Gp2x For Books?

[overtoe]

I'm planning on getting a GP2X but can't decide whether to get the normal one or the F200...

What I'll mostly be using it for will probably be Ebooks and ScummVM.

What is the PDF reader like? Would I be able to consistently use it to read? Or are there issues like text being too small or other things like that? Any general annoyances and so forth...

Oh and is it possible to use the touch screen for games like broken sword? Like substitute it for the mouse?

Oh and will Grim Fandango and Resident Evil work? And other games like that since they're all just pre rendered backgrounds with primitive polygon characters...

Oh and as a programmer how easy is it to develop for? I'd love to start making games for it.

Apologies if these get asked a lot...

Thanks for any answers in advance

EDIT: Apologies, a quick look in the FAQ has answered my questions. I saw a video of Monkey Island with touch screen too And I'm happy to see SDL is supported.

I can't find much about PDFs and 3D games though...

 

[quote]

PDFs work pretty well, but I wouldn't want to read for a long time on the gp2x (mainly because of screen size/type).

If you want ScummVM, get an F200. You can use the touchscreen as a mouse. Much easier for 'point and click'.

 

[Parkydr]

I've ported a PDF reader but I still prefer the built in text reader.

The screen is just too small, although I've heard that the Custom PDF facility of manybooks.net can be used to get PDFs that are readable without lots of scrolling.

There are also other good text readers available in the archive.

 

[MaxSteiner]

I tried using the PDF reader on some fairly image heavy books, and it really didn't like them I'm afraid to say! Took a hell of a long time to load in, and really didn't like me turning pages.
I'm sure its alright on something other than RPG books though

That said I've had very good experiances using the image reader to read comics and magazines, easy on the eyes, not to labourous and quick too boot.

 

[Ravnos]

PDFs in general are a nightmare on smaller, lower end devices. My N800 struggles with them too. I do not know if there is a port of FBReader for the GP2X, but it is a solid ebook reader and I would highly recommend it. There are also a number of text readers for the 2X, but they are generally limited to .txt files, so unless the bulk of your ebook collection is in that format, you are probably better off getting something else to read them with.

 

[overtoe]

Thanks for the replies

Ah well, pretty much all of my books are text only and I suppose I could just use it to read in college...

If I'm honest I'd probably end up spending most of my time on Scumm. It's so cool that you can use touch screen for point and click games =D

I think I'll be getting the F200. Thanks again.

 

[quasist]

3D games though...

Quake, Doom, WolfenStein, Rise Of The Triad, Duke Nukem 3D, EgoBoo, Port of PayBack, Port of some homebrew 3D GBA engine ...

ElseWhere have seems not been released outside korea. For good ... there a videos of cellphone version on youtube... it is horrible.

And for native gp2x homebrew - looks likes only my "FleshChasmer: The Eve" had managed not to die in polygon rasterising stage (remember trenki's engine, and DZZ's marble racing game? and even more early engines demos?) and leveluped to the final release.

 

[hardyx]

I recommend a F200 too, it supports high capacity cards and have a touch screen. For read ebooks you can use my !Reader 2x port, is a program to read ebooks in some formats like TXT, RTF, PDB, HTML but only shows text to work faster. If you can see comics or graphics you can use a image viewer.