DaveC posted on May 24 2006 at 01:08 PM said:
Ok I am suprised it seems like you prefer the GP32 over the GP2X, I don't think you updated MAME for it, just the GP32. I found the GP2X screen to have much better contrast and color than the GP32, but I guess the stick is better on the GP32. Too bad they couldn't put the GP32 stick on the Gp2X.
Do you have a replacement cap or the original? If it is the original then I can understand, it sucks. Get one of the replacements from Craig, the caps DO make a big difference. It seems strange that the GP2X stick feels odd to you but the analog one on the Palm doesn't feel odd? When I had one of those I could not play anything digital very well on that analog, Ms-Pac-man was impossible for me and always ended up in a long string of expletives. You must have l337 skillz to do it
Actually I'm not that fond of the controller either, but it is alright. It's just everything else about it that I love. Touch screen, heaps of buttons, comfortable to hold, small enough for my pocket, purty enough to pull out in public and does most things fairly well. With the updated BIOS for it (v1.1) the calibration of the stick is a lot better, so you can play pacman with it - but I know what you mean - the expletives are still there. PalmMAME with Zodiac acceleration is really quite good. Kudos to Vilmos. It's highly compatible and with a bit of pushing and showing he got Cyclone core working with it. 68K games really fly now. If he can get DrZ80 working with it - I'd say he'd have a really kick-ass handheld MAME. But it's still brilliant as is.
I've got a host of other handhelds and I've got MAME for all the machines that have it.
There's also ZodMAME which is really, really good for some games - plays them full speed with sound! All the vector based games are great! However, many games don't work or have messed up colors. Looking forward to v1.1 of this - Fangorn is going to add Cyclone to it.
The GP2X version of MAME is probably the fastest of the lot - with all the optimizations that Franxis (and later Chui) have made it pretty much flies - even with sound. It's really compatible and plays just about all 0.34/0.35 MAME games. But I don't need to tell you guys that...

It's got loads of buttons, a decent screen but not the best stick. Pity. Why did they change it?
I'll have to look into getting a cap. Or like I said before, I might just get a MkII.
The GP32 version of MAME is the predecessor to the GP2X version - so of course it's also good. The GP32 has better controls and (until recently) booted orders of magnitude faster. Not many buttons, but it most cases it doesn't matter. Doesn't play as many of the games due to lack of RAM but it still does a good job.
The Nokia N-Gage port is pretty good considering the hardware specs. It runs a limited subset of lower-end games - but some suprisingly well. It's controller is also surprisingly good and solid and provides excellent and precise control with loads of buttons.
I think one of the most disappointing MAME ports has been for the PSP. The new MAME4ALL PSP port looks promising (after all, it's Franxis's and Chui's MAME!), but so far there's not been a lot of MAME love there. Other ports of been *amazingly* slow, though credit must be given as the ports are based on a lot more current versions of MAME. Perhaps the lack of acceleration is the problem?
I don't have a PowerPC handheld - so I can't comment on that one.
Any other handheld MAME ports?