Lots Of Questions! Big Post!

[Hansel75]

Hi all, i have some questions i was hoping someone can answer.

1-Is there any estimates out there on the total amount of caanoo's sold?
For that matter, can anyone roughly estimate the sales of all the handheld formats, GP2x, Wiz, Caanoo, Dingoo, Pandora etc.
I know it's impossible to answer that question, but guesses are quite welcome to.

2-Also i see a lot of talk in here about the NeoGeo emulator and rom problems etc. I find that all the NeoGeo games work fine for me and at good speeds through Mame4all(@800mhz).
The slowdown in some NeoGeo games isn't always from emulation speed, the NeoGeo games suffered a lot of slowdown even on the original arcade machines(Metal slug etc).
I just wonder what is the point of using the dedicated NeoGeo emulator, over Mame4all. Am i missing something?

3-Will there ever be a better version of Ginge released for the caanoo? There are a few emulators that haven't been ported to the caanoo yet, but gp2x/wiz versions are available. Sadly most of these won't run through the current Ginge! So any chance of a newer Ginge with better compatibility?

4-So is the GPH/Caanoo dead or not? I keep reading conflicting reports, some say they have shutdown, others say there still open?

5-Does anyone think it's possible that someone could port the Vice 2.3 C64 emulator to the caanoo in the future?
Apparently the Dingoo version is awesome, both the current C64 emulators for caanoo are rather poor.

6-Also any chance of these systems emu's getting a port to the caanoo someday?- Lynx, Fm Towns, Archimedes, BBC, Odyssey2, Phone4me!
There are already gp2x versions of most of these available. And i know a lot of other members have been asking for these to!

7-Is is just my caanoo, or do you other guys have to reset your caanoo quite often. Especially when jumping from one emu to the next, mine often crash's, or the next emu doesn't run well until a reset etc?

8-Is there a way to overclock the caanoo for apps/games that don't have any overclocking options? Games like Quake, and some emu's like Frodo, don't have any oc options and i think they would benefit with an oc. Is there any commands that can be put into the ini files, that will set the clock speed for that particular app/game.
I thought i read somewhere that you could, or maybe it was for the Wiz.
I also know about gmenu2x and it's overclocking option, i tried it but i didn't like gmenu2x at all. I found it clumsy to use and prefer the default menu.
Also is it possible to set my caanoo to a permanent oc, i would be quite happy to set it to 800mhz permanently. It rarely gets used away from a power source, and i always keep it fully charged when not using it so battery length is not an issue.
Any ideas anyone?

9-Does anyone know of anyway to play c64 Sid music files on the caanoo. No player i know of supports sid files, i have tried out the default caanoo player, GMU and Ommpc and none have support. There are 2 players on the gp2x/wiz that i know about the have sid support, unfortunately they don't run well through ginge.
Also i know that mp3's are an option, but they are like 1000x times the size of the original sid files!
So any thoughts on how to get a sid file to play on the caanoo?

10-With the recent port of Dosbox to the caanoo, is it possible there will be a version released with some kind of frontend in the future? Or an easier way to get games working in it, i have tried to setup some games and there ini's etc, and i end up getting lost with it, and that's even after reading all the forum posts on the topic.
I was an amiga man back then, not a dos man, lol. It's quite confusing when u don't know much dos stuff.
Basically will there be an easier to use dosbox, for dos noobs?

11-Any chance that the PSX emulators like rearmed, will get OpenGL ES 3d support, so the textures get bilinear filtering, plus possible speedups etc? An example would be the doom port that uses 3d hardware to filter the textures to make them less blocky.

12-I know this is asking the impossible, but could Linux or Android ever be used on the caanoo? Through emulation or a port, i have no idea how this could be done, but i just thought i would throw it out there as an idea.

Ok, so a lot of questions and a huge post, sorry lol, i just had these things rattling around in my head recently and needed some answers. Thought i would do 1 megapost instead of 12 separate posts in there corresponding topics.

Anyway thanks guys, Han!

PS: As u can tell i am a die hard C64 fan, i bought the caanoo thinking it could do all the c64 stuff i wanted it to.
Then to my huge disappointment, i found out there was no sid player, and that both c64 emu's for the caanoo, while ok, are still quite weak. Please c64 fans, rally together with me and hopefully we will get a coders attention and time, for better c64 ports/players.
I would be hugely appreciative to anyone that could help out, and i know a lot of other caanoo users would love to see this happen to

 

[foleyjo]

just a sneaky addition h34r:

13 - Will Arora (or other web browser) be updated to allow things like flash (for sites like youtube) and will it be possible to add a control system for playing flash based games?

 

[Akabei]

Answer to all questions: I don't think the emulators will improve a lot on the Caanoo. The community is small at the moment and I guess, it will not expand much more in the future. So there isn't a big point for the developers to invest lots of time in it. Maybe that sounds too negative, but I was even surprised to see FBA or PCSXrearmed released on the Caanoo. I take the system as it is at the moment and I'm quite content, any further development is just a bonus. Don't expect too much further improvement, as the Caanoo itself is limited(GBA - and Amiga - Emulation could do better, though).

