GP64 Near/Far Future?


Oliboli

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Hi everyone, I am new on the GP32 scene and just beginning to develop some stuff with the help of Rico's tutorials. I was wondering if anybody had any information on the GP64 or any possible sucessor to the GP32? Cheers.
 
Nothing official is known at the moment, so all is speculation. I think that gamepark will probably release a sucessor to the gp32 in about 3 years time, but this depends on the gp32 being a success and the company still being afloat. we can only hope!
 
that would be great if gamepark would ask the people that actually own a GP32 what they would like in a new system. Just imagine......a real USB port, integrated wi-fi or bluetooth, a gig or two of memory......ooohhhhhhhh, it's all so magical. :rolleyes:
 
As long as they balance what they try to give us with what the batteries can, its a great idea. But you do have to hope they do that, or we'll end up with another of those 6-batery-eating monsters of yore.

That said, there's a LOT of threads already about what people do want, ranging from good ideas to just plain mad ones...
 
What id like is a machine with decend cpu power, maybe a bluetooth or wifi network. and compact flash storage or something similar (memory stick would be funny)
 
A floating point unit would be nice, and ARM do have one somewhere...
Getting rid of that damn writeback bug would also be a plus.

Although, considering the way the GP32 is designed, I imagine the features it will have will depend almost entirely on what chip manufactorers decide to put on a chip.
 
Although ARM chips are modular, so you can specify which modules you want incorporated- e.g. 2D (and soon 3D) acceleration, FPU, MMU etc.... I did a thread somewhere about the new samsung ARM 9 chip, the sucessor to the one in the GP. It's a nice 533mhz part :)
 
bahhh, i am uninteredted in the follow-up, my GP32 is still new and I look forward to see how it's existing capabilities are utilized. I know it's considered "underpowered" by many but it looks like it's got the goods to do a lot (well it's already running a lot of different system emulators, and quite well at that)

hopefully things will stay consistent and there'll be no need for us all to be sweating upgrades or successors anytime soon - at least until the next gen of heavy-hitting gameboy ripoffs hit the market!
 
Actually, I worked out that you could build a really impressive next gen GP with technology that is already available. HERE is the thread if you want to see the specs.
 
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The future of the GP32/GP64 can be put into a series of scenarios:

Scenario 1:

A sucessor to the GP32 - the GP64 - is released. The open source freedom of the GP32 is brought on to the 64 edition, so developers are hungering for the console. It will feature heavy upgrades, better user friendlyness, more internet/multiplayer features. We'll see a huge boost in sales of this console, as more commercial (good) games are released and the mainstream audience finds out about the console. More developers join the scene, and in short time we'll see developers making emulators, 3d engines and lots more.

Scenario 2:

The GP64 is still released. Although all the open-source freedom has been taken away, and the console is turned into a Gameboy look-a-like. We see a huge boost in commercial games, and a large amount of consoles in European and American stores. The mainstream audience get to know about the console through ads on TV, in magazines and on busses. The development scene slowly fades into a few hardcore programmers, doing all they can to hack the console. We see a few or none homebrew games or programs.

Scenario 3:

The GP64 is released! Although it features exactly the same lacks and bugs as the GP32. After years of waiting, Gamepark has released a - albeit upgrading the hardware - bug-filled console, packed with bad code and cheap hardware. Programmers have a hard time coding for it, because of bugs and crashes stopping them. The scene will continue to be relatively small, the same size the GP32 scene is at now. Gamepark has been beaten by other major companies, Nintendo, Nokia amongst others.

Scenario 4 (Worst Case Scenario):

We continue to wait for the next-generation, although nothing happens. Gamepark is too small a company to release a next generation console, they don't have the money to release it. Gamepark ends up in bankrupcy after a series of years with a extremely bad economy. Some people will still continue to work on GP32 games, but slowly the scene will fade away and die. The GP32 will be remembered as the fabulous open source console, albeit a lot of bugs and lacks.
 
Scenario 5
The PSP turns out to be easily hackable, and nobody really cares about the GP scene anymore. Somebody actually codes an emu to run GP32 programs on the PSP, and his website get all of 7 hits. Everybody is too busy playing Unreal Tournament and full-speed NeoGeo games to care about anything else.

Not a very likely scenario, but you never know...
 
I don't think the gp64 will happen for many years yet if at all. I don't want it to happen because it would render my gp32 obsolite
 
I don't think the gp64 will happen for many years yet if at all. I don't want it to happen because it would render my gp32 obsolite

I wish the Amiga never happened, cos it rendered my C64 obsolete. DOH!

If everything was never obsolete, we'd never get progress! All we need is a nice faster, backwards-compatible beast of a handheld and we'd all be happy :D
 
Scenario x: Someone copies the gp32 circuit board layout but fits a less buggy 200mhz processor and a 5v lcd that doesnt fry with high cpu speeds, and makes it with a lithium ion recharger, and 32mb ram.

This scenario can be done now, the only problem is if it has the gamepark bios then it just be a cheap clone. what u want is also a rewriten bios that runs all the software.

Problem is the encryption, but as it would be certered round free opensource then who cares :)
 
I don't actually understand what the big fuss is for a new gp64..... we've got a powerful enough console as it is, the problem is that there are not enough developers who know the ins and outs in order to really milk the power from it. What would a gp64 do that the gp32 can't? Maybe 3d games but we're certainly not going to see any new system emulators as you're being limited by the storage format (the next step up from SNES/Genesis would be PSX or N64 and you won't be able to store a CD on a flash media card, and I doubt it would be powerful enough to emulate the n64...)

I hope that the gp32 doesn't get a successor in the near future, systems that have matured for a long time tend to be the ones that get some in depth investigation by devvers (look at the gameboy, spectrum, c64, psx etc). The last thing I would want to see is the gp32 moving towards a PC way of thinking (i.e. upgrading every 3 years which means in sloppy programming as you just need a more powerful processor to get around your sloppy design!!)

I honestly believe that we could get fast SNES and Genesis emulators for the gp32, we just have to wait for the developers to find out how to speed things up!
 
:ph34r: Well, i can't remember where i saw it, but a while ago i was trudging through the net looking for GP32 stuff when i came across a very interesting page. it had a couple of photos of the next prototype. it has the same 133Mhz Samsung CPU but it has 16Mb of RAM and a built in Mobile phone.

Only Prob was that the intergrated phone would'nt work on British frequencies.

if only GamePark had developed the internet browser they promised. Allas.
 
It probably wasn't the next prototype, it was probably an early prototype. Gamepark had big plans for the GP32 when it was originally concieved. Orignal protypes even had CompactFlash on them. But probably due to manufacturing and profit budgetting, they watered down the console. It still ended up being more powerful than a GBA.
 
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