Should I Have Ordered The Gp2x...

[moz]

haha YESSS im in someones sig ^-^
amazing, i feel so popular now,
and ive only been on the forum about an hour...
...power...
i could take over the forum...
..Power..
And make them write posts about how good i am..
POWER..
AND BE KING! MWAHAHAHAHA ( dances around like a little fairy boy ) - i mean em..
Laughs manly while drinking beer and arm wrestling ^-^

​

dont get too excited, sam (sam fisher) once made it there to.

 

[Sonistar]

haha! u think gp2x regretted not putting a label on the screen protecter?

 

[scorpio]

Yes, Wipeout2000, you made the right decision. I will be selling my PSP soon, as I haven't used it in ages. I use my DS and the GP2X more now than I ever did the PSP.

Now, I shall rant. Self-indulgence mode ON.

Yes, the PSP has some good games, but from what I've seen, most of them are fairly average, and definitely not worth the money. The only ones I got are Wipeout Pure and Lumines, nothing else has impressed me much.

I was pretty disappointed with the UMD when I first saw it. I mean, you can buy blank minidiscs for less than a euro (well, less than 2, I'm pretty sure), and they have an automatic shutter on it, so what's going on here? Make a media format which is overpriced, and so severely restricted, and then don't even put a cover over the access slot? And loading times? Don't talk to me about loading times.

I used to watch video on it, but it was too much of a pain to keep converting them to mp4 just to copy them over for one specific platform. I've better things to be doing with my time.

I also found the surface of the console just too glossy. In most environments you get too much glare and reflection to make long-term viewing comfortable.

As an mp3 player it's not bad, but why lug around a PSP in my pocket and have it dragging down one side of my coat, when I can just throw them onto an SD card and put it in my Rio Forge? The PSP won't even let you use a decent directory structure to organise your music, photos or movies: Playlists and photo albums? What are they?

The only decent part of the whole PSP user interface is the main crossbar menu, everything after that is pretty bogus.

Then, you go to a friend's house, and you want to show your holiday pictures or whatever, and everybody has to squeeze together to look at the pictures on a little screen, and in the corner of the room is a widescreen TV, what a waste!

If you want to do anything other than what Sony want you to do, you'll have to jump through hoops with firmware revisions and exploits, and hope that you don't accidentally get a firmware update slipped into a commercial disc. After all, if they can install backdoors onto people's PCs via music CDs, who knows what they'll do with UMDs, which they have full control over.

The long and short of it is that Sony are selling us the PSP and saying, "Here, now go and do what WE want you to do with it", whereas GPH have sold us the GP2X and said, "Now go and do what YOU want to do with it". That's quite a different philosophy, and it frightens a lot of people (consumers included.)

I'm really pissed off with Sony, because the PSP had a lot of promise when it first came out, and they've everything they can to try and neuter it, and turn it into some kind of console equivalent of one of these manufactured pop groups.

If they had only left it open, it could be doing everything the GP2X is doing now, and more! Perhaps they were scared that people would just write music and movie players, and web browsers a hundred times better than what Sony themselves could be bothered to do.

I will also say my bit on the controls. The d-pad is very badly implemented. After about an hour of playing, you get pains in your left thumb because either the shape of the buttons or the stiffness of them just punishes your flesh (perhaps Clive Barker may consider the PSP for a cameo in a new Hellraiser sequel?). The analogue slider is rubbish. It has a sticky spot in the centre, which means you can't use it for fine control with any degree of reliability, so only the outside of the circular range of movement has any real degree of usefulness.

There is really just something so superficial about the PSP that I felt duped. Duped, that is, until I just stopped caring. It has a really good specification, but has been let down on the software side by the practice of maximum return for minimum effort (on the part of Sony, AND the developers), and forget about giving any respect to the consumer.

If I may paraphrase The Opera, "WTF? WTF? WTFFF?"

At least Nintendo give the appearance of caring about the gameplay side of it, and the touch screen adds a genuine sense of interactivity to many games. The design of the DS seems to be awakening a bit creativity in developers.

