Psp Vs Gp2x?

[PokeParadox]

widescreen is just better for 3d gaming. i have a widescreen notebook and games like half-life 2 and others just look far better with that added field of view. it's the way to go for future devices.

You don't necessarily get any added field of view just because something is widescreen. Did you ever think that maybe widescreen is just 4:3 with the top and bottom cut off? It could be, and that what it is on the PSP. Standard H-VGA is 480x320. The PSP screen is that with the vertical resolution REDUCED to 272 so you are *missing* resolution to get that aspect. It also a crap format for handhelds as it just makes them longer. The only advantage for 16:9 is the screen edges fit movies better. For 3D gaming it is meaningless either way and does not make the PSP any better for gaming.

POINT! When Widescreen was first being phased in I always thought, why the hell pay more for less viewable screen... Also it's not good for coding either (You see less lines of code and your variable watcher and stuff has less room). I know this is going just slightly off-topic, but I just want to re-enforce DaveC's point that Widescreen is pointless for games, since the (3D) game can be rendered at any aspect or resolution. The main benefit of Widescreen is that movies in the cinema share that aspect ratio... so unless you are a movie buff then there really is no point to Widescreen.

 

[Exophase]

Through all the noise and insult in the forum (I did not begin the bullying, I was just responding in kind), there has been no attempt at all to actually prove any statement. Even the Great and Powerful exophase continues to simply STATE what "is so", but offers no technical evidence. From a coder, in a forum? Highly irregular. I read his blog. It appears that even he is in the midst of uncertainty over the whole gpSP issue.

Everyone loves to repeat how much bigger the PSP's CPU is, but in twenty other threads in this and other forums, we will read how CPU size is not the deciding factor in deciding system performance. But that still does not deter anyone from repeating the mantra.

Oh, is that what you want. Yeah, a bunch of people saying CPU speed (size, wtf?) is irrelevant is all you need to "prove" that GP2X isn't weaker than PSP.

First of all, the CPU speed "myth" is relevant at two opposite ends of the CPU design spectrum - old CISC designs that may take several cycles to execute an instruction, and modern superscalar CPUs. The ARM920T in the GP2X and the Allegrex in the PSP both reside right in the middle: modern single issue RISC CPUs. It means that nominally they will execute most critical instructions in one cycle. THAT means that if you blindly go on about "instructions per cycle" rates then the two CPUs will be about the same there too, meaning that MHz becomes much more relevant.

Now, the other issue is the quality of instructions executed. I will be the first to admit that ARM has a far more elegant instruction set that often lets you get things done in less instructions - it has better address modes, postincrement, multiple load/store, a barrel shifter, and conditional execution. Sadly, the compiler people tend to use for GP2X (gcc) isn't very good at taking advantage of a good deal of these things. But even ignoring that, it's countered by some perks the Allegrex MIPS has - twice as many registers, immediate format that is often more useful, less delays on certain instruction types, a divide instruction, lack of flags (okay, it's too hard to really determine if this is globally better than the standard flags approach, but I think it might be, ever so slightly), and some useful specialized instructions (like ins/ext).

So in the end I think that the gap is largely closed - clock for clock the ARM920T might be slightly better than the Allegrex. So at 333MHz PSP's CPU mops the floor with the GP2X's at 200MHz (or 240MHz if you wish). I'm not going to consider overclocking to rates that not everyone can achieve, I'd may as well go straight to 315MHz (where maybe the two would be on par).

Now that I've wasted all that time on CPU, what about everything ELSE in the hardware, that you've conveniently forgotten to mention? PSP has:

- much faster RAM, DDR instead of SDRAM, and at a higher bus speed
- a second CPU that both has full amount of L1 cache AND has its own dedicated 2MB of eDRAM to avoid contention with the main bus, unlike the GP2X's ARM940T which barely has any cache and tends to starve the 920T's memory accesses
- an FPU for both CPUs - floating point operations on a real FPU are superior in performance to fixed point operations (especially if you want things like sqrt)
- a VFPU for the main CPU, allowing you to do vector operations much more efficiently, and also several mathematical primitives, and if not that it acts as a large register store
- much faster VRAM that you can use as general purpose if you want
- 3D acceleration that also provides much better 2D acceleration than GP2X

There is one additional hit against PSP, and that is that its cache is very low set associative (only two way). But the RAM is so much faster that this hurts a lot less (so long as you're careful not to do something to completely ruin cache).

