Should I Sell My Wiz And Get A Caanoo?

[marzsyndrome]

Sometimes I wonder whether I got myself a Wiz at an inopportune time last year, just as the Caanoo was announced and coming out in a matter of a few months. Fast forward several months and I notice a slowly increasing amount of stuff that gets released only for the Caanoo with no prospect of a Wiz port in sight, nor a GINGE-like offshoot to run Caanoo software on a Wiz.

Now I've always felt that the Wiz had one of the most comfortable and lovely compact styles ever made for a handheld - not to mention one of the most colourful and vibrant screens I've ever come across - and it's been the best one of my handhelds to use for Mega Drive and TurboGrafx emulation in particular. However, there's been some software that only ever received a one-off "quickie" port (adapted from the original GP2X code) before being quickly abandoned again (UAE4ALL and VICE immediately come to mind), usually performing rather disappointingly compared to equivalent versions on other handhelds. And the Wiz is still without any decent SMS/GG emulator - I have no clue whether DrSMS is supposed to be miles better than AlexKidd2X, since there's been no Wiz version so far. And of course, the Wiz's diagonal screen issue was a silly mistake that shouldn't have been allowed to happen in the first place, even if later models did (from what I've read) lessen the effect somewhat. It's a shame that not everyone could do a Notaz and patch their way around it in the end.

Mind you, I've always liked the D-Pad of the Wiz, and do have concerns about whether that analog-like thingy on the Caanoo is any better or easier to use for, well, non-analog stuff (which I reckon is 100% of everything released for the device to date). I also understand that to run stuff like Temper on it would require GINGE, but I'm hoping that it's at least possible to skip the whole "run the GP2X frontend first then choose an app" business altogether and have it run the app through a wrapper - is this possible?

I've been eyeing up Caanoos on eBay recently and it seems like you can get one for around £70-£90 delivered nowadays, which sounds good at least. I just have to be more thoughtful about it having gotten the Wiz and a second-hand PSP-2000 last year and a (also second-hand) Dingoo A320 a few weeks ago (which I'm already starting to consider selling). I've already consigned myself to the fact that I'm likely never going to receive a Pandora while it's still in production when it goes for the same price as a 'cheap' laptop/desktop PC nowadays, and besides that the likes of the PS Vita (which will inevitably be cracked in the end, let's face it) are already starting to look more powerful in comparison (not to mention significantly cheaper), even if they do lack a built-in keyboard.

So yeah, should I consign myself to the prospect of most developers abandoning the Wiz and move on to the Caanoo, or should I still hold out hope for more interesting software to come for my funky little black device of wonder? I'm all ears.

 

[Surkow]

Keep the Wiz, get a Caanoo. The Wiz has a superior screen.

 

[Orion4874]

Yeah, if you can afford it, keep them both. They both have their strong points imo.

 

[LTStone]

Hmm it sounds like you have pretty high standards, If you're not happy with the Wiz or Dingoo you will probably be disappointed with the Caanoo as well since they all have issues of one kind or another.

 

[HunterZ]

I had to choose between the Wiz and Caanoo when I was originally looking to by, and I went with the Wiz because it had more native ports of various things and because I liked the idea of a D-pad better than the rocking nub thing. From what I've heard, the under-the-hood specs of the Caanoo are not really better than the Wiz, so I plan to just hang on to my Wiz until it dies and then hope that something better is out that is not expensive and/or hard to obtain.

The Wiz servers all my needs perfectly (mainly 8- and 16-bit emulation), save for somewhat disappointing SNES emulation, but I have no reason to believe Caanoo would do any better. Hopefully something with a newer ARM SoC will come along and get popular enough to have some active porting/development. The technical and price point similarities of the Wiz and Caanoo, combined with the presence of the Pandora seems to have badly fractured developer/porter interests and slowed down the community, so I think it's unfortunately easy to find disappointments with every platform.

 

[qbertaddict]

The caanoo is a great device I like it better than my wiz. The analog nub is very nice and you can run ginge games right from the main menu. The Dingoo A320 has much better ports than all of them except for PSX emulation. Open dingux and the native side of things are getting a lot of love. Vice(c64) on the dingoo native is better than any port on the wiz and caanoo. GB/GBC GBA SMS/GG and Atari ST ports are also better on the dingoo. And now that opendingux was released everything that was ported from regular dingux to opendingux runs with tvout perfectly and is faster not to mention gpsp for opendingux is awesome compared to the wiz and caanoo. Pocketsnes on the native is awesome and better than the caanoo and wiz ports hands down. What Im trying to say is keep your dingoo(and learn more about it), keep your wiz(only for the nice screen otherwise ditch it), and buy a caanoo. Between them all you cannot loose.

 

[skeezix]

The Caanoo is not much of a tech change from previous units (arguably the gp2x before the Wiz was strongest in some ways, weaker in others.) Really, its all about ergonomics - look and feel.

The Wiz screen is nicer (if it didn't bitrot on you), but *I* found the unit too small to hold comfortably .. and I really really dislike the buttons on it; just too fiddly and small and poorly placed; the d-pad (left) is fiddly and hard to conmtrol, and the d-buttons on right are too close together (owing to the original dual-cross design before they split the buttons.) Finger ache for me just to hold it for 5 minutes, and my hands aren't really large.

So _personally_, I think the Caanoo is a hit look and feel wise; it is goofy that the screen bezel masks some of the pixel surface (!!), and the d-pad is analog and not really used much in an analog way.. but it maps okay to digital ordinals, so I don't notice much problem there; the volume 'slider' is annoying, since its forever moving on me (put device in pocket/whatever and volume _will_ change..) and its hard to get a satisfactory volume; so lots of little nitsd.

But the Caanoo screen is nice and big, and the device feels good and looks sharp. Its essentially as functional as the Wiz, or more so.

Myself, I'd pick up and use the Caanoo, and will not touch a Wiz again except for bug fixes or whatever of my code.

(I've coded for all these various devices; I prefer Caanoo over Wiz and gp2x F100 and F200.)

Check the software library, that is all that really matters; if it doesn't have what you need, don't move up.

jeff

 

[HunterZ]

So _personally_, I think the Caanoo is a hit look and feel wise; it is goofy that the screen bezel masks some of the pixel surface (!!), and the d-pad is analog and not really used much in an analog way.. but it maps okay to digital ordinals, so I don't notice much problem there; the volume 'slider' is annoying, since its forever moving on me (put device in pocket/whatever and volume _will_ change..) and its hard to get a satisfactory volume; so lots of little nitsd.

For what it's worth, my Wiz bezel obscures the leftmost column of pixels unless I turn it a bit to the left instead of looking at it straight-on.

I don't mind the Wiz D-pad, and I actually chose it over the Caanoo because I was tired of controllers that make it difficult to switch from pressing one cardinal direction to another without registering a diagonal direction in between. It's definitely a bit small for my hands, but I've become a bit used to it.

I have a bit of an opposite problem with the Wiz volume, as I often play in environments where I want to have the sound just barely audible. Because the volume is software-controlled, many games and emulators reset the volume on launch and I have to frantically turn the volume back down. I also noticed that it's often hard to get a quiet enough volume level because anything lower than a level of 5 is completely silent.