There are some people who will always want an easy life and want to be told how to do things, but then there's the rest of us here who believe in a more flexible way of living.

The GP2X may not have the commercial backing of Sony or Nintendo, but the fact that GPH have managed to get it out, at a decent price, without the benefit of subsidising the costs against future software sales is what says it all to me, and I'm all for supporting that. I'm just glad the GPL issues seem to have got sorted out, since that was the main thing that had held me back from buying some.

 

[Aninhumer]

Yes, Wipeout2000, you made the right decision. I will be selling my PSP soon, as I haven't used it in ages. I use my DS and the GP2X more now than I ever did the PSP.

Now, I shall rant. Self-indulgence mode ON.

<rm rant.txt>

That's one hell of a rant, I wonder if they'll ban me if I sig it?

EDIT: welll yeah

 

[scorpio]

That's one hell of a rant, I wonder if they'll ban me if I sig it?

EDIT: welll yeah

​

I guess I'm just passionate about having the freedom to experiment without having the manufacturer pull the rug out from under me.

I suppose this is why I loved the Spectrum so much. You could stick anything onto the expansion bus and it interfaced straight into the Z80! Oh, happy days.

 

[Koba]

i fully agree, i have a PSP, and i've developed for PSP but running (and keeping) homebrew is a hastle on its own... Sony releases this awsome web browser for PSP, but hides the fact that it crushes your soul and deflects any good hombrew... NOW they are giving a PSX emulator, and flash player support in the web browser in the new firmware 3.0, WTH!?! so basically we have to choose between a dream firmware and the latest games, or homebrew apps... heh, thats a taste of Sony's wrath. GP2X is awsome, open source, easy to develop for, and has a really nice community!

 

[Sonistar]

i you own the psp you might as well go put on a dog collar and fetch sticks for sony ^-^

 

[Koba]

well thats why i am getting a GP2X, because it's awsome! and i LOVE developing for handhelds (and having everybody being able to use it)

 

[DaveC]

The PSP is not bad. I have one and it is noce in many ways although I don't really use it much anymore. If I am going to play a 3D game I will just play the X360 instead. For retrogaming the GP2X is good for me because the screen aspect and resolution matches for emulators so well at 1:1 and I hate the blurry stretching on PSP. The one nice thing is that the PSP has a full speed SNES emu with full transparencies and due to CPU speed it looks we will be doing without that on the GP2X.

As far as Sony trying to crush HB, they HAVE to. If everyone can just download free R0MZ to it they will be buying less of their expensive games. Free HB emu games do compete with commercial titles in the market because they are easily obtainable for free. Plus that leaves the door open for piracy of their commercial titles. 3RD party developers are also reluctant to publish for unsecure systems because of piracy concerns as well. So Sony MUST make the choice between HB or commercial, they obviously chose commercial. GPH made the choice to go open with their console but the result there is commercial support is nil.

 

[Hory]

AAAAH! NOT AGAIN!!!

There is another layer on the screen protector. Pick at the corner and it will come off. The layer is scratched, not the screen protector.

*deep breath*

​

Man, I'm stupid. I've even read about "two protective layers" before buying it. But I thought there were supposed to be two on the LCD, not one on each part :/
Now I'm happy cause it looks great. Thanks.

 

[(naw)mcx]

For some odd reason I think I only have one layer of that stupid plastic stuff. Or i might of taken it off without thinking

 

[Goity]

Took me a while to get the damn thing off...

 

[Koba]

all my concern is, is that the GP2X community and development doesn't slow down to a halt like the PSP's did (it hasn't stopped but there is like one good release every month). no flaming needed, it was only one of my worries.

 

[Crazy Goat]

With every new announcement of firmware updates, the PSP community becomes less and less when it comes to the developers side. With every new feature they add, theres a secret feature to halt and prevent homebrew.


It is just one more obstacle that the end-user has to go through just to use their application.


If I take the time to write a program, I sure as hell want people to be able to play it.

