I ♥ My Wiz

[skeezix]

I've not had time to watch that close .. but really, have their been a lot of Pandora fanboi's bashing the wiz? Any fanboi bashing other's is pretty pathetic. (If you just mean 'a few trolls', well, such is life The Panda and the Wiz especially are not in competition per se (some overlap of course), but brothers in the indie arms race. Sillyness, I say.. sillyness!

I like my Wiz; I'm sort of annoyed with the usual things, but taken on its own, the machine is pretty good; the pocketableness is utterly fantastic, and I think its built pretty well. The dingoo took a lot of the Wiz steam imho (ie: due to price point), but the Wiz screen is tops. The biggest problem with the Wiz is GPH sometimes, but we all knew that all the way back to the GP32 GPH really did make a strong reach to the dev community with the neutered dev units going out to quite a few of us though the Wiz store (and WiFi module etc) seemed to have fallen through. They're the rogue indie crazy guys, and we love 'em. The GP32 was great, the gp2x f100 was where they started to 'get it' but screwy conrols; the f200 was a mistake imho (terrible controls), but the Wiz was their return to focus .. s'okay lost usb host etc, but they started 'getting it' again, and reached out to devs for the first time really. So when Wiz went retail, I ordered one, though my wife has gotten more use of it than I have had time for

As someone who spends all his free time developing, I only wish I had more time to actually play games (any kind, PC, Wiz, Pandora, PSP, Xbox, etc

jeff

 

[craigix]

Craig voted 'I don't own a Wiz and I won't ever'. Uhm, I'm pretty sure he owns a few dozen, but whatever.

Nope, gave it away. There isn't even one in my collection.

I'm concentrating on Pandora from now on, supporting the customers and developing the software.

 

[quote]

Nope, gave it away. There isn't even one in my collection.

I'm concentrating on Pandora from now on, supporting the customers and developing the software.

I understand the Pandora part; seems reasonable. But what made you hate the Wiz so much that you gave it away?

 

[craigix]

Nope, gave it away. There isn't even one in my collection.

I'm concentrating on Pandora from now on, supporting the customers and developing the software.

I understand the Pandora part; seems reasonable. But what made you hate the Wiz so much that you gave it away?

I suppose I'm quite ambivalent to the Wiz, but I was not using it, I prefer my GP2X, and a dev asked if I had a Wiz for them. So it all made sense.

 

[Nova]

Can I ask why you preferred the GP2x? For me, the Dpad on the Wiz is a huge improvement over that horrible stick.

 

[Optimus]

The last months I spent some time with my Wiz playing Street Fighter 2 on MAME, Castlevania series on GBA and it feels soooo good, especially unbelievable GBA emulation is sooo good (apart from that on my old GBA, screen is no lit and is not clear, so the emulated thing on the WIZ gets better

It's really good. I only miss my GP32 with the clickey stick and that feeling of nostalgy. Btw,. there was supposed to be a good GP32 emulator for MESS (running some demos well with sound as I had seen on youtube) but I still don't hear anything about it. I'd love to have it!

 

[Mithrildor]

Voted for I hate it. I dont use it at all. The last few things I did with it was using it as SD card reader

 

[coldfish]

I'm not a pandora fanboy but I already have a GP2X and the Wiz isnt enough of an upgrade to justify buying one. I was hoping there'd be a real performance upgrade from GP2X to Wiz but it seems the two are roughly the same. Also, a few of the apps I use still arent ported to Wiz, and I fear !!pixel plague!!

 

[trentg]

I dislike my wiz. The bundled software (besides the games) is quite bad. My biggest problem, as I'm a game developer, is with the opengl drivers. I'm thinking of selling it on ebay.

 

[RobertG]

I like my Wiz lots & lots. If the shoulder buttons were a bit better (the position is a bit awkward for me), the screen a little less grainier and if it had a bit more power it'd be perfect. 6 face buttons and putting Start/Menu under the dpad (for tate shooters) would be good too.

I have little to no interest in the Pandora. It looks a bit like one of those horrible MAME cabs with trackballs, spinners and buttons in the wrong places turned into a handheld. It just has too much going on for me, I prefer the simple "traditional" Wiz form factor.

 

[Exophase]

I don't really have time to use anything, but I voted for the second option. To me Wiz is a huge improvement over GP2X, but still leaves some things to be desired.

