, again it needs full power. Same with Neo Geo. I guess if all you want to run is NES and ColecoVision yeah you can run slow.

I don't use 2500 MA hour batteries because I use the 2000 MAh 15 minute rechargeables. I don't want to wait all night for those others to charge.

I still say they should have used 4 AA batteries. Just extend the battery bulge a bit and put 2 more in for double the playtime.

 

[DaveC]

Sorry, but I'm going to have to jump on DaveC's back and pound my chest on this one.  Think of the difference on the GP32 between 133mhz and say 166 or 172mhz.  That difference takes away about an hour of my battery life.  Now crank that up to 200... dare I say 400 mhz?  Firmware updates will help, but aren't going to solve the problem.  No matter how you slice it, (better technology, better efficiency), 400 mhz is going to chew through 2 AA's in short order.  It should have been 4 AA's from the get go... I even wish the GP32 had 4AA's.  It has the room internally(at least close to it)

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That's stupid. You can always carry more AAs around if you want to. <_<

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Well yeah but if you want to watch a movie for longer than 2 hours or play a game that long without it shutting off on you 4 AAs would have been much better.

 

[OrR]

Do you watch many Bollywood movies? Because normal movies usually aren't much longer than 3 hours. And changing the AAs every 3 hours while playing, I can live with that. Probably need to go to the toilet or eat something by then, anyway. Two more batteries would add unnecessary bulge and really wouldn't improve functionality much.

 

[nubie]

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.

 

[sand_man]

I will probably sitting in my bedroom using it mostly so I will be using the ac adapter more than batteries.

 

[Saido]

What is the white stripe on the left side of all your gp2x's?