christo930 said:
I really don't think the gp2x has ever had it's abilities really exploited.
Of course... but the effort involved in that is orders of magnitude greater than porting, or just recompiling, or even creating a program that runs on multi-platforms and hence "accidentally" runs on the GP2X too. And all that extra effort costs an awful lot in terms of time, money, and effort. Look at Payback versus the other games - if you know what you're targeting from the start, have the funds to do it, and really aim for a particularly good port, you can achieve wonderful things. Unfortunately, you're then into "one-man-army" or paid development team efforts, something you rarely see in small games projects except for a few minor exceptions. (Though there are a few one-man-army developers that pop up every now and again after man-years of effort to release something amazing)
Emulators are even trickier - you have to have good knowledge of BOTH sides of the coin (emulated system, and the system emulating it) to get the most out of things and that's not a common trait. The Amiga would be pushing it, however, purely because of the number/speed of chips that need to be emulated correctly to get even a basic Amiga model emulated (but obviously there are shortcuts, as with everything else) but you're looking at man-years of effort and people don't like to invest that into a "toy" project that they are doing outside work, or on a system that might go away in a year or two.
That's why most of the big consoles have an example project that they release to show the capabilities when they are first sold - it's usually developed in tandem with the hardware development teams, with access to pre-release hardware, written almost "from scratch" (may use libraries, etc. but would be optimised to get a lot out of the system - not the maximum, but enough to show-off) and it doesn't really matter how long it takes / much it costs because it's a learning / development tool that's started while the hardware isn't even finalised. You can think of Payback as that sort of game for GP2X. The Pandora is currently in that stage too... people are trying to create a "killer app" which uses the hardware to the max and it looks like that might be a 3D port or something like an N64 emulator.
But as with all videogames consoles - after that initial "demo", 90% of what comes out is clones, ports and simple games because of the sheer effort involved in building something just for a single model of hardware. Why would you want to "waste" a lot of development effort by optimising towards only one piece of hardware when you could just write generic code and have it run on iPhone, PSP, GBA, Wii, PC, etc. with just a recompile?
That said, there were and still are some *amazing* things coming out for the GP2X... I just look at some of the things which are released and think "How the hell did they manage that?".
And I hate using myself as an example of a "developer" - my skills are far below those of others on these boards, but I can program in several languages and get things working from zero code when I have the incentive - but I have about four ideas for games that I want to write by myself at some stage. Some of those game ideas have been stuck in a perpetual hiatus as I try to make a start on them from scratch (we're not talking anything revolutionary, just simple indie-style games - one of them was almost identical to the game Sheep, but they managed to write that game before I ever could get my version properly written).
Even with libraries to aid development, there's a ton of code that I have to write to get the gameplay ideas I want to work as I would like and that's the hard part. Most of that is boring, repetitive, confusing and irritating, but it has to be done. Even when you clone a existing game, some of the hard work is done for you, even if you can't see the code (e.g. my clone of Osmos was pretty much started because I looked at Osmos and thought "Oh, wow, the mechanics of that game must be really quite simple but it's great fun to play"). My point is - when you have code, no matter how little, already written for you (either actually in a file, or in a format you can decipher mentally) writing programs is quite easy. That doesn't mean that it's without enormous effort, but it's significantly easier than starting anything for yourself.
This is why companies license things like the Quake / Half-life engines even from their main competitors - the effort involved in re-inventing that stuff isn't worth it when you can just give money to your rival. Now imagine that you want to write a GP2X game after work and in your lunch hour - you can either "steal" the GPL Quake engine (which works everywhere, is already done and tested, can be easily understood and ported but will never be "optimal"), or you can try to rewrite one completely from scratch optimised for the GP2X's ARM... generic wins every time which is why there are so few 3D game engines out there that use anything other than ID-Software-based engines.
Be grateful for what you have... I wouldn't even like to guess the man-hours that have gone into half the software on the archives, and all of it unpaid.