So there's your technical argument. Now shut up and admit you were being a jackass.

Doesn't the 2X pretty much have fullspeed GBA emulation now? How is the PSP better then? Better compatibility?

gpSP for PSP is "more" fullspeed. It's faster. There's less frameskip on average.

To those asking about me narrowing the gap, I've been spending a lot more time focusing on optimizing the thing to perform better on GP2X than I have on PSP, if that means anything >_>

 

[Alex.]

Widescreen is artificially imposed, you're told that it's better than the traditional 4:3. For any applications except for movies, the more vertical space the better. Everything from games, to writing, and to reading is done better in 4:3. I walk into a tech shop, and can't find a single 4:3 laptop. Why is that? Don't tell me the majority of people who buy laptops buy them to watch movies.

 

[PokeParadox]

Widescreen is artificially imposed, you're told that it's better than the traditional 4:3. For any applications except for movies, the more vertical space the better. Everything from games, to writing, and to reading is done better in 4:3. I walk into a tech shop, and can't find a single 4:3 laptop. Why is that? Don't tell me the majority of people who buy laptops buy them to watch movies.

To be honest I think laptops can get away with being widescreen, (Mine is widescreen hence my little rant about less coding space) mainly because they have to reside on your lap at some point. If my laptop had the extra 10CM of vertical screen space then it would be impossible to use on a train or plane...

 

[Exophase]

Widescreen is artificially imposed, you're told that it's better than the traditional 4:3. For any applications except for movies, the more vertical space the better. Everything from games, to writing, and to reading is done better in 4:3. I walk into a tech shop, and can't find a single 4:3 laptop. Why is that? Don't tell me the majority of people who buy laptops buy them to watch movies.

I don't use widescreen but I think that it actually does improve productivity for people who multitask certain things, just because vertical space is so precious for a single task, it allows you to have more tasks on screen without sacrificing it (since they'd be horizontally spread). I know that when I'm coding something I tend to have several copies of it open at once - on widescreen you can screen-split horizontally (or window split and orient it that way yourself) and still have a lot of horizontal space to actually type.

A lot of programmers I know prefer widescreen for this reason.

For handhelds with limited resolution widescreen is better for web viewing (that's why the UMPCs tend to be around 800x480) - if 800x600 is not feasible then 800x480 is much better for web pages than 640x480. For reading I'm not sure it matters, for games it depends on the game design of course...

I won't argue that we chose 4:3 for a reason (pleasing ratio and all that) but I do think there are some decent arguments for widescreen too. For emulation 4:3 is definitely best though (except when emulating more wide devices like GBA ^_^)

 

[Orkie]

I personally like the idea of widescreen for games since it'd allow either more of the level to be displayed at once or have a sidebar of some kind (like in Baldur's Gate) without reducing the amount of space left for the game itself. I'd much rather have a wider screen than a longer screen as you (or at least I) can see much further out to the sides without having to move your head.

 

[Vollgasasi]

arg first i started the debate with gamefan999 and now i stared the debate about widescreen lol... sorry about that

i like widescreen because of that 'added field of view'. you know its like having a triple monitor setup for racing games. i hope you get what i mean i cannot describe it in any other way. i know that many games just cut the top and the bottom to achieve 'widescreen' but i mean those games that really have an added field of view. and i like it on the psp because i can view my 8-bit-theatre comics without side scrolling har har. and i must disagree with you that it is pointless for gaming. it adds a cinematic feeling to the games (i can just again refer to half-life 2) once you play it in ws you cannot go back (at least i can't) but well in the end it's all subjective.

 

[lubidog]

Through all the noise and insult in the forum (I did not begin the bullying, I was just responding in kind), there has been no attempt at all to actually prove any statement. Even the Great and Powerful exophase continues to simply STATE what "is so", but offers no technical evidence. From a coder, in a forum? Highly irregular. I read his blog. It appears that even he is in the midst of uncertainty over the whole gpSP issue.

Everyone loves to repeat how much bigger the PSP's CPU is, but in twenty other threads in this and other forums, we will read how CPU size is not the deciding factor in deciding system performance. But that still does not deter anyone from repeating the mantra.

