'Vimacs' said:
A forum about a device should never be in the hands of the manufacturer, its bound to cause interest conflicts.
You are so true about that, but sadly gp32x.de is in no state to be useful in the future.
This has really split the community, and I must say, this was always a great mature community. I have some experience in this type of thing, so let me share it.
I used to be a very active classic game fan. There was a vibrant community and a bunch of website and the r.g.v.c usenet news group. Sometime around 2000 or so the atariage website came along and then shortly after that they took over the distribution of new games written by fans. When they did this, they forced the old ones out of business and from what I recall publicly bashed some of the others. I objected to the new atariage guys and I knew what would happen. The prices all went up. You could get the games for free to play with multi-carts or memory carts and in many cases get the game on a cart for $10. Now the games go for 30-50 dollars. The games do come with nicer cartridges and boxes and stuff, but over all the community suffered and are now at the whims of the atariage website. There are still some cool things going on, but overall everything suffered.
People keep pointing out the the people working with the open pandora project won't be biased against anything because they sold all the systems. But I don't buy that. They have a much bigger stake in Pandora than they ever did in the GP32 or GP2X and they weren't segmented because they viewed all systems equally because a sale was a sale. But now, a sale for the wiz would usually be a lost sale for the pandora. In other words, they stood to profit or succeed equally from any sale before, but now they have a huge stake in the Pandora. They have to make back all the money and time they have invested in the Pandora. Does anyone think they are going to push the Wiz as hard as they would their own product? Also gp32x was a fan site not a gamepark owned site and even if it was, there was no competition. The only thing available was the GP32. None of this is a very bad thing. I understand WHY these guys want to push the Pandora. They want their product to succeed. Trusting them to be totally unbiased is very unrealistic. Anyone who doubts this is being unrealistic. It's human nature. It's the very reason science does double blind studies.
The owner of this website should really step up to the plate and get the site fixed, especially since so many people are willing to do it FOR FREE. He is making a stupid mistake. He could let these guys do all the work and keep the site going and all he does is pay for it and make whatever money the site may make. At this point, I am guessing the gp32x.de is not making any money which may explain his lack of interest.
I really hope we can resolve the issue without any major division of the community. This community is what makes the GP32 and the GP2X such wonderful platforms. Without the community the machines are bricks. Another thing I really liked about this site, especially when I first joined (things were different back then) was that the users were not teenagers. Now, I have nothing against teens, it's just that typically the hand held gaming market is built around kids. The gp32 was different. It focused largely on emulators and simpler classic type games that were no longer being made. The GP32 tended to draw an older audience and it really showed in the forums. If you go to any GBA or PSP or NDS forum you will immediately notice the difference. The idea of being able to play all your favorite older games on a portable game system was awesome and something that never existed before. The screen and controls were excellent... In any event, the gp32 would have been a one time failure if not for the community that actively supported it and I am far more concerned about the community in general than about any particular game system. Despite the fact that I feel the gp32 and the gp2x have plenty of life left in them, people do move on. So keeping the community vibrant and growing will ensure new hardware down the line. So please keep this in mind.
I did come off too strong last night in my earlier post and I apologize for it. I just get angry when people who are pandora fans dismiss the GP32 and GP2X as if they were unimportant or criticize them without ever having owned one. I am not saying that the post that I replied to was a non owner, it's just a general statement. I would notice people trashing the system and admitting that they don't own one and never used or even seen one. They go on and on about how wonderful the Pandora is and they don't even own a Pandora, let along the GP2X they say is such trash compared to the machine they don't even own. Some guy who joined 3 days ago has 25 posts trashing the gp systems and I think "Well, what are you doing here?" I don't go onto psp website and tell them how much the PSP sucks and I suspect most GP owners also abstain from that sort of behavior. So I apologize for how strongly I worded it, but I just get tired of it. The post I replied to suggested backing up the pandora section of the website and never even gave the gp sections a thought, which I thought was inconsiderate on a gp forum
Hopefully things will work themselves out and I really hope that the owner of GP32X decided to resurrect the site to it's former working design and glory.
Chris
