craigix
Mega GP Mania
As some of you will know I've done a video review comparing the A320 to the Wiz, I guess it should be linked here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-33IdcH3Wb8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-33IdcH3Wb8
My video review
- Thread starter craigix
- Start date
Good comparison of both systems.
I thought for sure that I would be ordering a Wiz soon (I haven't seen much footage of the Dingoo), but I didn't realize that the A320 was so much cheaper.
How easy is it to make homebrew games for each of them? That might be the deciding factor for me.
I thought for sure that I would be ordering a Wiz soon (I haven't seen much footage of the Dingoo), but I didn't realize that the A320 was so much cheaper.
How easy is it to make homebrew games for each of them? That might be the deciding factor for me.
Pickle
Mega GP Mania
What you survived the outdoors unscathed?
vanillacheesecake
Still Fresh
Pickle said:
The countryside is a dangerous place, you might get bitten by a cow, or a pig might sneeze on you...
gp2.eXe
Ultra Mega GP32X Mania Hardcore
Nice review.
Hey, is that the new camera you were talking about? It really was better than the previous ones. :wink:
Hey, is that the new camera you were talking about? It really was better than the previous ones. :wink:
craigix
Mega GP Mania
Yep, it's a Panasonic C71E.
The best you can buy without spending $10,000+.
The quality at full 1080 is astonishing.
The best you can buy without spending $10,000+.
The quality at full 1080 is astonishing.
craigix
Mega GP Mania
I did mention it in the full version which was 19mins, but I had to edit it right down for the youtube 10min limit.
10Mins does not go far at all when doing a review.
10Mins does not go far at all when doing a review.
craigix
Mega GP Mania
No, the problem is this new camera creates truly astonishingly huge files.
Around 200meg every minute, so it's a pain to upload it. The youtube vid is HD but I compressed it a lot and it was still something like 300meg to upload.
I've been asked to show more of the A320 3D games and I will make a new video showing them.
I'm still learning to use this camera, it's not really the kind you just point and press 'record' it's covered in buttons and dials and is very heavy after about 2mins of use so it's all a bit of a learning curve to make good videos.
If you are interested in video work I'd highly recommend this camera, I cannot fault the quality, it's real movie/broadcast quality for under $10k.
(now i just need the pandoras to arrive to make more use of it!)
Around 200meg every minute, so it's a pain to upload it. The youtube vid is HD but I compressed it a lot and it was still something like 300meg to upload.
I've been asked to show more of the A320 3D games and I will make a new video showing them.
I'm still learning to use this camera, it's not really the kind you just point and press 'record' it's covered in buttons and dials and is very heavy after about 2mins of use so it's all a bit of a learning curve to make good videos.
If you are interested in video work I'd highly recommend this camera, I cannot fault the quality, it's real movie/broadcast quality for under $10k.
(now i just need the pandoras to arrive to make more use of it!)
Exophase
Nothing good will ever come of Exophase.
Great review craigix, nice objective look. Although I'm all but required to say that I could outright see your Wiz d-pad pivot. Check out 1:40 to see what I mean.
Some things I'd like to add:
Some users have reported diagonal tearing on the A320 as well. See here: http://a320.freeforums.org/diagonal-tearing-t247.html
The thing is, it might only affect some of them. We have already seen that a lot of hardware components, like the RAM and the NAND, are not consistent between versions. How Gemei finds it profitable to spin out all these different versions in addition to having a ridiculous number of variations available, I'll never know. Maybe this problem only affects some, maybe it won't affect others in the future. I really have no idea. There are also reports that the black version has a better d-pad, so if that interests you you should look into getting one of those.
Fixing diagonal tearing on the Wiz can be done somewhat close to for free with the easy method of using the 3D accelerator with the natural portrait mode. If the A320 does have the issue across the board then it'll take CPU/bandwidth to fix or emulators that output natively rotated, which I don't expect to happen for most. This is if someone figures out how to put it in portrait to begin with (assuming it's the same issue, which it probably would be)
I don't think anyone should take the SNES comparison as being anywhere near apples to apples. I know it was mentioned that the Wiz version wasn't optimized, but I think that it's still probably much less efficient than the A320 version. It only really takes a few seemingly minor things to tank speed in an emulator. I just don't really forsee A320 as being faster than Wiz (outside of perhaps utilization of its SIMD instruction set, which I doubt any of the emulators do) - sure, Wiz has slow RAM and limited cache, but so does A320.
I'm kinda interested in getting one, once Linux matures so we have an easy way of using telnet to debug. If I want a MIPS handheld I'd rather it be this than PSP (with the bonus that some stuff would be backportable to PSP anyway)
Some things I'd like to add:
Some users have reported diagonal tearing on the A320 as well. See here: http://a320.freeforums.org/diagonal-tearing-t247.html
The thing is, it might only affect some of them. We have already seen that a lot of hardware components, like the RAM and the NAND, are not consistent between versions. How Gemei finds it profitable to spin out all these different versions in addition to having a ridiculous number of variations available, I'll never know. Maybe this problem only affects some, maybe it won't affect others in the future. I really have no idea. There are also reports that the black version has a better d-pad, so if that interests you you should look into getting one of those.
Fixing diagonal tearing on the Wiz can be done somewhat close to for free with the easy method of using the 3D accelerator with the natural portrait mode. If the A320 does have the issue across the board then it'll take CPU/bandwidth to fix or emulators that output natively rotated, which I don't expect to happen for most. This is if someone figures out how to put it in portrait to begin with (assuming it's the same issue, which it probably would be)
I don't think anyone should take the SNES comparison as being anywhere near apples to apples. I know it was mentioned that the Wiz version wasn't optimized, but I think that it's still probably much less efficient than the A320 version. It only really takes a few seemingly minor things to tank speed in an emulator. I just don't really forsee A320 as being faster than Wiz (outside of perhaps utilization of its SIMD instruction set, which I doubt any of the emulators do) - sure, Wiz has slow RAM and limited cache, but so does A320.
