The Wiz or the Dingoo?


Loser777

Still Fresh
Joined
Apr 29, 2009
Messages
9
I'm been looking for years for a nice balance between media/gaming in a handheld... unfortunately, everything thus far has failed...
The Nintendo DS, even with a flashcart and homebrew is far too weak in Audio/Video, as well as emulation. The Ipod Touch's lack of any UI aside from the touch screen makes any gaming beyond shallow 30-second ventures impossible. However, both the A320 and the Wiz look pretty promising... though the 533MHz ARM9 seems to make me lean towards the Wiz. My biggest concern right now is the audio capabilities of the handhelds... I don't care much about the interface, but what kind of sound do these devices typically put out? And is FLAC going to be supported on the Wiz -either via homebrew or built into the firmware?
Which console would you guys recommend? (I'm posting in the Dingoo Section since the Wiz board seems dead)
Thanks
 
I just ordered the Dingoo right now and once I get I'll run an RMAA test. I don't know how they sound I don't think it will be amazing, except for the Pandora.

I chose the Dingoo over the Wiz because I've been told its acutally more powerful than the Wiz once the emualtors are optimized. (wrong, below)Right now they don't run perfectly yet. I also chose the Dingoo because I have own an Archos device that has the exact same case styling as the Wiz and I didn't like the way it is held which cramped the hand over time, although the control on the Wiz seem to look like its in the ideal place. The Wiz only play 640x480 res videos which is a deal breaker for me.

If sound and video quality is that important, I would get pmp player seperate from an emulation player. The most idea device that can do both well is probably going to be the pandora.
 
"I chose the Dingoo over the Wiz because I've been told its acutally more powerful than the Wiz once the emualtors are optimized."

I think someone misled you - because the Wiz should be on another whole different level with regards to processor power.

That said, I did buy the Dingoo because of the low price - and the report that Zod will be porting MAME. I haven't gotten mine yet - but I'll be extremely patient, since MAME is my ultimate goal for this device.
 
There's no way the Dingoo is more powerful than the Wiz, those who claimed so probably said "GP2X" and meant the GP2X F-100/F-200.

If you want more than just emulators (ie. lots of nice ports and original games), the old GP2X will still beat the crap out of the Dingoo no matter what, as will the Wiz no doubt :)
 
In that case I hope it can atleast play dvd quality videos smoothly and once day able to emulator the snes. That's what I'm mostly looking for.
 
To me the dingoo looks like a great piece of hardware with great potential, but I'm worried about it's lack of support from the manufacturer...
I haven't seen any attempts to optimize emulators or even to fix the Y/B problem...
To me it looks like the GP2x Wiz will at least have an established homebrew/open-source community as a result of the F-100/F-200s, while the dingoo has yet to get one.
The dingoo itself has FLAC support and a FM Tuner, two features that make it very compelling for me over the GP2x Wiz, but the lack of support really bothers me.
 
Well the Dingo looks like a nice game device.

But I now have the Wiz and I must say I really like it, ofcourse not everything is ready if you look at the emu's.
Though I have a lot of fun with Warcraft on it, Genesis (Sonic :D) and Mame.

More will come shortly if the Wiz arrives at the stores.

I would go for the Wiz, but the Dingo is sure a good handheld!
 
Yeah, the greater support from the homebrew community + greater processing power has kind of made any of the dingoo's advantages pale in comparison.
 
Xian Long said:
please. this is like the argument over getting a pandora or a wiz.
No, it isn't. The Pandora and Wiz are in completely different categories. The Pandora is several times faster, has double the battery life, 4x the RAM, 5X the display resolution, and loads more input and connectivity options than the Wiz. It's like comparing a Toyota to the Batmobile.

Comparing the Wiz and A320 is like comparing a Toyota to a Hyundai: perfectly reasonable. They're both roughly the same size and shape and have comparably powerful processors. The Wiz has a better screen and 3D acceleration, while the A320 has longer battery life and is half the price. There are certainly differences between them, but they both fill the exact same niche.
 
The Dingoo is not currently well supported as we all know, but it has only been available to the public for a few months, so the homebrew dev scene is in its infancy. Once more people get one and develop for it, I think it will catch up to the wiz. The only reason that the wiz is ahead imho is because of the scene that existed around the gp2x. GPH know it is in their best interests to support the devs who are the ones that are making the device as useful as possible for its intended purpose.

The Dingoo is quite powerful as far as I can tell. The emulators haven't been ported with as much care or as many optimizations as the ones that exist on the gp2x or the wiz, but they are not completely and utterly terrible. So far, media playback has been quite good. I've only run into problems trying to play ogg video, but there has been a custom firmware released that may rectify that issue.

In regards to performance comparisons, there is no point insisting one is better than the other until someone actually benchmarks both consoles. I'm no expert, but it pisses me off when people make know it all comments based on superficial specifications like clock speed to strengthen their arguement for or against their preferred device. THAT is misleading.

Both are promising devices although currently the wiz shows more promise when it comes to software.

I have a Dingoo and will not be buying a wiz, because I don't like the buttons. GPH just can't seem to get the control layout right for a handheld gaming device imo. When I first saw promo shots of the wiz with 2 D-pads I thought it looked freakin' hilarious, considering that out of the 2 different gp2x models available, one didn't even have a D-pad, and the one that did had a half-assed D-pad. So what do they do? Put 2 proper looking D-pads on one device. Compensating much?

Still, the wiz seems to be a good device that I'm sure lots of people will purchase and enjoy. Current shortcomings aside the Dingoo is a good device that needs some attention. Pandora is clearly superior to both of them. Get whatever suits you in form and function the best. Hell, get 'em all! Just don't be a fanboy. Nobody likes a fanboy.
 
