general questions to the gp32

[flowinhard]

hey! i wonder is hould buy a gp32 but i couldn't find anyone owning it so i'm asking some questions here i hope someone can answer them, i hope noone posted that yet ok whatever let me begin
i wonder how good the emulations of wonderswan(color) and snes are yet, i've been on the snes page and it says that he stopped developing with the reason that there are several other snes emus forgp32 but i can't find any and snes9xgp32 seems unfinished. and apart from that the gp32 got 2 buttons less than the snes so how is this working so far? i would like to buy the system to play snes gba and wonderswan games on it but i'm not sure if the emus are that good so maybe someone is able to help me. the text might be a bit confusing now but i hope you're able to get my point..
thanx in advance
flowinhard

 

[Tobriand]

Well, to start with, yes you should buy it, if only for the master system emulation - the roms are very very small (about 256kb on average), and a lot of the games are very very very good. Only thing is if you find any roms larger than 512kb, they don't seem to want to run (Sonic Blast is the only one I've found so far).

However, SNES wise, yes there is an alternative to Snes9xGP... its called snesgp or something similar... file called snes.ace.

It runs at FULL SPEED, in high detail, but doesn't have sound or save function yet... if you want those, you need to use Snes9xgp, which I'm told runs very slowly (although I've yet to try it; I've been playing the master-system and game-gear games I never could because of a battery-life of 3 hours on the original... for 6 AAs!).

Wonderswan emu is very very good. Its also very small, sitting in the middle of the screen - 1 pixel to 1 pixel only, so it only takes up about 2/3 of the gp32's screen, which can be annoying. But it looks very nice, and the controls work - I've been playing FF2 much recently, and it feels like a SNES game. Just a bit small. However, it has yet to develop sound. Which in my view is annoying, but easily livable with.

GBA emu has yet to come out... once it does, you'll probably (at a guess) either find the emu comes out wrking fully at the onset (unlikely, but they've been being worked on for quite a while now), or comes out without save or sound, and those slowly get added. I'd guess there'll be an emu in some form by March, but that IS JUST A GUESS (considering I don't know anyone who is writing a GBA emu... except that some are being written and progress is being made).

NES emu is good - set frameskip to 3 and it runs at full speed and most games
Then there're all the other systems there're emus for:
MSX 1 and 2, C64, TG-16, Spectrum, and probably a few I've missed off, all of which have many amazing games - they might look bad on a full screen monitor, but on a handheld, no worse than some of the better gameboy games out there, and often somewhat better .

Finally, there's the other games, the ports and (in my view most importantly) ScummVM, which means you get to run all those old PC games on a handheld. And they're run astoundingly well (Day of the Tentacle even works with speech)

So go out to Lik-Sang and get the system now... even if the emu's you'r looking for aren't ready yet, there's plenty more in the mean-time, and they will come... as will emus for other systems - hopefully including DOS... which would mean all old PC games would work...

Now how nice would that be ?

 

[flowinhard]

hey!
thanx a lot for your reply. yes i think i'll buy one as soon as possible, seems really nice to me. and i bet those missing stuff will be added soon .