Our New Machine, Pandora

[Billy Lee]

I wouldn't mind playing on something like that!

Anyway, I wanted to voice my opinion on the price. If it is going to cost more than £150 then count me out. I just want to play up to early '90s MAME with no frameskip and with a good TV-Out. I'm sure we don't need OMAP for that. A lot of people seem to think that a cutting edge chip will guarantee a long lifespan. That is so wrong. Price will have more of an impact on the longevity of this machine. Look at how the PS2 completely dominated the last generation of consoles even though it was the least powerful (unless you include our dearly beloved Dreamcast). And now look at the PS3. That is THE cutting edge machine at the moment with the most powerful spec and a Blu-Ray drive. £425 is good value for all that but it's totally bombed because people don't look at it like that. They simply see the £425 price tag and think it is too much for a games machine. And that even has the powerful Sony and PlayStation logos stuck on it! It was designed to last 10 years yet it's struggling in its first year, being shamefully outsold by the original Gameboy Advance on a weekly basis not so long ago!

No matter how powerful the OMAP is, if it makes the handheld cost more than £180 it will look bad because you can now get Xbox 360 Cores for £179.99 which are way more powerful and has cutting edge games. Seeing all these people saying they won't mind paying £300 for an OMAP powered machine just makes the GP2X more attractive to me. It's cheap and does its job well.

I can guarantee that if the new handheld costs more than £150 it will be a complete failure. It won't last long enough to develop your much sought after N64 emulator.

 

[colt chillin']

@ fatblueduck....

go suck my mother's dick.

 

[trooper]

@ fatblueduck....

go suck my mother's dick.

No sense of humour then ?.

 

[Null]

go suck my mother's dick.

:lol:

 

[andyB911]

@ fatblueduck....

go suck *my* mother's dick.

No sense of humour then ?.


His mother's famous in a way that would make any man loose their humour

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/goldielooki...sgotapenis.html

@fatblueduck - fantastic - although a little worried there is only one coffee holder.

 

[X-Code]

I'm not pleased with that design, it doesn't include the beer tap

 

[A_SN]

snip

A well-made point

 

[God Ginrai]

I wouldn't mind playing on something like that!

Anyway, I wanted to voice my opinion on the price. If it is going to cost more than £150 then count me out. I just want to play up to early '90s MAME with no frameskip and with a good TV-Out. I'm sure we don't need OMAP for that. A lot of people seem to think that a cutting edge chip will guarantee a long lifespan. That is so wrong. Price will have more of an impact on the longevity of this machine. Look at how the PS2 completely dominated the last generation of consoles even though it was the least powerful (unless you include our dearly beloved Dreamcast). And now look at the PS3. That is THE cutting edge machine at the moment with the most powerful spec and a Blu-Ray drive. £425 is good value for all that but it's totally bombed because people don't look at it like that. They simply see the £425 price tag and think it is too much for a games machine. And that even has the powerful Sony and PlayStation logos stuck on it! It was designed to last 10 years yet it's struggling in its first year, being shamefully outsold by the original Gameboy Advance on a weekly basis not so long ago!

No matter how powerful the OMAP is, if it makes the handheld cost more than £180 it will look bad because you can now get Xbox 360 Cores for £179.99 which are way more powerful and has cutting edge games. Seeing all these people saying they won't mind paying £300 for an OMAP powered machine just makes the GP2X more attractive to me. It's cheap and does its job well.

I can guarantee that if the new handheld costs more than £150 it will be a complete failure. It won't last long enough to develop your much sought after N64 emulator.

Have fun carrying around the XBox 360 core with it's amazing power and playing it handheld! If you need some help getting the buttons and screen on it, I'm sure some of the guys at BenHeck can help you with that. Maybe you can use one of those Remote Control Car battery packs for battery life and get a whopping HOUR out of it.

@fatblueduck Think we can implement a VR headset as well? And a Scouter, too! ;P

-God Ginrai

 

[colt chillin']

go suck my mother's dick.

:lol:


hahahaha....

well, you get the picture.
grumpy early morning e-thugin'.

