Gph Clearing The Facts

[shezzor]

Excellent, some concrete news at least! Some people get panicky way too easily

 

[iignotus]

NOR = 1+0=0

OMGSTRANGE.

​

NOT really

 

[pea]

Well, I for one am glad to be waiting a while before I get my unit. All the bugs will be ironed out by then . GLad to hear the problems aren't that bad and are being sorted. Sending the unit back for a replacement, however, must be extremely frustrating for some.

 

[jedthehumanoid]

So this means the GP2X already has a screen protector in place? I wish I'd known that before I ordered the offical screen protector <_<

Edit: Or more likely: The screen protectors are only included in the first 500 korean

For what i have understood the screen protector that follows is just a plastic film with a red strap to pull it of with, like the ones one all new mobilephone screens, et.c...
A screen protector nevertheless, but not the one you buy for long term use.

 

[Dryer Lint]

I was wondering about the booting time:

Is there a way to suspend the GP2x or some kind of sleep-mode that consumes little to none power? Or do you have to shutdown and reboot the thing every time you stop and restart using it? Because in the latter case the boot time would be really annoying.

EDIT: overall, this is good news, though. I didn't mean to sound pessimistic. ;-)

 

[Ferentix]

Yay! This is pretty much all good. I like that the company are actually recommending a solution to the stick being stuck... it's something you don't see often for some reason

I guess I should have expected the long bootup time really- it may be a small OS, but it is still pretty much a full Linux OS right? So it's only to be expected. Hopefully this can be optimised further still in the future though... Also, to those who have a devboard or have actually recieved a unit, I'd be interested to know... what happens at boot time- just a black screen? Loats of text? A loading progress bar? It's not imprtant, just wonered what their approach was

* Read-only NAND

Actual firmware's problem. Will be fixed soon.

Meh. I doubt I'll ever write to the NAND except firmware upgrades etc. After all, it's only 64Megs (less once you take out the space Linux and built in apps use). And there's no point risking it by using it for general storage, not when it's so important.

 

[AireTamStorm]

So no SD hotplug, but that will be fixed. No SD > 1 GB but that will be fixed. Do we have any real problems other than the scary headphone jack issue?

 

[Mr Doctor]

Things are looking up!

​

Crap, not another fault!.... oh sorry, I thought you said 'locking' B)

 

[woogal]

what happens at boot time- just a black screen? Loats of text? A loading progress bar? It's not imprtant, just wonered what their approach was

​

Depends what beta firmware you flash with . It used to be a solid grey background with the logo on it, then it went to a very nice green background with the logo on it, then the latest one I saw was a horrible one with a solid black background (or could have been grey, can't really remember now) and a crappy looking 'loading...' block in the middle. Oh, and you do get a load of normal linux bootup text, but that is sent over serial not to the screen.

 

[ratx]

I just got my unit this morning, I thought the boot time would bug me, but its really not that bad actually.

 

[woogal]

The boot time doesn't bother me at all. 20 seconds on a pda would be far too much because I often want to turn it on, check something which will take a couple of seconds, then switch off again, but with a console chances are you're going to be playing on it for at least 5 minutes. If the overall playing time is 5+ minutes (and probably more like 30+ minutes), who cares if you have to wait 20 seconds first. If your life is so hectic that you can't sit back and relax for 20 seconds then you obviously have no time to be playing games anyway.

 

[Mr Doctor]

Besides, unless you patch firmware, DS isnt far off 20seconds boot with that crappy disclaimer, and PSP is about 10-15 seconds (I think) to get into the menu from cold with no UMD in the drive.

Out of curiosity, as Ive never seen it mentioned.... no standby save state thing, but is there a powersave mode on the GP2x? Ie, leave it for 5mins and the backlight etc powers down like PSP does.

 

[Tobriand]

For me, the boot time is a little important, simply because I've gotten used to the GP32's non-existant one. Thus I have a tendency to turn off/turn on to switch programs, or if I load something that doesn't work, or summut. Seeing as this happens fairly often, I can imagine it getting at least as frustrating as the GP32 was before I moved to Pacrom, which was pretty darn frustrating.

On the other hand, for those using the original bios with no hacking (i.e. still on free-launcher and with the bouncing logo at startup), I suspect 20 seconds will seem fairly trivial.

 

[Quiest]

* Read-only NAND

Actual firmware's problem. Will be fixed soon.

How can the firmware be flashed to a version that fixes this, if flashing means writing to the NAND?

 

[woogal]

I don't understand this read only nand thing. The theme changer supposedly works on released hardware and all that does is overwrite files on the nand, and I've seen a lib install shell script (think it was for the snes emu) that also copied files to the nand. Originally it was said that the nand shouldn't be written to in case it gets full, and so my guess is that statement has become corrupted over time to be 'the nand is locked'.

 

[Hanz™]

NOR = 1+0=0

OMGSTRANGE.

​

Not really what it looks like btw.

 

[ratx]

Woogal> Re: the Nand is locked. You can't browse into it or lauch games / utilities from it via the "dashboard" ( Orange thing ) perhaps thats what it refers to. Though yes you're right you can get access to it very easily still from code...

 

[torpor]

NAND shouldn't be thought of as 'another place to stash stuff', its really a more 'precious' storage mechanism than other media, because it does, in fact, wear out. you want to write to it as little as possible. its not like 'flash-ram', which you can burn and read as much as you like, NAND will eventually fail. and some users, not knowing this about NAND, might indeed use it as a 'disk' just like all other, and after the 100,000th bit of reading/writing, end up with 'holes in the disk'.

NAND is protected in Linux, you have to treat it properly, because its often there and needed by the system to make boot .. but perhaps there will be simple hacks in the future to allow 'burn favourite games to NAND' in the gui shell at some point.

it'd be nice to have a 'put favourites on-board' option that treats NAND like a game-stash, but for sure .. i don't think its wise to consider NAND as just 'another built in disk' ..

speaking of this, i got myself a small stack - yes a stack - of SD cards today, 512 meg'ers, nice and cheap. its like the good ol' gb days, only all the 'carts' will be fully home-brew/open-source/media collection.

sweet.

 

[OrR]

The boot time doesn't bother me at all. 20 seconds on a pda would be far too much because I often want to turn it on, check something which will take a couple of seconds, then switch off again, but with a console chances are you're going to be playing on it for at least 5 minutes. If the overall playing time is 5+ minutes (and probably more like 30+ minutes), who cares if you have to wait 20 seconds first. If your life is so hectic that you can't sit back and relax for 20 seconds then you obviously have no time to be playing games anyway.

​

Well, you seldom boot PDAs anyway, you only set them to sleep which takes 0.5-2 seconds...

 

[woogal]

NAND shouldn't be thought of as 'another place to stash stuff', its really a more 'precious' storage mechanism than other media, because it does, in fact, wear out. you want to write to it as little as possible. its not like 'flash-ram', which you can burn and read as much as you like, NAND will eventually fail.

​

NAND is exactly like flash ram, because that is what it is. NAND is the very same stuff as inside your sd cards, and yes it will eventually wear out (but not for many, many years with average use) but so will your sd cards.