General Questions About The Caanoo And Concerns About The Screen


ozzuneoj

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Ever since buying an R4DS and a DS Lite back in 2007, I've been interested in "homebrew" mobile gaming, but I've wanted something with more power and more flexibility. The Pandora looks incredible, and I've wanted one for years now... but they're just too expensive for me and I think widespread availability of reliable and well-tested units is still quite far off.

So, lately I've been looking at other handhelds. The dingoo looks alright for the price but doesn't seem to have the same level of flexibility and community support, and most reviews seem to consider the Caanoo a decent step up in quality and features from the Wiz, which is practically the same price, so after lots of research I've pretty much decided that I want to buy a Caanoo very soon.

But I am a bit concerned about the issue of a few rows of pixels on the top and side being covered up by the bezel surrounding the screen, because I tend to notice things like that. If there isn't any hope for a "fixed" version to be released any time soon, I'll probably just buy one anyway, but if GPH is producing new ones right now that don't have this issue, I definitely do not want to buy one that does. Do both the black and white systems have it? Does every unit have this issue or is it inconsistent? It isn't a horribly big deal to me... if it really irks me I can always fix it myself (though I'd hate to void the warranty).

I'm also curious about the analog stick, though after reading lots of comments about this I guess its just something I'll have to test for myself. I never play fighting games so I'm not concerned about having a super precise and responsive d-pad, but I've always preferred the "playstation style" d-pad in older games because of the well defined direction buttons. The pad on the SNES was always pretty good too. I have used Playstation and Xbox 360 controllers in recent years to run emulators on my PC and the analog sticks weren't bad for most games and created far less "fatigue" after intense play. Does the Caanoo's stick feel similarly to the one on either the 360 controller or the Playstation?

Some random other questions:

*If I hook the Caanoo's TV-Out cable to an old NTSC tube TV will it actually be rendering\displaying something close to 640x480 (or 720x480 for a modern wide screen) or does it just internally scale everything from 320x240 to fit your TV? I'm just wondering if its possible for games\apps to be programmed to support higher resolutions via TV-Out, even if the Caanoo's screen is only QVGA.

*Is it possible to use the touch screen when using TV-Out? For example, if I want to use ScummVM to play an old adventure game and I decide to hook it up to the TV, will I be forced to use the analog stick?

*Do any current emulators (Genesis, SNES, MAME...) support multiple players by connecting a controller to the Caanoo's USB port? If so, what controllers are currently supported? I'd love to use a wired 360 controller (or one of the Playstation 2 adapters I have laying around).

*Does the Class of the SDHC card I use have a significant impact on how the Caanoo operates? I'll probably just go with a Class 6 8Gb card, but I figured I'd ask, just in case I find a smoking deal on a Class 4 or 2.

*And the big question... how far away is the Caanoo from being compatible with most\all previous GP2x\Wiz software? I realize that it's a very new system, but I'd really like to be able to play most of the cool stuff that's been released over the years. I've read that Ginge is very useful for this, but so far hasn't been ported to the Caanoo... is anyone working on this?

Anyways, thanks for any replies. Any info you can offer will just help to solidify my choice of buying one of these handhelds. My poor DS Lite's shoulder buttons no longer work properly and the homebrew scene seems to have almost completely died in the last two years... so, I'm going to need a new device to waste time on when I'm on breaks at work. ;)
 
Very good post I'd like to know all of these things too.

I have a GP2x-f100 which I still use a lot but have a nag for something new.
If the Pandora was a bit cheaper and in plentiful supply it would be an easy choice, but until some larger company comes up with something similar to Pandora the Caanoo looks good.

The hardware has a few little issues but seems ok.

The only thing that really puts me off is the possibility of limited community support, improved GP2X compatibility would be an instant fix, but is it possible?
 
