El_Diablo posted on Aug 6 2004 at 10:42 PM said:
woah...that was a pretty well reasoned and logical breakdown of possible gp32 specs...thanks for that, it made for a good read!
Indeedy...
Personally, I think they could afford to up the processor speed to something in the region of 200MHz default with a max of maybe 300MHz (but no more for the sake of our dear batteries).
Storage-wise, I don't mind what they change it to tbh, as long as it is affordable (4gb is all very well bit it is a bit pricey, eh?). But I *would* like to see backward compatibility, a USB port identical to those found in PCs (i.e. the big slot) and the SMC code from the old SDK bound to read from that - via some standard driver (so essentially it might not have an SMC slot in it, but it could remain backward compatible with SMC accessing code by allowing the user to plug in any old reader).
Batteries, I think they should have 3 AA batteries (since that'll open them up to improvements without *needing* to move to LI-Ion) and an LI-Ion battery that fits in the same slot - but without removing the compatibility for normal bats that makes the GP32 imho so much superior to the Zodiac. A self-charging small lithium battery running an RTC would be very very nice as well (i.e. when you turn on the unit it the RTC draws power from the normal batteries and the one that runs it when the unit is off does too charging itself)
Some kind of FPU would be very very nice I think, but I don't see the need for a dedicated 3D chip if it is backward compatible enough to work with Yeti. After all, that's a damn good 3D engine, and it can scale up to meet the needs of the hardware iirc (just as Yeti for GBA is essentially the Cube engine scaled down).
Ram is a must. 64 mb would be very nice; I imagine 32mb would do, but considering the price of the stuff these days, I think 64mb is certainly conceivable.
Resolution-wise, 320x240 is brilliant, I think. At that level it is low enough to save battery power and space on storage. Talk to (some) Zodiac people and you'll find that their higher resolution is a bit of a hinderance from time to time with movies since the files are quite a bit bigger. Others of course swear by it, but personally, I'd be fine with a 320x240 screen again.
Other than that, what would be nice?
Well, I'll tell you two things that would be absolutely amazing if GP could fit them in from an emu POV. A z80 chip (since those are darn cheap, I imagine, these days), and a good ole motorolla 68k. So many things use those in the past that I personally feel it'd be invaluable to have them available for the present in hardware form - especially considering just how dated they are now.
Anyone else agree?
Oh, and bluetooth or similar will, I suspect, become more and more essential. Ideally with an RF-Link emulator built into the SDK to preserve backward compatbility.
