Where are the old folk of GP32?


I thought about doing a GP32 emulator at one point.. worked on it for maybe a day. Maybe one day it'll happen... doesn't seem like it'd be too much work, at least for those who already have the ARM9 dynarec part done. Seeing as how the SoC doesn't have too much else in terms of complex peripherals, especially when ignoring ones that are probably not used much by the system.
 
I'd be a happy camper :)
So many nice games... there's also a Gianas Return version with totally different levels :)
 
Blimey this is a blast from the past! Maybe time to dig out the old GP32
 
My GP32 (blu) starts into the menu, but the SMC is corrupted (and I only have one 128MB SMC).
Also the BLU doesn't work anymore, and you actually really need it if there is not a lot of light.
 
Was GP32 really a SOC? as I remember it seemed like it was a cpu and a few external chips... simple but effective..., but maybe the s3c2400X is a SoC, I'm nowhere near as smrt about these things as Exophase....

...and yeah, I'd love to see a sweet GP32 emulator, or even something like spot/ginge... Mind you I have a gp32 with a set of full smc's sitting feet away, but sometimes it's convenient to just have the Pandora on me and use it for everything :p I rarely use my GP2X anymore unless it's in the dock hooked up to the projector... GINGE might not run everything, but it sure hits the spot for most GP2X classics :)
 
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A SoC is a CPU that combines a few interface chips, with a few extra support chips on the board - on the PCB you'll see one well connected blob that's the SoC and a few chips around it, but less than you'd see if the SoC was replaced by an old-style discrete CPU. From the software side there's almost no way of knowing if you're running on a system based on a SoC or a discrete chipset - they both look the same in the main.
 
So with the integrated lcd controller and uart, etc. it would be considered a SoC? Just wasn't referenced as one in the doc as SoC's hadn't become popular yet?
 
Probably a good source of tech specs is here, a quick google search'll get ya s3c2400x pdf's from samsung site too...

aka, lots of docs floating around... darkfader might be a good source too...
 
Hi, everyone. I never coded, but I used to be the main "content writer" for a short-lived GP32X competitor (I think its name was GP32Universe) before almost all its content was irretrievably lost (either its admin suddenly deleted it or user Deleted User hacked it, I forget). I think that may also have been the first big attempt to collect all the different GP32 software in one place, which was at that time scattered across innumerable developer's personal websites, or as links on the forum.

Later on I collected reviews of GP32 software from various places and was going to put up a website (I think ED even agreed to host it) but never quite finished it (though it still exists on my computer, heh).

I actually continued using my GP32 for a long time after the boards were no longer alive. For one thing, it is a great e-reader (I have the FLU model, so less eye-strain than backlit screens). Also, emulations of older consoles (including Genesis) worked pretty well on it, although after a while I could no longer play games with diagonals because my joypad became less and less sensitive.

About two years ago, I accidentally removed my SmartMedia card before fully shutting off the GP32, and caused corruption of the card. Since then, I haven't been able to figure out how to get anything working again! I'd really appreciate some help (I described the problem in full in another thread).
 
Hooka said:
Was GP32 really a SOC? as I remember it seemed like it was a cpu and a few external chips... simple but effective..., but maybe the s3c2400X is a SoC, I'm nowhere near as smrt about these things as Exophase....
Click to expand...

If you look at the PCB the significant components are basically the S3C2400X, PMIC, RAM, and firmware flash. This is basically the standard SoC arrangement that you see on gaming handhelds from there forward. So I think it's fair to call it an SoC if it's fair to call GP32 a full system. As far as SoCs go it's early and simple and doesn't have anything resembling a graphics accelerator, but this isn't something GP32 solved with more components, it's just a limitation that software had to accept.

The chip was made before the term SoC really became popular so the datasheet doesn't call it that, instead it calls it a microcontroller. The lines can be blurred between what's a microcontroller and what's an SoC, but I would say that these days I expect a microcontroller to have its own embedded RAM and flash and run a CPU that's lower end than the ARM9 was for GP32. I expect microcontrollers to be mainly for small/cheap/very low power embedded applications that aren't designed with external interfaces to RAM, flash, or displays as first class concerns. And because of that they have much smaller pin counts than even an old chip like S3C2400X. This chip was probably made with devices like phones and PMPs in mind.

Hooka said:
...and yeah, I'd love to see a sweet GP32 emulator, or even something like spot/ginge... Mind you I have a gp32 with a set of full smc's sitting feet away, but sometimes it's convenient to just have the Pandora on me and use it for everything :p I rarely use my GP2X anymore unless it's in the dock hooked up to the projector... GINGE might not run everything, but it sure hits the spot for most GP2X classics :)
Click to expand...

I'll let notaz speak more here as necessary but something like GINGE works by running software targeting one ARM Linux platform on another. AFAIK most of the functionality is intercepted at the Linux program loading, syscall, and mmap interfaces. It doesn't work for GP32 since it didn't run Linux.

But with a good recompiler I think even Pandora should be able to run a conventional GP32 emulator okay. Especially since AFAIK most of the non-emulator software was made with only 66MHz CPU clocks in mind.
 
I think I first heard the ARM250 chip (that combined CPU, memory controller and 2D video controller) described as a system onna chip in around 1992, though I'll agree that I can't definitively remember hearing the acronym SoC until much later.
 
Exophase: Thanks for clarifying, and yes I understand that GINGE is nowhere near an emulator, even though most of my changes to Notaz's GINGE have been actually external to the code (lots of script modification, adding libraries and just compiling with different toolchains to get binary compatibility), I've been studying the code for the last little bit. But I was meaning something that's like ginge's static binary loader, but tweaked to GP32 specs, or is there such a major difference in arm-linux-binaries vs. arm-elf-binary that they couldn't be patched in a similar way? (Not saying an emulator isn't a better option for multisystem support and such, but thought it might still be feasible...)
 
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Another *heart* thread. I see Wub .. been too long :)

The GP32 (and GP32X site) will always have a special place .. GP32 really opened up a community, and was a really fun time to hack around. (I'd been doing PDA hacking for some time, there was a lot of crazy hardware flying around those days), but GP32 was for gaming, and with the freeloaders.. right into emulation. It was hawt. And had GPBoobies on the back.

black's GPEngine ruled :)
 
skeezix: GPEngine was awesome, nevermind the fact it used ebichu the housecleaning hampster as a background... Was mighty impressed to see its source surface after so many years too. I still think about digging through black--'s code to see if I could finish my attempt at getting gpdoom multiplayer :p Cause that would be the best rf-link code to use as an example I would imagine...
 
GPEngine's source came around? Nice. I doubt it had any features over other similar works these days, but it surely had its thing. A worthy port to current platforms :)

I wonder about the GP32 emu.. what was it called? something by Firebat or someone? We all used it for dev at the time.. it wasn't particularly compatible with anything crazy, but it was good enough to bootstrap some code, without having to do the eternal SMC-swap-of-doom. That emu, if source could be located, could make a handy jumping off point. (At the same time, looking at rlyeh's devkit source headers would point out all the main addresses the gp32 used anyway..)
 
geepee32 by firefly... guy was quite smart, bs'd with him back in the day about how he made the usb joystick and mouse driver for GP32...

Also, I would've liked to see Squidge keep working on SPOT...
 
Ok, second that... It makes me sad seeing so many missing faces and sites over the last few years, Squidge, mr_spiv's site is down now, Woogal disappeared near the early days of GP2X, etc. etc.
 
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