Oh, is that what you want. Yeah, a bunch of people saying CPU speed (size, wtf?) is irrelevant is all you need to "prove" that GP2X isn't weaker than PSP.

First of all, the CPU speed "myth" is relevant at two opposite ends of the CPU design spectrum - old CISC designs that may take several cycles to execute an instruction, and modern superscalar CPUs. The ARM920T in the GP2X and the Allegrex in the PSP both reside right in the middle: modern single issue RISC CPUs. It means that nominally they will execute most critical instructions in one cycle. THAT means that if you blindly go on about "instructions per cycle" rates then the two CPUs will be about the same there too, meaning that MHz becomes much more relevant.

Now, the other issue is the quality of instructions executed. I will be the first to admit that ARM has a far more elegant instruction set that often lets you get things done in less instructions - it has better address modes, postincrement, multiple load/store, a barrel shifter, and conditional execution. Sadly, the compiler people tend to use for GP2X (gcc) isn't very good at taking advantage of a good deal of these things. But even ignoring that, it's countered by some perks the Allegrex MIPS has - twice as many registers, immediate format that is often more useful, less delays on certain instruction types, a divide instruction, lack of flags (okay, it's too hard to really determine if this is globally better than the standard flags approach, but I think it might be, ever so slightly), and some useful specialized instructions (like ins/ext).

So in the end I think that the gap is largely closed - clock for clock the ARM920T might be slightly better than the Allegrex. So at 333MHz PSP's CPU mops the floor with the GP2X's at 200MHz (or 240MHz if you wish). I'm not going to consider overclocking to rates that not everyone can achieve, I'd may as well go straight to 315MHz (where maybe the two would be on par).

Now that I've wasted all that time on CPU, what about everything ELSE in the hardware, that you've conveniently forgotten to mention? PSP has:

- much faster RAM, DDR instead of SDRAM, and at a higher bus speed
- a second CPU that both has full amount of L1 cache AND has its own dedicated 2MB of eDRAM to avoid contention with the main bus, unlike the GP2X's ARM940T which barely has any cache and tends to starve the 920T's memory accesses
- an FPU for both CPUs - floating point operations on a real FPU are superior in performance to fixed point operations (especially if you want things like sqrt)
- a VFPU for the main CPU, allowing you to do vector operations much more efficiently, and also several mathematical primitives, and if not that it acts as a large register store
- much faster VRAM that you can use as general purpose if you want
- 3D acceleration that also provides much better 2D acceleration than GP2X

There is one additional hit against PSP, and that is that its cache is very low set associative (only two way). But the RAM is so much faster that this hurts a lot less (so long as you're careful not to do something to completely ruin cache).

So there's your technical argument. Now shut up and admit you were being a jackass.

Doesn't the 2X pretty much have fullspeed GBA emulation now? How is the PSP better then? Better compatibility?

gpSP for PSP is "more" fullspeed. It's faster. There's less frameskip on average.

To those asking about me narrowing the gap, I've been spending a lot more time focusing on optimizing the thing to perform better on GP2X than I have on PSP, if that means anything >_>



Excellent!!!

 

[rokdcasbah]

i like that aspect about widescreen as well: the feeling that, at least with 3d games, you're getting more peripheral vision. it seems like it'd be nicer for horizontal shooters too, or vertical shooters rotated 90 degrees.

it's definitely great for designing, most design apps have way too many toolbars and buttons and such, and you can get more done if you don't have to waste time opening and closing them.

final thing: cinematography for a movie and directing for a game have become very similar, and widescreen formats allow game designers to use the types of shots and composition that a film crew might take for granted.

(which is not to say that movies are shot directly 16:9, it really depends on the director, the camera, the lens, the film stock...but anamorphic lenses are usually a little wider, even.)

 

[fusion_power]

Now that I've wasted all that time on CPU, what about everything ELSE in the hardware, that you've conveniently forgotten to mention? PSP has:

- much faster RAM, DDR instead of SDRAM, and at a higher bus speed
- a second CPU that both has full amount of L1 cache AND has its own dedicated 2MB of eDRAM to avoid contention with the main bus, unlike the GP2X's ARM940T which barely has any cache and tends to starve the 920T's memory accesses
- an FPU for both CPUs - floating point operations on a real FPU are superior in performance to fixed point operations (especially if you want things like sqrt)
- a VFPU for the main CPU, allowing you to do vector operations much more efficiently, and also several mathematical primitives, and if not that it acts as a large register store
- much faster VRAM that you can use as general purpose if you want
- 3D acceleration that also provides much better 2D acceleration than GP2X