I'm kinda interested in getting one, once Linux matures so we have an easy way of using telnet to debug. If I want a MIPS handheld I'd rather it be this than PSP (with the bonus that some stuff would be backportable to PSP anyway)
Consequence_9
have you realized that rock stars always seem to l
@ craigix: thanks for showing these two side by side, that really helped me visualize how big the wiz is. I hadno idea they were so close in size! For some reason I had it in my head that the wiz was much bigger.
@ Exophase: you really should get one. I am extremely pleased with it after having mine for about 2 weeks now. I was very surprised at the overall quality of the device, especially considering the price point. I found it to be very comfortable & well designed. I was even surprised by the screen - it's gorgeous! CPS1/2 & Neo-Geo games look absolutely stunning. One of my favorite things about it is how natural it feels to play vertical shooters on it. One can physically rotate the device, map primary fire to select & secondary to L, it works great. I've got a feeling that once linux is up & running & neatly packaged this thing's gonna explode. VLC would be spectacular on it. IMO from owning both: The Dingoo is a hundred times better than the psp. Honestly. Not to mention that the scene could really use more experienced coders. I'd love to see a proper port of gpsp on it some day :wink: (you do deserve the credit for it after all, lol)
@ Exophase: you really should get one. I am extremely pleased with it after having mine for about 2 weeks now. I was very surprised at the overall quality of the device, especially considering the price point. I found it to be very comfortable & well designed. I was even surprised by the screen - it's gorgeous! CPS1/2 & Neo-Geo games look absolutely stunning. One of my favorite things about it is how natural it feels to play vertical shooters on it. One can physically rotate the device, map primary fire to select & secondary to L, it works great. I've got a feeling that once linux is up & running & neatly packaged this thing's gonna explode. VLC would be spectacular on it. IMO from owning both: The Dingoo is a hundred times better than the psp. Honestly. Not to mention that the scene could really use more experienced coders. I'd love to see a proper port of gpsp on it some day :wink: (you do deserve the credit for it after all, lol)
Lafazar
Member
Exophase said:
Yeah, that was me who reported the diagonal tearing. And I think you are right that not all Dingoos are affected, because I think someone else would have noticed it by now. I have a black Dingoo, if that matters
Could it be that the Dingoo is so cheap not despite, but because they keep changing the hardware components? Perhaps they have a poor board designer shackled to a workbench who has to redesign the board again and again to fit whatever cheap hardware components are currently left over from some production run?
fanoush
Still Fresh
I've noticed that too. Black Dingoo, got it from DX, have it for 2 days now (and I'm happy).Lafazar said:
Wouldn't the tearing be solved by double buffering/framebuffer switching in video driver? Can wiz or dingoo flip framebuffer pointer or at least synchronize screen updates with vsync interrupt?
Not sure how much is µC/OS-II hackable but at least in linux this could be hopefully solved somehow. I also hope for full PAL/NTSC resolution tv-out in linux.
Exophase
Nothing good will ever come of Exophase.
fanoush said:
Diagonal tearing is (probably) caused by a mismatch between the screen controller's internal framebuffer and the way in which it's written to. Since these controllers don't have multiple framebuffers it can't be solved with double buffering.
craigix
Mega GP Mania
I'll look in to this diagonal tearing on the a320 today.
The white one does not do it (SF2 Turbo is a good game to see it on on the wiz, where the TURBO logo flies across the screen).
If for some reason the new ones have this issue I shall be on to Dingoo post haste.
The white one does not do it (SF2 Turbo is a good game to see it on on the wiz, where the TURBO logo flies across the screen).
If for some reason the new ones have this issue I shall be on to Dingoo post haste.
fanoush
Still Fresh
We'll know more when booboo makes available his changes to linux kernel so others could start hacking. He added Ilitek ILI9325 driver to the kernel (among other things). From quick glance at Ingenic code in drivers/video/jz4740_slcd.c it looks like the framebuffer is in normal RAM and is sent to LCD controller via DMA so more frames should be possible by changing DMA source address. Well at least if there is vblank interrupt and you can change it in each frame while the display is onExophase said:
Most info about linux porting progress is in this thread
http://translate.google.es/translate?u= ... s&ie=UTF-8
Exophase
Nothing good will ever come of Exophase.
fanoush said:We'll know more when booboo makes available his changes to linux kernel so others could start hacking. He added Ilitek ILI9325 driver to the kernel (among other things). From quick glance at Ingenic code in drivers/video/jz4740_slcd.c it looks like the framebuffer is in normal RAM and is sent to LCD controller via DMA so more frames should be possible by changing DMA source address. Well at least if there is vblank interrupt and you can change it in each frame while the display is on
Most info about linux porting progress is in this thread
http://translate.google.es/translate?u= ... s&ie=UTF-8
We're talking about different framebuffers, confusing I know. The LCD controller has its own buffer that can store exactly 240x320 pixels, this is the framebuffer I'm referring to. The controller used in the Dingoo (or at least some of them?), whose datasheet you linked, is extremely similar to the one used in the Wiz. The only major difference is that it's for 240x320 LCDs instead of 240x320 AMOLEDs. Rotation is still performed by altering the steps/direction of the framebuffer upload process and hence the tearing. Why others don't have tearing, I don't really know. It could be a change in LCD and controller, just controller (maybe one has dual buffers?) or in software. Software changes would have a performance hit unless Dingoo has hardware that will rotate for you, like a specialized DMA controller.
