Has Wiz Development Died?

[Optimistic]

It seems like after one round of doing quick and dirty ports of GP2X emulators to the Wiz the development just stopped. Very few of the emulators are optimized for the Wiz, many suffer from the screen-tearing issue and many are lacking features that we had on the GP2X (overclocking, etc.)---some are still quite good, but mostly because they were already perfect on the GP2X anyway.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still more or less satisfied, but it would be nice to see some real attention being paid to the Wiz. What happened? Did the developers move to the non-existent Pandora or are there problems from the Gamepark side (no sdk, or weird hardware issues)?

 

[adolobe]

its on life support, many dev blame it on the spotty firmware an no usb. Plus the sdk issue.

With the pandora and the unstoppable super cheap Dingoo most have moved on, though I hope just temporarily

 

[chickendung]

Pessimists. Don't worry, it hasn't been out for very long. And, as we speak, a new version of PocketSNES Wiz is being developed, and it finally supports Super Mario RPG! The tearing has been reduced, and SuperFX is working, but it is slow at the moment. Have faith, the Wiz will not die.

 

[Rivroner]

Optimistic? Sure?
I don´t think is die:

http://www.gp32spain.com/foros/showthread.php?t=68696

 

[Enverex]

Optimistic? Sure?
I don´t think is die:

http://www.gp32spain.com/foros/showthread.php?t=68696

Er... you are aware that no-one that has posted in this thread so far is likely to be able to read that?

 

[Rivroner]

Babel fish can help you.

 

[Jurk]

Optimistic? Sure?
I don´t think is die:

http://www.gp32spain.com/foros/showthread.php?t=68696

Er... you are aware that no-one that has posted in this thread so far is likely to be able to read that?

Or google translator

 

[gp2.eXe]

Optimistic? Sure?
I don´t think is die:

http://www.gp32spain...ead.php?t=68696

Er... you are aware that no-one that has posted in this thread so far is likely to be able to read that?

Or google translator

Pfft... people like to complicate themselves... just move to a Spanish-speaking country and learn it!

 

[Alex.]

Dead? There's more to Wiz than just emulators, I just downloaded a bunch of cool new stuff I can't wait to try: Worship Vector, Railroad Rampage, Road Fighter, Wiz NotePad, WizFrontier, and EpicRocks Later I'll get the other new tower defense games too, good times!

Be thankful for what you already have, and don't forget to give developers plenty of thanks and feedback! Remember everything you get is for free and comes from the efforts and time of someone else!

 

[Exophase]

Very few of the emulators are optimized for the Wiz,

That's pretty much wrong. Aside from situations where 3D acceleration is applicable (few) there's very little you can do on Wiz that is fundamentally different from how you'd do it on GP2X. So with that in mind, most of the emulators that were optimized for GP2X and ported to Wiz are optimized for Wiz too. The diagonal tearing thing is a dilemma and people are waiting for someone to give a proof of concept to see how effective the 3D hardware is in treating it.

 

[aho]

[...] are there problems from the Gamepark side (no sdk, or weird hardware issues)?

Yea, not having a proper SDK is a very big issue.

E.g. one of the problems I currently have is similar to this one:

http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86465

"symbol __tls_get_addr, version GLIBC_2.3 not defined in file ld-linux.so.2 with link time reference"

I really do not know what I'm supposed to do about that.

Over at some other project I get other issues, which again seem to indicate some problem with the toolchain (it works fine if I use a different one).

Also, the GLES stuff we got right now is incomplete. The few things I actually need aren't there.

To tell the truth I was very surprised that the Wiz wasn't shipped with a CD which contains the SDK and documentation. E.g. the Net Yaroze was shipped with all that stuff.

And now, a few months later, the situation is still pretty horrible.

 

[Kojote]

i would not say at all the wiz homebrew has died. after posting news on the homebrew scene for ages, i can clearly see peaks during winter time, when everyone tends to stay at home instead of freezing his ass off.

also many authors lack of finding a proper way of spreading their news and choose wrong, less known places, or using popular boards but posting in subcategories no one visits.

winter is coming up, so as said, i am sure things will improve again

 

[Jest]

I dunno, I'm new to the community and I haven't been disappointed yet. Every week it seems like something is updated or a new home brew game is out. (or perhaps ported) Just today a Go game came out. Recently a bunch of tower defense games came out, a new NES emulator, Gameboy was just updated, The pocketsnes emulator is getting updated.