ozzuneoj said:
But I am a bit concerned about the issue of a few rows of pixels on the top and side being covered up by the bezel surrounding the screen, because I tend to notice things like that. If there isn't any hope for a "fixed" version to be released any time soon, I'll probably just buy one anyway, but if GPH is producing new ones right now that don't have this issue, I definitely do not want to buy one that does. Do both the black and white systems have it? Does every unit have this issue or is it inconsistent? It isn't a horribly big deal to me... if it really irks me I can always fix it myself (though I'd hate to void the warranty).
It is really noticeable, and the default games from fungp don't counteract this, It can only be really fixed by modding the bezel HOWEVER developpers can easily counteracts this, by instead of scaling emulators fullscreen to 320x240, scale them to something less in the center of the screen and the problem is solved, i added this option as a caanoo mode to sms_sdl which isn't released yet. It can be done with existing games as well that require 320x240 but i wouldn't do that. In the case of new games dev's would just have to take into account not to place important things near the boders, most action in game is in the center of the screen anyways so i'm not bothered with it

ozzuneoj said:
I'm also curious about the analog stick, though after reading lots of comments about this I guess its just something I'll have to test for myself. I never play fighting games so I'm not concerned about having a super precise and responsive d-pad, but I've always preferred the "playstation style" d-pad in older games because of the well defined direction buttons. The pad on the SNES was always pretty good too. I have used Playstation and Xbox 360 controllers in recent years to run emulators on my PC and the analog sticks weren't bad for most games and created far less "fatigue" after intense play. Does the Caanoo's stick feel similarly to the one on either the 360 controller or the Playstation?

The anolog stick is fine, but deadzone options in software would be nice, i don't play many games but have no problems with the analog stick

ozzuneoj said:
*If I hook the Caanoo's TV-Out cable to an old NTSC tube TV will it actually be rendering\displaying something close to 640x480 (or 720x480 for a modern wide screen) or does it just internally scale everything from 320x240 to fit your TV? I'm just wondering if its possible for games\apps to be programmed to support higher resolutions via TV-Out, even if the Caanoo's screen is only QVGA.
NTSC is supported but i don't know which ntsc standard they use, not sure if games can be programed for higher resoltions i think the gp2x had a higher res in tv out mode so maybe the caanoo as well but i was nowhere near to what you suggested it was some tv standard and you lost pixels due to overscan on tv's

ozzuneoj said:
*Is it possible to use the touch screen when using TV-Out? For example, if I want to use ScummVM to play an old adventure game and I decide to hook it up to the TV, will I be forced to use the analog stick?
Yes you can use the touchscreen but the Lcd Screen is turned off while in tv out mode, i think that's just how the software works atm, so your kinda blindy using the touchscreen

ozzuneoj said:
*Do any current emulators (Genesis, SNES, MAME...) support multiple players by connecting a controller to the Caanoo's USB port? If so, what controllers are currently supported? I'd love to use a wired 360 controller (or one of the Playstation 2 adapters I have laying around).
Don't know about that, it's emulator specific so read up their readme's i could hook up my usb controller sometime to see if it gets detected if so, any emulator that supported it on the wiz / gp2x (with cradle) will support it on the caanoo as well

ozzuneoj said:
*Does the Class of the SDHC card I use have a significant impact on how the Caanoo operates? I'll probably just go with a Class 6 8Gb card, but I figured I'd ask, just in case I find a smoking deal on a Class 4 or 2.
Irrelevant question you know they invented the classes for a reason to define how fast the card is etc. any class is fine it all depends on your needs, most games don't need much sd card access, but you might want to get a decent card to copy stuff over to it or something

ozzuneoj said:
*And the big question... how far away is the Caanoo from being compatible with most\all previous GP2x\Wiz software? I realize that it's a very new system, but I'd really like to be able to play most of the cool stuff that's been released over the years. I've read that Ginge is very useful for this, but so far hasn't been ported to the Caanoo... is anyone working on this?
djeez, the caanoo is barely released and you except it to support all software ever released for gp2x / wiz during a time span of 5 or was it more years ? If ginge is ported it would be easier yes, but if it was me i rather had a game ported natively but then again i'm not intrested at all in playing games on it.
You could also look up if the author(s) of ginge already have a caanoo and if not donate one to them somehow either by grouping donations, that way support for caanoo might come quicker and even then it's no garantee
 
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Thanks for the replies.

joyrider said:
ozzuneoj said:
ozzuneoj said:
*And the big question... how far away is the Caanoo from being compatible with most\all previous GP2x\Wiz software? I realize that it's a very new system, but I'd really like to be able to play most of the cool stuff that's been released over the years. I've read that Ginge is very useful for this, but so far hasn't been ported to the Caanoo... is anyone working on this?
djeez, the caanoo is barely released and you except it to support all software ever released for gp2x / wiz during a time span of 5 or was it more years ? If ginge is ported it would be easier yes, but if it was me i rather had a game ported natively but then again i'm not intrested at all in playing games on it.
You could also look up if the author(s) of ginge already have a caanoo and if not donate one to them somehow either by grouping donations, that way support for caanoo might come quicker and even then it's no garantee

Heh, I wasn't expecting anything. That's why I asked long it may take for a large portion of the current Wiz\GP2x library (in other words, more than a handful of games and emulators) to be ported or to be supported via a Ginge. Ginge seems like a fairly important program to have, yet I'm having no luck actually finding any information about its progress on the Caanoo, or if anyone is working on it. I see lots of people referring to it being ported to the Caanoo, but there has never been a thread created in the Caanoo section here that even used "ginge" in the title, so there isn't much to go on.