Wow..
I'm glad, that the PSP is no Open Source because then, every Homebrew Dev would only code for PSP and throw our Hardware-Weak GP2X in the corner. :lol: I can imagine Coding with such an dominant hardware like the PSP has is much more fun (if the whole thing would be complete open Source), than coding for the GP2X with his "strange" Cache-limited Dual Core Design and the lack of every Hardware (3D) acceleration (included the lack of Alpha-support) ^^

But thank God, the PSP is not Open Source.

Oh, when you Devs could decide, what Hardware the GP3X would have, what would be the Kick-Ass-Homebrew-Dominator Hardware for the most Coding-Fun?

 

[PokeParadox]

arg first i started the debate with gamefan999 and now i stared the debate about widescreen lol... sorry about that

i like widescreen because of that 'added field of view'. you know its like having a triple monitor setup for racing games. i hope you get what i mean i cannot describe it in any other way. i know that many games just cut the top and the bottom to achieve 'widescreen' but i mean those games that really have an added field of view. and i like it on the psp because i can view my 8-bit-theatre comics without side scrolling har har. and i must disagree with you that it is pointless for gaming. it adds a cinematic feeling to the games (i can just again refer to half-life 2) once you play it in ws you cannot go back (at least i can't) but well in the end it's all subjective.

A triple monitor setup is different in the sense that those monitors can be angled and if the game renders the graphics properly then you can look left and right and see a more immersive view. You would also have more immersion if you had more monitors scrolling and angled upwards. I don't see that a standard widescreen can achieve anywhere near that kind of immersion. Also the cinematic feeling can easily be achieved just by adding black bars at the top and bottom of the screen and, hey presto, "instant widescreen"™. This is what happened to a few movies before they were scaled to 4:3 ratios.

I still think it's unfair to directly compare the PSX emulation on GP2X and PSP since, I will reiterate, The PSP emulator is a hacked commercial emulator made by Sony. I would hope they would be able to write a decent emulator given their budget and man-power...

I dislike the proprietary nature of the media supported by PSP, the insistence of trying to get yet another format to sell when there is more than necessary available already. So with regards to that I prefer the GP2X since it has an established media format, the SD card.

I would have preferred a nice battery pack for the 2X so I think the PSP has a slight edge there... but only in the convenience of being able to plug into mains and recharge. I think the ability to carry extra AAs to extend playtime balances the nuisance of having to take out batteries to stick them in the charger and to continue playing when the current ones go flat.

I haven't heard much good about the PSP dev-scene, but as a dev in the GP2X scene I'd say the 2X scene is pretty good once you can convince people you are not just all talk :rolleyes: I didn't find it so welcoming when I first started out... it was hard to get replies to posts about setting up the development environment and such... It was quite frustrating since I wanted to code... not to mess around getting the devkit to compile. I do think the air has changed at least a little bit and is maybe a bit more welcoming.

The GP2X is made by a small company in Korea... the PSP is made by a huge multi-national corporation which has oodles of cash poured on R&D etc... of course the build quality of the PSP will be better. I think that if you can look passed the flaws the 2X has more character though. The main charm of the 2X is that it's almost completely wide open for us to exploit. We can change the firmware (Open2X) and make this thing run how we want it to run... The ability to customise is one of the main reasons use foobar2000 as my audio player for reasons similar to what builds up the charm of the 2X. I don't like a corporation telling me what I can and can't do with hardware I've purchased just as I don't like my music player to limit how I access and browse my music (ick iTunes...). In short I'm glad that we can make our 2Xs do what we want, and yes it might complain a bit... and throw a tantrum and not do exactly what we want... but it least that's down to the fussiness of the hardware and not down to a decision by a fat man in a suit who would rather keep his hardware under lock and key and make us buy the same movie across as many different media formats as possible.

 

[Alex.]

final thing: cinematography for a movie and directing for a game have become very similar, and widescreen formats allow game designers to use the types of shots and composition that a film crew might take for granted.

That's another bad thing. Games shouldn't be movies. They should be all about explosive fun, not capture artistic angles. None of the great classics were cinematic, because that's not where fun comes from. So boo to 'game directors'.