 

[Firefox]

On the gp2x, it seems to me that most people don't bother with the chip documentation - most coders seem to prefer to just use SDL and the others use pre-written SDKs such as Rlyeh's minilib. Very few people actually attack the hardware directly. If the docs are not public, I don't see that as a major downside - everyone will still have access to the raw speed of the device, fpu, 3d, etc.

Don't you that it's possible that you may have that the wrong way round - that many programmers failed to get the MMSP2 reference manual, or were underwhelmed by its sparse Engrish if they did manage to obtain a copy, and decided that they'd be better off spending their spare time doing something else?

In any case, if the manual for [whichever SoC gets picked] is freely available then there will be more programmers able to contribute to making SDL (and the other libs) super-fast.

 

[TelcoLou]

The new machine may be nearer to production than you all think. h34r:

Prototype unit

 

[cappuchok]

Anyway, I wanted to voice my opinion on the price. If it is going to cost more than £150 then count me out. I just want to play up to early '90s MAME with no frameskip and with a good TV-Out. I'm sure we don't need OMAP for that. A lot of people seem to think that a cutting edge chip will guarantee a long lifespan. That is so wrong. Price will have more of an impact on the longevity of this machine. Look at how the PS2 completely dominated the last generation of consoles even though it was the least powerful (unless you include our dearly beloved Dreamcast). And now look at the PS3. That is THE cutting edge machine at the moment with the most powerful spec and a Blu-Ray drive. £425 is good value for all that but it's totally bombed because people don't look at it like that. They simply see the £425 price tag and think it is too much for a games machine. And that even has the powerful Sony and PlayStation logos stuck on it! It was designed to last 10 years yet it's struggling in its first year, being shamefully outsold by the original Gameboy Advance on a weekly basis not so long ago!

No matter how powerful the OMAP is, if it makes the handheld cost more than £180 it will look bad because you can now get Xbox 360 Cores for £179.99 which are way more powerful and has cutting edge games. Seeing all these people saying they won't mind paying £300 for an OMAP powered machine just makes the GP2X more attractive to me. It's cheap and does its job well.

I can guarantee that if the new handheld costs more than £150 it will be a complete failure. It won't last long enough to develop your much sought after N64 emulator.

I don't think anyone here has said anything to the effect of "OMAP or bust". Personally, I don't need N64 emulation in a handheld, it'd probably be a nightmare to design a working controller scheme for it anyway, but there are so many other fun things an OMAP can do that an i.MX31 can't (real OpenGL support, for example, would enable many ports that would be harder to do with the limited OpenGL ES support of the i.MX31). I, and several others, have said that while it would be interesting to see a gaming device with the OMAP and explore what would be possible with such a ridicilously powerful chip, we'll be perfectly happy with the i.MX31 if Craig thinks it's the most viable choice, taking both price and power into consideration. The i.MX31 is certainly powerful enough for the intended use (give me a more recent MAME build, and fullspeed PSX and Amiga, and I'll be happy), but the OMAP, if viable at all, would probably open up whole new possibilites that weren't even considered when first planning this device. Also, £200 would be my limit for an OMAP-based device, while if the i.MX31 was chosen I'd probably agree with the £150 price tag or at least not much more than that.

 

[fusion_power]

On the gp2x, it seems to me that most people don't bother with the chip documentation - most coders seem to prefer to just use SDL and the others use pre-written SDKs such as Rlyeh's minilib. Very few people actually attack the hardware directly. If the docs are not public, I don't see that as a major downside - everyone will still have access to the raw speed of the device, fpu, 3d, etc.

I've heard that too. It seems, that nearly nobody really take advantage of the pure Hardware Power of the GP2X because the most devs use SDL. So I think nobody still knows, what the GP2X coulld do with "close-to-hardware-coding" or however its called. I really hope, people can do this better and more easy with the new Handheld. Who needs all the super CPU and Chipset and 3D power, when everyone just use pure Software solutions for the program-performance? Ok, we could say it doesn't matter if a simple Pac-Man clone needs 300MHz to run because we have the power so or so. But I would like to see High optimized programms where I can run the most stuff underclocked because its just good coded. Your batteries will thank you for that philosophy.

