Still use your gp32? Gp2x? Wiz? Caanop? (Zodiac...)

[atari_afternoon]

Well I at least still regularly play with GP2X and Wiz, at least once every other week, I got either around the same time as the Pandora (I did not know about Linux handhelds until 2011) so they are not "old" in my opinion. GP2X is great as a "backlit NGPC" and for Lynx games that benefit from save function, Wiz is mostly my Doom-mod machine. Wish I had gotten a Caanoo with a better screen, the GP2X is far better here.

 

[Hooka]

Caanoo screen leaves alot to be desired with it's "backlight gradient" effect, I'll always pickup the wiz or GP2X first just based on that and find despite being a little too small, wiz is my favorite screen of any device I have, so vibrant and when playing in the dark, if the screen goes black, the whole room goes dark  Not to say it doesn't have it's disadvantages... eventually it will probably get pixel rot and since I first got it any screen that is a solid color you can see the slight difference in each pixel, but I find it doesn't affect normal gameplay so I'm fine with that. Almost gives it a dithered color feel to it.

 

[skeezix]

Hmm, now I wonder if any dpad or joystick mods can be designed and 3d printed

 

[slaanesh]

Man I have so many handhelds! Out of all things computers and gaming, handhelds are my favourite and the GP2x, Dingoo A-320, Pandora, Ben Nanonote and GCW-Zero are my favourites. GP32 should also be that list I guess


I've recently got the Sharp Zaurus bug so decided to  get MAME4ALL running on both machines I currently own setup as follows:


Sharp Zaurus SL-860


cacko 1.23 lite
libsdl 1.2.5-slzaurus20041025-j


Sharp Zaurus SL-C1000
cacko 1.23 lite


bvdd 0.4.0-1
libsdl 1.2.5-bvdd-07-2


MAME4ALL runs ... well, okay... but not really great. I was expecting them to be faster than the GP2X but they're not, both are slower.


The SL-860 version seems to be faster than the C1000 - I believe that's thanks to the W100 video.
The C1000, despite using bvdd framebuffer driver and having a superior CPU, is somewhat slower.


I'm using gcc 2.95.3 (-O3 -fomit-frame-pointer), which is so old it's probably producing pretty unoptimized ARM code but I can't get a more recent toolchain so I'm guessing the C1000 is suffering more here as I can't build optimized binaries for it.


I don't have a Linux machine, I have a a Macbook running OSX and an iMac which pretty much dedicated to running Windows 7 via bootcamp.


It's all a bit disappointing.


On the bright side (literally), the screens on both are gorgeous, really sharp, vivid displays. Superb given how old they are.


Must have been super-awesome 10 years ago when these machines were current.


I'm also getting a SL-5600 just for giggles which is on it's way from Russia.


Anyone else have Sharp Zaurus developing experience?

 

[benoitb]

So has anyone else got a Sharp Zaurus? I have a CL-860 and recently ported MAME4ALL to it... For a 400Mhz ARM CPU machine it's disappointingly slow. Here I'm thinking superior speeds to GP2X but sorely mistaken. I'm using Cacko v1.23, BVVM, libsdl 1.2.5-slzaurus20041025-j from the Cacko feed. This seems to be the only libsdl which properly supports 320x240 modes on my Zaurus.

I had some back then (C1000, 760 and 700). Even on the faster ones I could not have the Megadrive emus to run fullspeed. Almost but I needed some frameskip. I only played Shining Force on it as frameskip is no issue for that game. I can't remember if it was Cacko or pdaXrom, I think it was on Cacko.


Zaurus was a wonderful device, unbrickable and with a wonderful screen. The wifi card was expensive, though. I always thought it was a shame that wifi was not integrated in such devices.

 

[atari_afternoon]

Caanoo screen leaves alot to be desired with it's "backlight gradient" effect, I'll always pickup the wiz or GP2X first just based on that and find despite being a little too small, wiz is my favorite screen of any device I have, so vibrant and when playing in the dark, if the screen goes black, the whole room goes dark  Not to say it doesn't have it's disadvantages... eventually it will probably get pixel rot and since I first got it any screen that is a solid color you can see the slight difference in each pixel, but I find it doesn't affect normal gameplay so I'm fine with that. Almost gives it a dithered color feel to it.

+1


Caanoo is great for ScummVM in my opinion, the speakers are also great and loud; other than that, I like screen and handling of the Wiz better, I totally second what you said there.


Later generation Caanoos, however, seem to have gotten worse lit screens in Korea than the earlier runs, we compared them on the pandora de-board some months ago - mine is from 2011.


Anyway, just finished the freedoom levels on Wiz, now playing then on GP2X. And then onto some GP2X Quake again