 

[nubie]

HERE.

That doesn't specify Intel based chipset, VGA, 3 USB ports, etc.

Although since I found out it's jointly developed by Intel that must mean Intel CPU...



its called, completely over reacting the product features, common practice by sales ppl and fanboi's
and yes i did say to my mate who said, look at ur puny 200mhz cpu, i laugh at ur weak gaming system
mine overclocks to 310mhz! so hah!, but my only really does 240 tops
but anyways, the gp2x does all i want, movies, music, emulation
better then that asus "laptop", with no joystick ~~
dont want keyboard support and all this fancy wifi + bob crap
just play portable games, can bring me laptop for internet and stuff


This laptop was old news LAST YEAR when they announced they were going to make this. It was always said to be "just good enough" to be a replacement for textbooks and get on the internet and write reports.

Basically, what are you going to do with it? Will it play movies to your satisfaction? Will it be a gaming PC? No. If you want a laptop for this price, why not buy an old laptop off Ebay that does WAAAYYY more and has WAYYY better specs than this "new" laptop? LOL!!! People please.

Well, before this thread is closed for a lot of crap I wanted to clear that up...

Yes, google the Eee PC and see what is up, it was just released, it is not vaporware, and I predict if it comes in at under or around $250 it will be selling off the shelves like a Wii, unfortunately Asus only expects to sell 200,000 this year and won't have the 10" screen $300 model until next year.

Intel Chipset (hate to burst your smelly bubble Exophase), if it is a Conroe-L chip at 800Mhz it will mop the floor with any emulator up to the PSX level. If it is a 400mhz-600mhz Pentium M or Yonah chip it will still be able to play a lot of stuff. Considering that XP is running on it, there must be enough processing power for it, 300-400mhz Pentium2 - P3 level minimum.

Play movies as well as I want? Yes, it will. Play Youtube over wifi? Yes it should.

Buy "an old laptop off of ebay" for less money? Sorry, that doesn't exist, you don't seem to get that the only thing in the same class as this new notebook would be a Toshiba Libretto u105, and they are still around the $1,000 mark used.

It will weigh in at under 2 pounds, it will have a full keyboard, there is a 10" screen model coming (judging from the big black screen bezel on the 7" it will be on the same footprint/chassis). The UMPC market went under, ASUS can leverage the millions of dollars of UMPC R&D into these, that means a better product.

I am familiar with the 7" display that they will be using, it is a native 800x480 display, that is perfect for the 640x480 of old PC games, it also just happens to be cheap, which is why I will believe $200 can be done.

Here is a Youtube of a guy playing FEAR on a UMPC. Sorry, but gaming of some sort (especially retro-gaming and emulation) will for sure be possible:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_quer...ear&search=

It is rumored to have 512MB of 400mhz DDR-2 (256MB onboard, 256MB additional, and a free SO-Dimm slot!!, suck on that MAME emulation fans!)

No stick? Come on, you know I only play on a USB to PSX adaptor with a real DIGITAL ONLY PSX pad. If it is powerful enough for PSX emulation and Need For Speed Porsche Unleashed I will be cutting a PSX pad in half and integrating it into the lappy on the sides just below the screen. Well, that or using the PSX pad with a heads-up display and wearing the ASUS on my belt.

CF slot for multiple OS'es, well "why would I want to run all those old Os'es?" Windows 98 for generic emulation and old-school gaming, if you don't retro-game then you don't know that old games had their compatibility broken by DirectX 7 and 8.x and 9.x, sometimes you need an OS with DirectX 6.1, sometimes you need real MS-Dos if it is old enough.

Also, I may need to troubleshoot or walkthrough an old OS with someone on the phone or in person without their PC. Last, for PC repair service calls a small functional machine for reading PDFs or getting the latest drivers, or checking their peripherals, or their internet connection or LAN, is worth its weight in gold, let alone $200.

XP with an Embedded Write Filter (3 DLLs and a service to enable) is fully CF compliant, and a powerful OS too.

Um, 3 hours on the standard battery with no moving parts in the PC?? That says either a powerful chipset or a CCF backlight, either one is good news. I can replace the backlight with LEDs, or just underclock the Processor to 400mhz.

On the subject of which is better, that depends on your personal needs, and for $200 the Asus Eee PC 701 trumps all of the GP2X's and PSP's in the world for my needs.