 

[A_SN]

On the gp2x, it seems to me that most people don't bother with the chip documentation - most coders seem to prefer to just use SDL and the others use pre-written SDKs such as Rlyeh's minilib. Very few people actually attack the hardware directly. If the docs are not public, I don't see that as a major downside - everyone will still have access to the raw speed of the device, fpu, 3d, etc.

Don't you that it's possible that you may have that the wrong way round - that many programmers failed to get the MMSP2 reference manual, or were underwhelmed by its sparse Engrish if they did manage to obtain a copy, and decided that they'd be better off spending their spare time doing something else?

In any case, if the manual for [whichever SoC gets picked] is freely available then there will be more programmers able to contribute to making SDL (and the other libs) super-fast.


As one of the few who chose to do it all the hard way without SDL, and from discussing the topic with other devs, I think it's safe to say that most devs can't be arsed to get their hands dirty with the hardware and are glad enough with SDL.

As for SDL on the GP2X, we can say there'd be little to add to it in order to make it faster, every documented hardware specific optimization has been implemented, despite the relatively poor documentation (we still have every register documented to a certain extent)

It seems, that nearly nobody really take advantage of the pure Hardware Power of the GP2X because the most devs use SDL. So I think nobody still knows, what the GP2X coulld do with "close-to-hardware-coding" or however its called.

Utter bullshit, see my previous comment. There's little you could do to make an app faster than with SDL without using SDL, plus it's hard to include everything SDL does, as it includes pretty much everything known to us.

 

[fusion_power]

Utter bullshit, see my previous comment. There's little you could do to make an app faster than with SDL without using SDL, plus it's hard to include everything SDL does, as it includes pretty much everything known to us.

Yes, maybe. I'm not a coder and I don't know the full power of SDL. Of course it would be cool, if SDL is working better on the new Handheld. So I just wanted to say, that an chipset with good documentation and good "sdl-compatibility" should be choosen, so Devs have an much more easy life with the new Handheld.

 

[Squidge]

On the gp2x, it seems to me that most people don't bother with the chip documentation - most coders seem to

Don't you that it's possible that you may have that the wrong way round - that many programmers failed to get the MMSP2 reference manual

Not really, considering there were links to download the manual posted from practically the day of the console release, and it's been available to download from the gp2x wiki not long after it's release.

or were underwhelmed by its sparse Engrish if they did manage to obtain a copy

Thats datasheets for you - they assume that if your reading the manual, you are technically minded. The few instances of engrish could be easily guessed at what they mind, so it wasn't an issue. Datasheets are not really meant to be read by someone that just has an understanding of writing games for a PC, for example. That's why SDL was invented, to take away the technical details of dealing with the hardware.

decided that they'd be better off spending their spare time doing something else?

Exactly my point. Most people agree that simply using pre-written SDKs is far more productive in writing your game or emu than figuring out how the hardware works.

 

[craigix]

Using the OMAP chip may result in a system which would be around £199. Opinions?

 

[X-Code]

Doesn't sound too steep , what are the "real" advantages ?

Edit: That's €293 -- $403 ( for those that don't know it )


Edit 2: I'll explain why it doesn't sound too steep to me... I've had a Zodiac 2, a Zaurus SL-C860, ( was going to buy an SL-C 3200 soon ), I have a Nokia N700, I have 4 * GP2X, PSP, and a load of other stuff, and none of them does everything that I need it to do... This machine probably will B)

 

[Javacat]

Using the OMAP chip may result in a system which would be around £199. Opinions?

Sounds like a nice price to me

I'm guessing that means you've had talks with TI and have come up with the preliminary details.

 

[J201605]

200 is pretty expensive... the main question is that since the OMAP would mainly enable n64, will the system have some sort of analog control and a decent amount of buttons at that price? Also, how big a difference is there between the final price with i.mx31 and the OMAP? My opinion would be that I would want it at that price if the price difference between having the OMAP and the i.mx31 would be less than $100.