Is there another major site\forum that developers use to keep people up to date on things like this? As a gamer and not a developer, I'm looking at the current usability of the system and how much support it may receive in the near future.

Anyways, thanks again for the reply. If anyone else knows about the status of Ginge or the ports of the Ur Quan Masters, or DOSBox for Caanoo, I'm very interested. Thanks!
 
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About the class speeds again, yes i was refering to most apps / games not writing much to sd card... so it's kinda irrelevant at least to me and subjective also (since not everyone cars that a 5 kb config file takes 25 microseconds longer to write to their sd caard). I can imagine however that scummvm could benefit from it while loading the game. Most of the games load the assets into memory just before a level or even the whole game assets at startup...

about ginge, What i was trying to say is that porting things to caanoo is not just a simple recompile, you have to fix errors & bugs and adopt the control scheme's (since it's analog now) sometimes even other bits, and that could be the case with Ginge or even other emulators... I don't know about ginge, but my guess no work has been done on it nor on dosbox or anything else *BIG* but that's just a guess... Developpers need the machine in question to devellop for it and test things, if they don't have one or have no intention on buying one you might have to wait a long time. Besides as i said before the caanoo has only been released like a month, a month and a half ago, give it time things will come. Donating consoles to dev's will speed up things but it's no garantuee they will do anything with it...
 
joyrider said:
About the class speeds again, yes i was refering to most apps / games not writing much to sd card... so it's kinda irrelevant at least to me and subjective also (since not everyone cars that a 5 kb config file takes 25 microseconds longer to write to their sd caard). I can imagine however that scummvm could benefit from it while loading the game. Most of the games load the assets into memory just before a level or even the whole game assets at startup...

about ginge, What i was trying to say is that porting things to caanoo is not just a simple recompile, you have to fix errors & bugs and adopt the control scheme's (since it's analog now) sometimes even other bits, and that could be the case with Ginge or even other emulators... I don't know about ginge, but my guess no work has been done on it nor on dosbox or anything else *BIG* but that's just a guess... Developpers need the machine in question to devellop for it and test things, if they don't have one or have no intention on buying one you might have to wait a long time. Besides as i said before the caanoo has only been released like a month, a month and a half ago, give it time things will come. Donating consoles to dev's will speed up things but it's no garantuee they will do anything with it...

Thanks for the reply.

I know it isn't a simple job to port things to another system. I guess I'm mostly concerned about how much actual developer interest there is in the Caanoo... and if hardware availability is preventing the system from getting very popular, that makes it very difficult for me to want to invest in one. I realize its only been out a couple months, but I don't really see very much talk about developing software for it, where as the Pandora has a rather massive following, despite not even being a finished product yet. If 90% of developers are going to focus their efforts on either the Wiz (a well established platform) or the Pandora (supposedly the holy grail of portable gaming) I'd be a bit disheartened to have an awesome little device like the Caanoo that few are interested in developing software for.

So, I guess it would be more appropriate to ask how much interest there is from most GP2X\Wiz developers to port their software over to the Caanoo. Are most of the active members of the community accepting the Caanoo or are they skipping this generation to focus on the Wiz or the Pandora?
 
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ozzuneoj said:
Thanks for the reply.

I know it isn't a simple job to port things to another system. I guess I'm mostly concerned about how much actual developer interest there is in the Caanoo... and if hardware availability is preventing the system from getting very popular, that makes it very difficult for me to want to invest in one. I realize its only been out a couple months, but I don't really see very much talk about developing software for it, where as the Pandora has a rather massive following, despite not even being a finished product yet. If 90% of developers are going to focus their efforts on either the Wiz (a well established platform) or the Pandora (supposedly the holy grail of portable gaming) I'd be a bit disheartened to have an awesome little device like the Caanoo that few are interested in developing software for.