GP2x pluses:

Screen (no ghosting)
Open source
Lightweight (no optical drive)

PSP pluses:

Closed source (commercial cookie-cutter games)
Far more powerful (come on, a real video accelerator?? I see you DaveC, I didn't mention 3D or 2D [crap, I just mentioned them])
Far more popular

I often wish that the GP2X was white to start with, or blue or pink. If it was white I would either get "is that a new Ipod?" or "Is that a white PSP?"

About USB, I have made a couple of my own USB host cables, and yes the Keyboard support on the GP2X is not in a usable format, it is less usable than the PSP controls on the web browser are, if that is possible.

 

[Alex.]

I agree that cheap laptops are a godsend. Few people need a system more powerful than a Pentium 3, and finally companies will start taking advantage of cheap aging technology and deliver it to the masses at approachable prices

However, it's no GP2X killer. It's a different thing altogether. You can take the GP2X with you anywhere, while a laptop, no matter how small, will still be too large to carry with in many situations. I think that the idea of such a physically small handheld doing so much is a great bonus on its own.

I'll make sure to pick up an Eee PC when my current laptop will go bust - I wonder if it will be made commercially available in north America, because I would imagine it would take a serious portion of market share away from the big boys priced at $600+...

 

[Miika]

Nubie: Sounds good but it is really just a smaller laptop, much harder to carry than these handhelds so wouldn't compare it with GP2X!
If it has a decent 3D accelerator, N64 emulation would be entirely good.
PSX will definitely be fullspeed I think.

On my 350MHz PII, N64 was nearly perfect with a good graphics card and 320x240 (Native N64)

 

[nubie]

Nubie: Sounds good but it is really just a smaller laptop, much harder to carry than these handhelds so wouldn't compare it with GP2X!
If it has a decent 3D accelerator, N64 emulation would be entirely good.
PSX will definitely be fullspeed I think.

On my 350MHz PII, N64 was nearly perfect with a good graphics card and 320x240 (Native N64)

While true, my stature (6' tall 260+ pounds) makes playing a PSP or Gp2X look fairly ridiculous, not to mention it is hard to hold them, they are too small. I fluctuate by more than 2 pounds daily, so the added carrying is nothing to me, sure I can't shove it in a pocket, but I can hardly do that with a PSP or GP2X, I don't wear cargo pants.

Basically I have discovered I NEED Wifi and a keyboard, this is actually cheaper than a GP2X or PSP and a keyboard for it (even Used). The x86 architecture means I can use the PC emulators natively instead of waiting for them to be ported, and yes, I was playing n64 on my 233mhz machine at 200fps(??Something insane like that) 640x480 with a Voodoo3 and Corn.

I use a projector or a PC monitor for my TV, I like the TV-Out of the GP2X, but VGA-Out is just better/smarter for me.

All woes of compatibility are shot down, I can run pure real MS-Dos on a real Intel chip, no need for emulation to play the Dos games.

The emulator will have much more power than either handheld. I don't care how small either of these is, the screen res and power will blow them both out of the water, why carry something that won't do what I need it to do? It isn't all that much bigger either.

I know this will work because I owned a Toshiba Libretto 110CT and 50CT while I was waiting for my pre-ordered GP2X, I put a CF card (instead of the hard drive) with win98 on it and booted into pure "98 dos" to play kgen with all my genesis roms. This Eee laptop will be 20 times more powerful at the least, and brand new with flash installed and a nice screen (much much nicer than the PSP/GP2X).

For the price? With a keyboard, a real web browser, VGA output, Wifi?? This owns them.

If you are a kid and are playing games on a handheld? Get a DS Lite with the media player cart, it seems to be higher quality and more suited than either of the two kickers up for dispute.

This is my opinion, as I said, everyone needs to get their own opinion. Personally I am jazzed about handheld emulation and retro-gaming and wifi and net surfing/media streaming. The PSP let me down, the GP2X let me down. If I just wanted to play games, I would buy the DS Lite. There is no perfect machine (unless you personally are Bill Gates and can have one made for you), my perfect machine would be no larger than my current wristwatch with a new Laser projector built into it (think DLP with a single point source that can raster like a CRT, I would love to turn one into a Vectrex projector!), and the ability to connect to a cell-phone size fold out keyboard via bluetooth. And since it is bluetooth, integrated WiiMote capability and a SSH back to my home server via Satellite or Cellphone or Wifi full-time, so I could run movies and applications/games off of my home system on the lazer projector.