 

[zsonance]

2 - Mame4All doesn't support all of the NEOGEO titles that GnGeo does. I don't have a complete list that i can type out or anything, but for example, Mame4All can only run King Of Fighters 94 and 95 I believe, but for GnGeo I've been able to get the majority of the KOF series running fine up to some of the 2004 versions. I think the only one I couldn't get to work is KOF 2000.

Although, the game Voltage Fighter crashes in GnGeo right as you begin your first round, where as in MAME4ALL the game works fine.

Also, all of the Metal Slug titles seem to work without any problems for GnGeo, but Mame4All does not support all of them.

So basically, i feel like it's a good thing to have both of those emulators (even including FBA), because if a certain game doesn't work using one of them, there is a chance it might work in one of the other emus.

7 - Yes, crashes all the time..especially using FBA because it's just a straight port. ( don't mind the startup time for the Caanoo too much though, so no complaints really on my end. )


Hope this answered your question

 

[Hansel75]

Hi! Thanks for answering some of my questions guys, much appreciated.

Still looking for answers to the other questions if anyone can help.

TY, Han.

 

[sebt3]

3 - Most emu in the gp32/gp2x era used many trick with the hardware to use 110% of the system. These hacks cannot run under ginge as these hacks pool directly the hardware and ginge is "just" a compatibility layer not a full hardware emulator (wich would be use less speed wise)
5 - if the dingux version have source it should be rather easy. Create a thread with pointer to dingux source and gp2x source and hope for the best (aka a dev jump on this)
6 - As explained for point 3, these emulator for gp2x poke the hardware directly. That make porting harder (way harder). Some others depend on timing that happen on gp2x and when ported on an other plateform just crash (that was the case for fba from my reading). The best a dev can do is merging the gp2x sources with some desktop/dingux/pandora source to build a caanoo version. That's paintfull work
8 - BAFelton have written a guide for that. google for it or see with him.
12 - Caanoo OS *is* linux you might dislike its current frontend tough

PS : emulation is way over my head, dont count on me.

 

[foleyjo]

3&6 - It seems that the GP2X BBC emulator does work on Ginge after all and works at a really good speed.

 

[Hansel75]

Nice find there foleyjo, i will have to test out that bbc emulator through ginge sometime soon.

Never seen a bbc for real, but i like to check out all the old systems when i can to see what they were like.

U don't know until u ask, or try!!

Han.

 

[cubemoss]

7 - I haven't encountered crashes very often, personally. I mostly use MAME4All, PicoDrive, and Dr.SMS so far, but I've tried out pretty much everything on there, and haven't noticed any problems moving from one emulator to another.

 

[erico]

On the how many caanoos are out there question,
I heard the serial number on it (front side by the side of the power conector) carries the number of caanoos produced till yours, I´m not sure about this or what exact number is that but someone mentioned such on one post around here that I can´t seem to find through search.

Could someone clarify that?

 

[Cory]

11.- This is what notaz say about that in the pcsx rearmed r11 thread

"One big thing that would help is making use of pollux 3D capabilities to do PSX GPU rendering, but I have no plans to work on that, sorry."

But maybe we can make change is mind...

http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/62800-does-psx-rearmed-use-the-gpu/page__view__getnewpost

 

[rohezal]

11-Any chance that the PSX emulators like rearmed, will get OpenGL ES 3d support, so the textures get bilinear filtering, plus possible speedups etc? An example would be the doom port that uses 3d hardware to filter the textures to make them less blocky.

I read the documentation sheet of the caanoo. Yes the 3d hardware can speed things but it would be a lot of caanoo specific work. Its very low level and you need people who know how do handle 3d stuff and to use hardware at low level. This is limiting the people who can do it.

Exophase is too busy to do it. Same for notaz. Not sure if someone else can do it.

 

[someoneElse]

Chui may be a good candidate for that if he wants to do it. Recently worked on an earlier PCSX emulator for caanoo, and has done a lot of PowerVR acceleration stuff from the dreamcast days. If I'm remembering correctly, I think he said using the GPU would actually be slower unless a full, low level tile based renderer was written, which he's also had experience with. Could potentially have interest in working on this GPU plugin again, merging the two projects. I think another member of that team has already offered their sound plugin for Rearmed? (has it already been included?)

 

[Cory]

No, chui and Franxis are porting pcsx4all to android, they told me personally, so looks like they forget caanoo (they don't say that, but they are working currently in android)

 

[rohezal]

Ask them. The renderer stuff is "just" to push the triangles into the video ram, convert the blending (some work) and let the rasterizer take the triangles. Ok its a lot of work to do. And its very low level. But seriously ask them, I think its worth the work. In the documentation (starting at page 286) is a good documentation what formats the Caanoo gpu needs.

 

[Cory]

Ask them. The renderer stuff is "just" to push the triangles into the video ram, convert the blending (some work) and let the rasterizer take the triangles. Ok its a lot of work to do. And its very low level. But seriously ask them, I think its worth the work. In the documentation (starting at page 286) is a good documentation what formats the Caanoo gpu needs.

I've asked and they said no.

His words were "the emulator of notaz is a lot better, until pcsx4all not come better, we don't release nothing" but now we are very busy with job to spend too much time in the emulator