 

[DaveC]

With every new announcement of firmware updates, the PSP community becomes less and less when it comes to the developers side. With every new feature they add, theres a secret feature to halt and prevent homebrew.


It is just one more obstacle that the end-user has to go through just to use their application.


If I take the time to write a program, I sure as hell want people to be able to play it.

​

Yeah but for every attempt to block HB there is an exploit or hack to defeat it. Still I can see it is kind of a hassle for coders to have to make sure their app works with xyz exploit of the day. I would imagine eventually a few PSP coders will say "fuck it, I will just get a GP2X".

 

[scorpio]

As far as Sony trying to crush HB, they HAVE to. If everyone can just download free R0MZ to it they will be buying less of their expensive games. Free HB emu games do compete with commercial titles in the market because they are easily obtainable for free. Plus that leaves the door open for piracy of their commercial titles. 3RD party developers are also reluctant to publish for unsecure systems because of piracy concerns as well. So Sony MUST make the choice between HB or commercial, they obviously chose commercial. GPH made the choice to go open with their console but the result there is commercial support is nil.

​

From the viewpoint of appeasing shareholders, then yes, they have to do what they can to lock out "piracy". However, if I was really intent on "pirating" games, then I would go out today and buy GTA so I could use the current exploit, although I do believe (from what I've read) that only a limited number of 'I5O' dumps work with it.

I put piracy in quotation marks, because if I was really serious about playing rips of commercial releases, I would put some effort into reverse-engineering the latest firmware update, and release a patched version which would masquerade as a revision to the current FW. The fact that I can't be bothered, and it seems nobody is either, speaks volumes.

If I was interested in mass-producing games, then I would build a pressing plant in some out-of-the-way location and make proper physical media copies, like the way the real pirates do. Anyone who believes that this is impossible, just because Sony claim to have full control over UMD manufacturing, is just buying into the corporate fantasy of Total Market Control.

I wouldn't be surprised if, with a bit of work, it wasn't possible to upgrade a minidisc production facility to produce the higher-grade UMDs. The form factor is similar enough, so there would presumably be minimal retooling required, and all the development work would be in engineering the blanks for pressing the high-density foils.

Anyhow, I digress, and this is a GP2X forum.

For homebrew, I can accept Sony don't want to take the commercial risk of opening it up, but I think the least they could have done was designed in some kind of hardware-restricted sandbox, i.e. lock out the UMD when running homebrew, remap the IO address, etc. so make it difficult to just load in a dump of a game. That way homebrew developers could work within the specifications of the homebrew developer model, and commercial developers would have their software running under the commercial model. If this had been done, there would have been less incentive from the homebrew scene to actually break the existing protection.

The GP2X is a completely open model, and that hasn't really hurt the PC much over the years. I don't see the GP2X as purely a console, I see it more as an independent, open, general purpose platform in its own right. I have some ideas in this regard, and I would like to be able to come back with some news in a couple of months after I have experimented. Now that I have my own GP2X from Lik Sang which arrived yesterday, I can start pottering about. The problem from this point of view is that because the MMSP2 is a BGA part, I'll have to use whatever lines GPH have chosen to make available on the PCB...

 

[moz]

all my concern is, is that the GP2X community and development doesn't slow down to a halt like the PSP's did (it hasn't stopped but there is like one good release every month). no flaming needed, it was only one of my worries.

​

if the gp2x community turns out like the gp32 community then it will come and go in waves of approx 3months and a new super duper mega coder will turn up on the scence about every 6-12 months with some of them moving onto other things after 12 months

imo the gp2x has go a long way already in just a little amount of time

and if HH turns out with the promise of decent 2nd processor access then all hell could break loose

 

[Sonistar]

the finshing blow is... coders for the psp have to fight a war with sony, where the gp2x coders get accepted by all.

 

[Lettuce Dude]

the finshing blow is... coders for the psp have to fight a war with sony, where the gp2x coders get accepted by all.

​

Not just accepted but praised. All hail Cragix All hail.......

 

[Koba]

ok sweet could someone link me to this HH page? it sounds very interesting.