Oh, and run off of my body heat/motion and solar power while keeping me cool in the summer.

Basically they all have down sides, just live with it, get both, or neither. You can't get something for nothing.

 

[Exophase]

The x86 architecture means I can use the PC emulators natively instead of waiting for them to be ported, and yes, I was playing n64 on my 233mhz machine at 200fps(??Something insane like that) 640x480 with a Voodoo3 and Corn.

WTF, no. Corn was great, but not that great, that's impossible (and it was probably the version that only played Mario 64).

I know this will work because I owned a Toshiba Libretto 110CT and 50CT while I was waiting for my pre-ordered GP2X, I put a CF card (instead of the hard drive) with win98 on it and booted into pure "98 dos" to play kgen with all my genesis roms. This Eee laptop will be 20 times more powerful at the least, and brand new with flash installed and a nice screen (much much nicer than the PSP/GP2X).

Do you like to exaggerate or something? No way is the Eee 20 times more powerful than a 233MHz Pentium laptop. It's decently likely that it's using the A100 CPUs which seem to be less powerful than similarly clocked Celeron M's. It's probably around 4-6 times as powerful.

 

[nubie]

The x86 architecture means I can use the PC emulators natively instead of waiting for them to be ported, and yes, I was playing n64 on my 233mhz machine at 200fps(??Something insane like that) 640x480 with a Voodoo3 and Corn.

WTF, no. Corn was great, but not that great, that's impossible (and it was probably the version that only played Mario 64).

I know this will work because I owned a Toshiba Libretto 110CT and 50CT while I was waiting for my pre-ordered GP2X, I put a CF card (instead of the hard drive) with win98 on it and booted into pure "98 dos" to play kgen with all my genesis roms. This Eee laptop will be 20 times more powerful at the least, and brand new with flash installed and a nice screen (much much nicer than the PSP/GP2X).

Do you like to exaggerate or something? No way is the Eee 20 times more powerful than a 233MHz Pentium laptop. It's decently likely that it's using the A100 CPUs which seem to be less powerful than similarly clocked Celeron M's. It's probably around 4-6 times as powerful.

I wish I knew what CPU it is using, how would an A100 run XP and use DDR2-400??

OK, maybe it was 160FPS (or 300fps) on Corn, I am telling you that it was only the Voodoo3 2000 and Glide that did it on Mario64, and it wasn't a "mario64" build, it was one of the later corn builds. I think I may have been using a beta driver/glide build too, I may have been overclocking the Voodoo too, but I doubt it.

Glide is easily the fastest API ever built for 3D rendering, probably because it was wholly owned by the hardware manufacturer, that is why nVidia had to buy out Voodoo, Glide couldn't support new features very well, and that is one of the main reasons it is so hard to correctly play retro early 9x games, they were pre- directX and so need Glide, since Glide is defunct it is hard to get them out of software 320x240 modes.

How do you know it won't be a Yonah or Conroe-L derivative?? Maybe not 20 times more powerful, but at least 20 times more productive, due to a faster entire system speed, DDR2-400 will easily best the 32MB of SDRAM in the 110CT, thus the entire system will move much more quickly.

Edit, Ah, I see, but 600mhz of Pentium 3 tech in a wifi handheld for $200 is suddenly bad? Or not so capable of playing games?

Correct me if I am wrong, but shouldn't it basically have the processing power of an Xbox (celeron 733mhz ?128kb lvl2cache?), as far as I know that can play games. Like Need For Speed 1-4 just fine. I know the video card probably will be the intel integrated, but it is a handheld, we aren't talking about new games here.

 

[Exophase]

I wish I knew what CPU it is using, how would an A100 run XP and use DDR2-400??

That's well within its specs, look up the CPU with codename "McCaslin."

OK, maybe it was 160FPS (or 300fps) on Corn, I am telling you that it was only the Voodoo3 2000 and Glide that did it on Mario64, and it wasn't a "mario64" build, it was one of the later corn builds. I think I may have been using a beta driver/glide build too, I may have been overclocking the Voodoo too, but I doubt it.