Firefox (of the Jag Emu port fame) is messing with the Dingoo now:

Firefox said:
Doing a little bit of a game for the Dingoo:

2009-04-19-0931-small.jpg


(Should've turned the brightness down a bit before taking the photo. The colours don't look washed out in real life.)

It's looking a bit like Zarch because the player's ship is just four triangles at the moment, but I was thinking of making the gameplay more like Zeewolf where the action takes place close to the ground.

Excuse the big blue triangle looming over the horizon! I just put that there when I was working out the pixel colour format of the framebuffer, and haven't bothered to take it out.

Firefox said:
piku said:
I really like low poly 3D style games for some reason :)
I miss them, really. I think they could work well on teensy handhelds, because the small screen limits how much detail you can put across anyway.

Here's a shot from last weekend of the same program running under SDL:

2009-04-13-1943.png


I spent several weeks looking for a suitable game to port to the Dingoo, but in the end I thought I'd write a simple game that just needed to plot coloured pixels and read button presses. That makes the hurdle I have to jump to get it running on a new platform quite low.

Interestingly, the random number generator doesn't seem to work on the Dingoo. Instead of ground squares of random colours centred around green I get squares of a uniform colour (which is why I've turned the corner dots on). But the maps will eventually be generated by a separate program and compiled in anyway.

He's also stated that he might be porting Dio's Jag emulator to it (re-working the GP2X port) to see just how fast this little thing is, but it won't be without its problems:

Firefox said:
Well... I dunno, really.

The A320 probably has more computing power than a GP2X, or as much but more usefully concentrated into a single core, but it's a MIPS core so I'd have to run the slower Mushashi 68000 emulator instead of fdave's Cyclone.

When I get a minute I'll rummage through my pile of T2K ports and pick one that'll be easy to quickly hack into an A320 build (probably one of the single-core GP2X ports).


I think that the main problem will be the asm cores that people have hacked together for ARM won't translate very well initially to the MIPS processor, but it's gathering support at an astonishing rate - I've seen far more of these in the wild than I have of people who want a Wiz; most people don't know what the Wiz is, and the Dingoo is actually out there now.

D.
 
Wiz has the advantage of being ARM. Most emulators for GP2X that are being ported to Wiz (or have already been ported) have a substantial amount of ARM ASM behind them. Emulators for PSP, on the other hand, have little MIPS ASM. GCC output is still lacking for both platforms. MIPS isn't as nice to write anyway, for a CPU interpreter core there are a lot of tricks you can do in ARM that you can't do in MIPS. For instance, it takes three instructions to fetch an opcode, you can't perform 8bit operations in the top byte of a register using folded shifts, and you can't emulate flags natively to any real extent.

To get more to the point, everyone thinks that there are going to be emulators that are so much faster than the current ones and I'm skeptical. Especially for SNES. PSP fared better because people were able to resort to using the video hardware when possible to help out with some things and use the second CPU to do the sound emulation. SNES emulation is ultimately locked down to SNES9x, as it has been with GP32 and GP2X. ARM ASM cores for CPU/SPC700 helped there, but the real bottleneck is video and the best we ever really got were hack options that threw away machine features for speed.

I wonder what the memory bandwidth and latency are like on A320. And the cache ways, since the datasheet doesn't say that for some reason.
 
I think I'm probably going to get the Wiz then if the controls aren't too ridiculous... I mean I was already skeptical of the A320s performance, especially on SNES emulation, as even SNES for PSP isn't 100%... I also doubt devs will be as enthusiastic about coding for the A320 as it's MIPS and not ARM.
 
You maaaayyyy wanna just wait a tick.
193_179329_0.jpg

Meet the A380
Has a 4.3" 'HD' screen, price estimated at $100. Not much else is known atm, but more info should follow.

I just got my dingoo a few days ago, and I can't say much about it that hasn't already been said: The hardware itself is great. It's surprisingly well built & boasts a great form-factor, But it is hindered by poor software. I'm confident in the developing scene though, quite a lot of progress has been made in a short amount of time, someone is apparently even working on a PSX emu (how practical, i dunno).

The wiz looks great & I would love to have it around just for it's gorgeous oled screen, but from a design standpoint I have to go with the dingoo (times a thousand with the a380).
 
Yay, PSP ripoff. Don't think the wide-screen resolution is a good thing for what it's targeted to do and I don't think the analog nub is going to do much for anyone, but could be alright >_> Probably is a little easier to hold.

That's the problem with these PMPs though, the companies are always moving on to other things that are ultimately not totally compatible.

I strongly doubt a PS1 emulator is going to be going anywhere for this hardware without someone really skilled behind it (look at the nonsense that went on with PSP, vastly overhyped ports of PCSX that didn't perform very well at all.. until Sony stepped up that is)
 
Exactly, I'm still siding with GPH's devices as Dingoo seems a bit too fickle in terms of development/support.
 
That only serves to show for me how fickle and unpredictable dingoo is with their handhelds... I'd rather not purchase something from a company that will reinvent something it made itself when the first device is far from maturing. It's like a retarded version of Moore's law where one company competes against itself -thereby hurting interest in its existing products -much the same reason that Apple delayed the announcement of it's 3G iPhone...
However, the A380 may turn out to be completely compatible with the 320, and thus share a DSi to DS short of relationship with the Dingoo. However, the Wiz's theoretical internals make it a much more comfortable buying decision for me as Emulators will benefit from faster hardware.
At this point, I'm not ready to believe that dingoo is firmly committed to standing behind its handhelds. Still, my final decision is to be made after the release of the Wiz.
 
Back
Top