The only problem with the community so far is people mostly whine when they should be saying "thanks, all the work you put in this emulator/game/app is great". XD

 

[Exophase]

Yea, not having a proper SDK is a very big issue.

E.g. one of the problems I currently have is similar to this one:

http://bugs.gentoo.o...ug.cgi?id=86465

"symbol __tls_get_addr, version GLIBC_2.3 not defined in file ld-linux.so.2 with link time reference"

I really do not know what I'm supposed to do about that.

Over at some other project I get other issues, which again seem to indicate some problem with the toolchain (it works fine if I use a different one).

Also, the GLES stuff we got right now is incomplete. The few things I actually need aren't there.

To tell the truth I was very surprised that the Wiz wasn't shipped with a CD which contains the SDK and documentation. E.g. the Net Yaroze was shipped with all that stuff.

And now, a few months later, the situation is still pretty horrible.

You were surprised? Must not know GPH very well, the GP2X wasn't any better. Using Open2x and some other options has worked okay for lots of people so far, I don't think you would have had any fewer issues working with something GPH themselves bundle.

Also, shipping a CD with that stuff would be incredibly silly, given only a small percentage of Wiz owners would want it and it could be downloaded online easily enough..

I doubt many other developers feel they're being held back by no official SDK right now. Lack of OpenGL ES features could be a problem, but are you sure that what it's missing is capable in the hardware? It would be nice if someone started their own OGL ES drivers using the 3D chip documentation and also exposed features that are not part of OGL..

 

[aho]

>You were surprised? Must not know GPH very well, the GP2X wasn't any better.

The Wiz was my first homebrew handheld.

>Also, shipping a CD with that stuff would be incredibly silly [...]

CDs are cheap. Would add about 10 cent to the price. A link to a repository would have been sufficient though. (Pretty silly that there isn't any.)

>I doubt many other developers feel they're being held back by no official SDK right now.

Well, it surely makes things more difficult than they need to be. I already lost a few hours and I'm probably not the only one. By the way Orkie promised to fix one of the glitches when he gets some time to burn.

>Lack of OpenGL ES features could be a problem, but are you sure that what it's missing is capable in the hardware?

Draw texture is in the GLES 1.1 spec. The common and common-lite profiles also list OES compressed paletted texture and OES point sprite as required extensions. If this stuff is missing it doesn't even support the 1.1 lite profile.

 

[craigix]

The Pandora exists because of GPHs outrageous treatment of their customers and distributors.

I hope we can make the software development at least a much more smooth ride.

 

[Rivroner]

Buff

 

[DaveC]

i would not say at all the wiz homebrew has died. after posting news on the homebrew scene for ages, i can clearly see peaks during winter time, when everyone tends to stay at home instead of freezing his ass off.

also many authors lack of finding a proper way of spreading their news and choose wrong, less known places, or using popular boards but posting in subcategories no one visits.

winter is coming up, so as said, i am sure things will improve again

I am not sure I buy that logic. Allot of new stuff is released and updated every day for the dingoo but you can go weeks with almost nothing on the Wiz. It is like 10:1 or so. Unless all Wiz devs live in the northern hemisphere where it is just starting to get cold now then there is something else wrong.

I think the big problem is the lack of USB networking that makes developing harder and the painfully slow boot times. Why the hell does it take almost a minute for the Wiz to boot while dingux takes 5 seconds? What the hell are they loading on the Wiz at startup, a whole PC linux environment or something? While these issues are bad they mostly can all be fixed by some firmware work. The problem is that they (GPH or the community, the source is out but no one has bothered with it) aren't fixing them and seem to have no interest in doing so. If there was something like open2X available on the Wiz then I think we would see improvement in activity.

The Wiz has some nice potential over the other cheapoo console such as a touchscreen, more RAM , better ARM CPU, 3D GPU, better contrast screen, the ability to use up to 32 gb cards instead of only 8 etc. It is a shame that much of this potential will never be used just because of some simple boneheaded software oversights that could be fixed but aren't.

 

[Orkie]

Somebody buy me one of these

http://www.tincantools.com/product.php?productid=16134&cat=0&page=1

 

[andymanone]

Somebody buy me one of these

http://www.tincantools.com/product.php?productid=16134&cat=0&page=1

Hi Orki, why don´t you take that ?:

Ok, the JTAG onnector must fixed soon

Gtx.,
andY