Glide is easily the fastest API ever built for 3D rendering, probably because it was wholly owned by the hardware manufacturer, that is why nVidia had to buy out Voodoo, Glide couldn't support new features very well, and that is one of the main reasons it is so hard to correctly play retro early 9x games, they were pre- directX and so need Glide, since Glide is defunct it is hard to get them out of software 320x240 modes.

I don't think Corn even used Glide (maybe you're thinking of UltraHLE?).. anyway, no matter how powerful the video card is a 233MHz Pentium MMX is not fast enough to emulate Mario 64 at 160-300fps, even with a static recompiler.

How do you know it won't be a Yonah or Conroe-L derivative??

I don't, A100 is just what seems to be most commonly believed. No matter what it is it's clearly x86 so it's probably not far off from those, but of course it'll be a mobile CPU.

Maybe not 20 times more powerful, but at least 20 times more productive, due to a faster entire system speed, DDR2-400 will easily best the 32MB of SDRAM in the 110CT, thus the entire system will move much more quickly.

I don't know about you, but concerning the average things I do modern computers haven't improved my productivity 20 times in the last 10 years.. if anything software has gotten more bloated and inefficient to compensate for the increase in CPU speed and memory.

Edit, Ah, I see, but 600mhz of Pentium 3 tech in a wifi handheld for $200 is suddenly bad? Or not so capable of playing games?

Correct me if I am wrong, but shouldn't it basically have the processing power of an Xbox (celeron 733mhz ?128kb lvl2cache?), as far as I know that can play games. Like Need For Speed 1-4 just fine. I know the video card probably will be the intel integrated, but it is a handheld, we aren't talking about new games here.

I'm not sure who you're responding to here, but I for one think the Eee sounds like an excellent deal >_> Although if you want good gaming controls there's not much way around that, and for most people using an external gamepad in addition to something "portable" isn't going to work at all.

 

[nubie]

I don't know about you, but concerning the average things I do modern computers haven't improved my productivity 20 times in the last 10 years.. if anything software has gotten more bloated and inefficient to compensate for the increase in CPU speed and memory.

Edit, Ah, I see, but 600mhz of Pentium 3 tech in a wifi handheld for $200 is suddenly bad? Or not so capable of playing games?

Correct me if I am wrong, but shouldn't it basically have the processing power of an Xbox (celeron 733mhz ?128kb lvl2cache?), as far as I know that can play games. Like Need For Speed 1-4 just fine. I know the video card probably will be the intel integrated, but it is a handheld, we aren't talking about new games here.

I'm not sure who you're responding to here, but I for one think the Eee sounds like an excellent deal >_> Although if you want good gaming controls there's not much way around that, and for most people using an external gamepad in addition to something "portable" isn't going to work at all.

OK, since it is running Linux, I don't see why it won't be fast.

And since I will be able to run Windows 98 on it, I don't see why it wouldn't be fast (apples to apples, the 110ct ran on Windows 98).

And since I may want to put XP on it, I don't see how it won't be compatible. Likely however I will use Windows 2000 SP4 and NT lite to cut it down in size, and then keep it on it's own flash drive.

I plan to use my PSX pad w/usb, and if it is a nice enough machine I can cut the PSX pad in half and integrate it to the machine so that it will have a D-pad, that is fine by me.

I looked up the a100, have you any benchmarks? as far as I know a 600mhz Pentium M is fine for playing anything short of HD video, media-wise. Apparently Intel is chucking the "The Mobile Intel 945 Express Chipset family comes with the Generation 3.5 Intel Integrated Graphics Engine and the Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 950 (Intel® GMA 950) " at the processor as the bundle, if this is true it should basically have the power of an Xbox, with Ram to spare.

I would like to see some benchmarks on the "Gen 3.5 Integrated Graphics", maybe this can handle a lot more than we think. (personally I am not above some overclocking for gaming, and some underclocking for battery use, on a side note, I got my AM2 4600+ x2 processor down to 15mhz , obviously it crashed soon after, damn windows XP services used too much processing power, but it is plenty happy at 800mhz too, and I even forgot that is where I left it until I noticed my 720p video was a little jerky ).

I am reflecting on it, it may have been an 800mhz Duron Socket A that I was using to play Mario64, but I am sure it was glide, there is a button to enable it with Corn.

http://picasaweb.google.com/nubie07/Corn/p...901347540085650

Edit: Ok maybe not "glide", but Voodoo specific hacks apparently.