So, I guess it would be more appropriate to ask how much interest there is from most GP2X\Wiz developers to port their software over to the Caanoo. Are most of the active members of the community accepting the Caanoo or are they skipping this generation to focus on the Wiz or the Pandora?

No problem, Pickle is already porting things from the wizz, and he's doing a good job so i'd look out for his releases, myselve i'm working on my SMS_SDL port i once did for the dingoo. It already plays fine, but i still have to create a rom file browser and fix the crashing @ exit bug, unfortunatly i don't have much time, i still haven't found a new place to live and i only have one week left to live in my current place and besides that i have to prepare for my fatherhood ;) so Real life things (which are more important imo) can impact porting things.

I'm pretty sure the caanoo will get enough support, it just takes off slowly as usual, just because there's little software availible at lauch, that's always the case with new community powered handheld devices... It only takes a few dev's to get interest going though and there are already plenty of people working on things...

Just look at the history of the GP32 / GP2X or even the Dingoo which is quite a nice device and very cheap but lacks some things .. Pandora was known about for a very long time and people were already making things for it before they had the device actually in their hands. In theory all of this is possible with every device, the game / engine or emulator already exists in most cases but just the front-end needs a rework for a port to the caanoo, the architecture is more or less the same as wizz and it's predecessors. (I consider the front-end in this case the handling of the input, the (possibly needed) scaling for the resolution and possible fixing of bugs that occured during porting (so nothing compared to creating something from scratch but still takes a bit of time and intrest)

Hope that clears up a few things :)
 
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joyrider said:
ozzuneoj said:
Thanks for the reply.

I know it isn't a simple job to port things to another system. I guess I'm mostly concerned about how much actual developer interest there is in the Caanoo... and if hardware availability is preventing the system from getting very popular, that makes it very difficult for me to want to invest in one. I realize its only been out a couple months, but I don't really see very much talk about developing software for it, where as the Pandora has a rather massive following, despite not even being a finished product yet. If 90% of developers are going to focus their efforts on either the Wiz (a well established platform) or the Pandora (supposedly the holy grail of portable gaming) I'd be a bit disheartened to have an awesome little device like the Caanoo that few are interested in developing software for.

So, I guess it would be more appropriate to ask how much interest there is from most GP2X\Wiz developers to port their software over to the Caanoo. Are most of the active members of the community accepting the Caanoo or are they skipping this generation to focus on the Wiz or the Pandora?

No problem, Pickle is already porting things from the wizz, and he's doing a good job so i'd look out for his releases, myselve i'm working on my SMS_SDL port i once did for the dingoo. It already plays fine, but i still have to create a rom file browser and fix the crashing @ exit bug, unfortunatly i don't have much time, i still haven't found a new place to live and i only have one week left to live in my current place and besides that i have to prepare for my fatherhood ;) so Real life things (which are more important imo) can impact porting things.

I'm pretty sure the caanoo will get enough support, it just takes off slowly as usual, just because there's little software availible at lauch, that's always the case with new community powered handheld devices... It only takes a few dev's to get interest going though and there are already plenty of people working on things...

Just look at the history of the GP32 / GP2X or even the Dingoo which is quite a nice device and very cheap but lacks some things .. Pandora was known about for a very long time and people were already making things for it before they had the device actually in their hands. In theory all of this is possible with every device, the game / engine or emulator already exists in most cases but just the front-end needs a rework for a port to the caanoo, the architecture is more or less the same as wizz and it's predecessors. (I consider the front-end in this case the handling of the input, the (possibly needed) scaling for the resolution and possible fixing of bugs that occured during porting (so nothing compared to creating something from scratch but still takes a bit of time and intrest)

Hope that clears up a few things :)

Those are some good points. Thanks again for taking the time to reply.

I sent a private message to notaz asking if he has a Caanoo and if he'd be interested in developing Ginge for the Caanoo if the community could get him one. I'm hoping that he's interested, because even some basic compatibility with GP2X\Wiz software on the Caanoo would make it an instant buy for me. It would surely make the system more popular which would lead to more users and developers.

I'm really itching to buy a handheld though... that's for sure. gp2xstore does have the white Caanoos in stock right now... I think I might just take the plunge. :)
 
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Just wanted to say that I ordered my Caanoo last week and received it on Saturday. I've been tinkering with it a bit and I really like it.

I'm impressed with how quickly software is being developed for it, and I'm blown away by the quality of the emulators so far. Everything seems to work extremely well!

