Should I Have Ordered The Gp2x...

[Sonistar]

haha worshipped like a budda god!

 

[Goity]

Crag for the win...

 

[DaveC]

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

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The benefit though is uber powerful hardware with the PSP. The GP2X is weak in comparison to the PSP hence full speed SNES on PSP, Transparency-less, poor sound quality SNES on the GP2X. Basically it means there is still no perfect emu portable yet as they all have their advantages and flaws. I guess it depends on the person as to which is the "winner". If all you want is SNES and PSX then the PSP is it, If you want an open system and don't mind a few more hardware limitations then the GP2X is best.

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.

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I think you missed part of my point above. Piracy is only part of it. Emulators are not wanted on the PSP by Sony as it would take sales away from commercial titles. If you have easy access to 1000's of games ranging from GB to SNES to NeoGeo many people will buy less games, some will buy none. An internet connection and a blank memory stick is all you would need for quite a long time. Sony makes money from their games, not Fr33 R0MZ0RZ.

 

[Epicenter]

The benefit though is uber powerful hardware with the PSP.  The GP2X is weak in comparison to the PSP hence full speed SNES on PSP, Transparency-less, poor sound quality SNES on the GP2X.

The majority of the advantage the PSP has speed-wise, though, is its graphical processing capabilities, hence its speed in PSX emulation (a hardware rendering engine is the advantage; the GP2x's ARM920T and the PSP's MIPS core are both perfectly capable of the emulation of the R3000A in the PSX..) Same for SNES-- in all likelihood transparencies and some other elements are handled with help from the GPU. As for raw CPU horsepower, which matters more for emulating more powerful processors in consoles themselves, the GP2x at the very least breaks even with a 250 MHz (rated) ARM9 which usually makes it to 266+ MHz, and in my case at least, 300+ MHz. Given the efficiency of the ARM9 architecture next to the aging MIPS one (compounded with its very low power usage and low heat dissipation next to the old, power-hungry and often warm-running Rxxxx series) there may be a performance advantage beyond raw 1-to-1 clockrate comparisons as well-- and likely is.

The FPU complicates things. The PSP is able to natively run floating-point math, while the GP2x has to work around it or emulate an FPU. But this matters a lot as to WHAT you are emulating- e.g. 90% of my favorite games run on a 68000, an integer-only microprocessor, so it comes as no consequence to run them on the GP2x's Integer-only ARM9. While something that demands heavy use of floating point (3D applications come to mind..) Benefit more on the PSP.

So yes, it is indeed a balance situation. But the PSP is not truly inherently more powerful in all applications when you take into account the COST of its abilities in power consumption especially. And most of its benefits are for 3D .. which most Gp2x users won't be using often.

 

[Sonistar]

i thought the psp with its 333mhz core (or whatever ) and the gp2x with its two 200 mhz cores..

surely 400mhz over two cores is more powerful than one 33mhz?

or am i just talking crap (readies the noob sticker)

 

[nickspoon]

i thought the psp with its 333mhz core (or whatever ) and the gp2x with its two 200 mhz cores..

surely 400mhz over two cores is more powerful than one 33mhz?

or am i just talking crap (readies the noob sticker)

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And here we go again.

In the GP2X, 200MHz + 200MHz does not equal 400MHz. Instead, 200MHz + 200MHz = 2 x 200MHz. A program cannot simply take advantage of an entire 400MHz, it has to use both in a way that is beneficial to the program's running, though this still does not constitute 400MHz, due to certain difficulties on each processor, such as the 2nd one not having an MMU.

Basically, having two processors is an advantage for some things (video decoding comes to mind) but a disadvantage for others. The dualcpu setup has not been used to its full effect yet, so it's too soon to judge.

 

[FFNoir]

However on disadvantage with the PSP is their decision to use the MIPS processor... it's not as friendly to overclock as the GP2X's...

 

[Sonistar]

and the sticker is stamped on my forehead.