Personal pros:
- Lithium Ion is much less of a hassle than replacing/externally charging batteries
- Can charge over USB instead of bulky additional AC adapter
- Screen is sharp and high contrast
- No necessary power/connection sockets on the edge of the thing making it really hard to actually use while plugged into the wall and sending stuff
- dpad pretty good, although I prefer circular designs

Personal cons:
- USB network was botched which meant I had to swap files on SD which got old super fast.. transferred over serial some but that's excruciatingly slow (this has since been fixed though, no thanks to GPH)
- Serial/USB has to go through BoB for me which has a very short cable so I can still barely use the unit while connected
- Both dpad and buttons feel way too close to the edge and too high. I like to grip handhelds, not pinch them, and to do this on Wiz I have to hold it with my thumbs parallel to the edges, which is pretty uncomfortable (I have very small hands)
- Face buttons feel too small and cramped, easy to hit the wrong one accidentally
- Rectangular shape is not the most ergonomic thing in the world (probably so for Pandora too)
- SoC not nearly as fast as you'd expect, not offering much over Wiz
- Having to deal with diagonal tearing or 240x320 w/o hardware rotation
- Unlike GP2X there's no fast hardware scalar for constantly changing items, since textures must be stored swizzled
- Memory hard-segmentation scheme is really wasteful, although not as much as it was on GP2X.. you may have some chance of actually getting a contiguous 32MB block
- Still need mmuhack if you're accessing the framebuffer through /dev/mem
- Still using OABI

Bottom line - to me this was GPH's first device I'd consider personally acceptable, with GP2X F100 and F200 being below that line; although an F100 with a dpad mod is not bad so long as everything else still works and you don't need to plug anything in.

 

[iprice]

I really like my Wiz (love is too stronk a word, but it's more than OK), but I can't play it for too long, as my hands cramp up. Sure it has its faults, but so does every other machine - handheld or console, and I own many.

I plan to continue supporting both Wiz and GP2X even when I have my Pandora - although that doesn't seem to be any time soon...

 

[Mega5657]

Its hard for me to compare the wiz to the pandora, because the pandora and the wiz are in a completely different price range. But on a different note, I love my wiz (from a non-developer's perspective)

 

[CapcomSuicide]

I've had a bit of a re-visit to my Wiz. I have to say the software is really very good now. Picodrive gives perfect Megadrive games, PocketSnes 6.5.0 seems to do many games at close to full speed, GpSP does Yoshi's Island GBA very well and GnGeo seems full speed to me. The tearing issue is greatly reduced/resolved in many of these too.

The OLED remains a real "wow" factor, and battery life on my unit is good. Overclocking with the battery test tool is stable to 850Mhz.

Build quality is impressive, it feels like a way more professional device than my F200 and Dingoo.

BUT, and it's a really big massive huge but, the "Dpad" buttons kill my hands. I am cramping up after 20 minutes and this makes the Wiz unplayable for me. A great great shame.

Taking into account the good software, does anyone know if there are people who can mod the Wiz with normal buttons? Now the emulators are so good, it frustrates me even more about the poor button design.

I also find it unbelievable that such a well designed and specced device would have dual Dpads, and then under pressure to have buttons, they still ended up using a Dpad! Very very odd.

So.... no change in my feelings towards the hardware, (Amazing brilliant fantastic.... and... flawed.) BUT the software is so good, I feel obligied to at least try and find out if anyone does button mods. I am not good with a soldering iron...

In answer to the poll, I "Want" to love my Wiz, but the controls make that impossible..

 

[kasi]

Well, I voted I love it but

I love my wife, most of my family and some of my friends

but I LIKE my WIZ, really. :rolleyes:

 

[Jest]

I love my wiz. I play it almost everyday, while I walk to school I use it for music or have it play a t.v show and I watch it while I walk *probably gonna get myself killed*. I read Comics on it, I play video games on it constantly. I've played through the Castlevania games, Snatcher, Monster World games, Final Fantasy 1, Dragon Quest 1. My hands have never cramped up while using it. The screen looks amazing, makes it easy to watch and play things.

I suppose I've never had a GP2X or any other open handheld, so I can't compare like many are doing in this thread. However I'm glad that this is the only one I've bought thus far, it wasn't an upgrade for me it was just a brand new hand held. It's very cool, I probably won't need another open hand held until they make one that's atleast 3 times as fast and capable, and that might not be awhile. (and no I can't afford a pandora, nor is the price worth it for me)

 

[Nova]

I love my wiz. I play it almost everyday, while I walk to school I use it for music or have it play a t.v show and I watch it while I walk *probably gonna get myself killed*.

Hahaha, I hear that! I was walking home playing Boomshine the other day, and walked into busy traffic without knowing. Not a good idea.

 

[Jan-Nik]

I dislike my wiz. The bundled software (besides the games) is quite bad. My biggest problem, as I'm a game developer, is with the opengl drivers. I'm thinking of selling it on ebay.

Same for me.

 

[DaveC]

I like my Wiz still. Even though I designed the case for the Pandora, I still like the Wiz for many things. MAME looks great on that OLED screen and nothing will beat it. LCD is shit. It is ghostly, low contrast, has terrible "black" levels (more like medium gray) and has bad viewing angles. This is why the LCD based Canoe doesn't interest me.

 

[Nova]

I like my Wiz still. Even though I designed the case for the Pandora, I still like the Wiz for many things. MAME looks great on that OLED screen and nothing will beat it. LCD is shit. It is ghostly, low contrast, has terrible "black" levels (more like medium gray) and has bad viewing angles. This is why the LCD based Canoe doesn't interest me.

Not all LCD screens are created equal though, right? I mean on the PSP Fat and (i hear) the Pandora, the ghosting is very visible, but on a lot of other handhelds I've played with, this isn't quite the case.