Should I Get A Gp2x?

[Perseid]

I've been recently playing with homebrew on handhelds and I was wondering how the GP2X compares.

I have a DS with a Supercard. With PAlib it is very easy to code for.
I also have a PSP with 1.5 firmware but I haven't tried coding for it yet.

So, does the GP2X have a one up on these two for any particular reason? Is it faster? Is it easier to code for than a DS?

Also, I see it can play .AVI files. Can I just drag a DivX onto my SD card and play it or will I need to convert or transcode it?

And I've been reading here that it's overclockable. Is this easy? Is it safe? Can all the GP2Xs be overclocked the same or is there a special model?

Thanks.

 

[imhotep]

Also, I see it can play .AVI files. Can I just drag a DivX onto my SD card and play it or will I need to convert or transcode it?

And I've been reading here that it's overclockable. Is this easy? Is it safe? Can all the GP2Xs be overclocked the same or is there a special model?
Thanks.

One advantage of the GP2X over the PSP is that movies (e.g. DivX) don't need transcoding to the right resolution. The second CPU of the GP2X is used to rescale the video on the fly. DivX/XviD movies are supported out of the box too. No downloads necessary.

Overclocking is great. It is completely safe for the hardware to test and all done through software. Every model can overclock above the default 200MHz. Models that are pretested to 266MHz are more expensive, but untested models may still reach this number or higher. Virtually all models overclock at least 240 to 250 MHz.

 

[GameGod]

I've never coded for DS, but coming from a Linux background, I can tell you that I found the GP2X extremely easy to code for. It's as simple as writing a Linux app.

Plus, with the bundled USB cable, you can just test run your applications off of your PC's harddrive, making development much less of a headache. (You don't have to copy your app over to your memory card every time you want to test it.)

There's also quite a bit of documentation on the GP2X wiki on setting up your development environment, and the community is quite helpful too.