As for the unit itself, it seems very well built. The screen looks good, the speakers sound good, the analog stick has a very nice feel to it, the abxy buttons are very solid and responsive... in general it just seems to work quite well.

The shoulder buttons, the Home, I and II buttons and the analog stick button don't feel all that great, but I think they'll do the job. As long as they work and they stay working for a long time I'll be happy.

I'm still waiting on my 8Gb SDHC card to arrive, so for now I'm using a simple 1Gb MicroSD card in an adapter. I am a little disappointed with how slow file transfers are from my PC through the Caanoo's USB interface. Something that takes a few seconds to transfer directly to the MicroSD card in a USB adapter takes a few minutes to transfer through the Caanoo to the MicroSD. I'm very glad that I ordered a USB card reader to go along with my 8Gb card, because using the Caanoo's USB cable for file transfers seems to be extremely inefficient. It would probably take a couple hours to transfer a full sized Scumm game this way, vs only a few minutes with a USB card reader.

All around though, I'm quite happy with the device. It's going to be really nice to have it to play with during my long boring breaks at work. :)
 
ah nice to hear that :)

i don't really have a problem with the "I" "II" and "HOME" button, since well generally they aren't used that much.. Getting an (usb 2.0) card reader is always a good idea as well :) btw you can also use microsd cards etc, there exists convertor cards for them, i'm actually using one like that with an 8 gig micro sd card :)
 
joyrider said:
ah nice to hear that :)

i don't really have a problem with the "I" "II" and "HOME" button, since well generally they aren't used that much.. Getting an (usb 2.0) card reader is always a good idea as well :) btw you can also use microsd cards etc, there exists convertor cards for them, i'm actually using one like that with an 8 gig micro sd card :)

I actually have a tiny little USB MicroSD reader that came with my R4DS. It seems to work really well.

And I agree that the I II and Home buttons aren't used much. And that's a good thing.

The triggers may need to be "broken in" a bit though. They seem a bit stiff and don't always click reliably. I'll give it some time though. :)
 
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ozzuneoj said:
I'm still waiting on my 8Gb SDHC card to arrive, so for now I'm using a simple 1Gb MicroSD card in an adapter. I am a little disappointed with how slow file transfers are from my PC through the Caanoo's USB interface. Something that takes a few seconds to transfer directly to the MicroSD card in a USB adapter takes a few minutes to transfer through the Caanoo to the MicroSD. I'm very glad that I ordered a USB card reader to go along with my 8Gb card, because using the Caanoo's USB cable for file transfers seems to be extremely inefficient. It would probably take a couple hours to transfer a full sized Scumm game this way, vs only a few minutes with a USB card reader.

All around though, I'm quite happy with the device. It's going to be really nice to have it to play with during my long boring breaks at work. :)

It seems to depend on the card, while my class 10 card is significatnly faster in my USB card reader, than in the Caanoo via USB cable, I didn't have the extreme slow speed you describe. It is around half as fast as in the card reader. Maybe the Caanoo Firmware doesn't read the maximum writing speed from the card correct.
 
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Regarding plugging in joypads to the USB ... so far the only emulator I've encountered that could do it was Picodrive ... it was flawless with my NES and SNES pads (usb adaptor). I thought the 360 pad needed a special driver and only works in windows? I would expect that one not to work, but I would expect your ps2 via usb adaptor to work.

However, picodrive is the only app I've seen so far that does not work with TV out .. which kinda kills its amazing gamepad support.
 
traylorpark said:
Regarding plugging in joypads to the USB ... so far the only emulator I've encountered that could do it was Picodrive ... it was flawless with my NES and SNES pads (usb adaptor). I thought the 360 pad needed a special driver and only works in windows? I would expect that one not to work, but I would expect your ps2 via usb adaptor to work.

However, picodrive is the only app I've seen so far that does not work with TV out .. which kinda kills its amazing gamepad support.

I do not think it's hard to implement in other emulators, one just had to allow diffrent joysticks to be used and read from that joystick instead of joystick / joypad nr 1 (the caanoo one).. Quite easy to do with SDL and i already had implemented something like that for the gp2x in the days of the break out board...

Tv out does need more work, if it's still the same as with the gp2x days, you'll need to create a larger screen surface and add options to counteract overscan... However it could be using a new system like if they automaticly scale the screen up to TV Resolution with some hardware scaler or something (if there is such a thing in the caanoo)... There is other software that doesn't work with tv out, all the arcade games on fungp don't for example ...
 
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