What Is The Down Side Of A Dingoo

[J_B]

Ok I have looked at all the good points of a Dingoo the price is very good $100
Now what is the down side of a Dingoo?
:huh:

 

[iprice]

You are Red Baron/RedBaron/Joker and I claim my £200

 

[J_B]

You are Red Baron/RedBaron/Joker and I claim my £200

You have herd of the game Where's Waldo but in this case you are all playing Where's Red Baron, you are all nuts

 

[Iorgy77]

The downside for me are the following:

The screen looks its best at a bit of an angle rather than looking at it dead on.
The reset hole is a bitch if the thing hangs and you don't have a paper clip or something handy, you can mod it to fix this.
The performance of some of the more demanding emulators isn't as good as the wiz.
Dmenu is a bit of a pain to set up but they have gmenu2x ported now so that's sorted.
Battery is hard wired so when that goes it will be a bit tricky to replace (meh.. just buy another if they are still available)
Last time I checked no movie player for dingux only for original firmware.

For $100AUD it really is a great console though with some really nice software.

 

[euleberlin]

Hey lorgy, there´s MPlayer for Dingux: e.g. here :lol:

For me the downsides are:
Bad shoulder buttons
Weird LCD angle (left good, right bad)
TV-Out only in native firmware
4GB flash not accessible from Dingux

That´s it for me

 

[christo930]

Ok I have looked at all the good points of a Dingoo the price is very good $100
Now what is the down side of a Dingoo?
:huh:

Chines piece of junk
You have to install dingux for extra stuff
Hard wired battery

 

[slaanesh]

From a developers point of view

Bad points:

* Lack of double buffering
* Lack of 8-bit graphic modes
* Lack of video v-sync
* 64MB instead of 32MB would have made a huge difference to the higher end emulators
* MIPS cpu (everything else now days is ARM)

Good points:

* Fastest startup for Linux based console (a few seconds!)
* Lovely bright screen
* Easy to develop with Linux
* Ethernet over USB
* Excellent battery life
* Cheap

 

[quote]

You are Red Baron/RedBaron/Joker and I claim my £200

It's not him. This guy seems mildly more intelligent.

 

[fishybawb]

Shoulder buttons
Only 32MB RAM
No hardware volume control

The problems don't outweigh the benefits though, it's well made, has nice form factor, decent controls (minus the aforementioned shoulder buttons), great battery life and is a surprisingly capable little device. Oh, and it's dirt cheap too.

 

[FunkeeMunkey]

The device is pretty well built.. It's almost impressive for a chinese handheld.

The only problems are the following..

1.) poor support.. Development documentation is all in Chinese.

2.) BIOS updates are first available for brand new systems before an update is posted to the community. It seems like important updates like that are first found by word of mouth and then someone has to beat it out of Dingoo to get a release.

3.) Native emulators are OK at best, If one wants to do anything with it productive it maybe better to
flash the rom to install Dingux.

4.) Websites are OK at best. Dingoonity is probably your best bet, but they're more for doing things with Dingux, rather than the native OS. (Reasons for that in #1 of my list.)

5.) Mini SD CARD... ugh.. hard to find unless you like ebay a lot.

6.) Battery is a bitch to replace.

Other than these here, I'm pretty happy with the unit. If all you want to do is emulate, it's a great handheld!

Don't look for many Non-Native games though.. Most stuff is via emulation of other consoles.

 

[blueshift]

Battery is hard wired so when that goes it will be a bit tricky to replace (meh.. just buy another if they are still available)

To be fair, even though the battery for the Wiz is replacable. If your living in the US theirs no place to order a new one within the country. I was looking at prices for replacement batteries and it costs about $55 to order one from Germany or Hong Kong and have it shipped to the US.

I also called around a bunch of different stores and none of them said they could rebuild a lipo cell.

* MIPS cpu (everything else now days is ARM)

Why is ARM > MIPS?

 

[Exophase]

Why is ARM > MIPS?

I think what he was getting at was that there's a lot of optimized ARM ASM out there for say, emulators, and not a lot for MIPS. GCC output isn't that great for either, but the nature of ARM lets itself better to exploitation via hand assembly.

When comparing actual CPUs you can't just go by the architecture, when it's the particular implementation of the CPU that determines clock rate and how many instructions per cycle it can typically execute. Most of these MIPS and older ARM CPUs in handhelds are pretty similar in implementation though; they're single issue with 16/16KB of cache and have similarly lengthed pipelines. With everything else kept equal I think the ARM instruction set does have better performance potential than MIPS, because of folded shifts, predicates, and better memory addressing modes. MIPS is occasionally better at something too, though, and Dingoo's CPU does have SIMD extensions.

 

[axiomprime]

The shoulder buttons are crap and the reset button needs a paperclip. If you're playing loads of ROMs then you will get crashes (bad or incompatible ROMs) so wear a badge or put a paperclip on your Dingoo case. It's tricky to install Dingux and exploit its full potential.

On the other hand it's easier than the Wiz to get going. You get a charger with it and, since it's got built-in flashRAM, you can be playing most 8bit and 16biy games within 2 minutes of it being charged without even having to buy a microSD card.

 

[slaanesh]

... and Dingoo's CPU does have SIMD extensions.

I wish I knew how to use them in gcc.

 

[flatmush]

... and Dingoo's CPU does have SIMD extensions.

I wish I knew how to use them in gcc.

If you look at "mxu_user_guide_EN.pdf" it talks about an awk script that patches assembly files to work with MXU instructions, assuming you can find the script among the millions of files on the ingenic ftp then it should be pretty straight forward.

All the files off the ingenic ftp (including "mxu_user_guide_EN.pdf") are mirrored here: http://boards.dingoonity.org/dingux-development/everything-ingenic-up-to-date-i-could-get-on-development-and-white-papers/

 

[Harteex]

The script is called mxu_as, and can be found in the bin folder of the toolchain (or at least the toolchains hosted by flatmush).

 

[flatmush]

The script is called mxu_as, and can be found in the bin folder of the toolchain (or at least the toolchains hosted by flatmush).

Lol, now I feel stupid.