Where are the old folk of GP32?

[Kojote]

Just on a side note: If anyone wants to update/port Retroguru games over to GP32, let me know I tried to get in touch with Anthony (Slaanesh) few times but his responses are really taking ages GP32 was a nice little handheld... oh yeah... memories. Oh anyone has a white battery cover left?

 

[Hooka]

KOJO!!!

I'll always offer my services if you want me to I'm just not the best coder (lots of proof of that )

As for white battery covers, grrrrrr, I have 3 broken ones personally :S

 

[EvilDragon]

How did you manage to do that? :O
All of my battery covers are still fine

 

[Hooka]

1 I bought with a broken battery cover, one is my old original GP32 and it just has seen that many batteries, I literally watched the clip slowly bending and breaking over the course of a few years and the FLU with 64MB and a glass screen (Robster fixed/modded it for me) the glass screen was so heavy it pulled the little grey screen piece off and the glass tried to fall out so I awkwardly grappled all the pieces as they were falling and somehow got my nail caught on the battery door and broke it off while saving the glass and GP32 :S

 

[alxm]

Was there any software that took advantage of the 64MB mod? I read about a Neo Geo emulator prototype in your interview with Rlyeh, but don't remember hearing about anything else.

Speaking of GP32 mods, I remember doing the pencil mod on my Blu+ and running DrMD at something close to 200MHz. I chickened out and cleared it off after a day, though.

And my battery cover clip broke too! I made a makeshift one out of paper and folded electrical tape that keeps the cover in place.

 

[Hooka]

My original GP32 could actually do 240Mhz without crashing, but I only played quake for about a 1/2 hour at that speed before I chickened out

For the most part 166Mhz was sufficient for most things on GP32 anyways (besides a few emus that could use a little extra oomph, but by that time I had a GP2X that I could abuse for them )

I think there was 1-2 emulators modded for it (something like MAME and NEOGEO or something). It was right around the time the GP2X got released, so it was a highly unsupported mod and most of the modded software were only kicked around irc if I remember correctly...

 

[sam fisher]

My original GP32 could actually do 240Mhz without crashing, but I only played quake for about a 1/2 hour at that speed before I chickened out

Without overvolting? Nice, my BLU could make 180 iirc

 

[woogal]

Woogal disappeared near the early days of GP2X

Hi Hooka That's the problem with having kids, no free time plus the GP2X was never quite as much fun as the GP32.

Coding Pebble apps these days. Great hardware, and a nice little community that really reminds me of the GP32 scene. http://www.sector808.org/pebble/ if anyone is interested. Some of you may recognise a couple of the apps

 

[Hooka]

I do agree, GP2X wasn't ever quite the same scene as GP32, although Dzz tried to push it in a similar direction with his demo coding compo's and low level dev docs...

The GP2X did however become one of the "arm/linux powered handhelds" that really led to what the pandora/pyra are, just needs more homebrew and some better thought through software/hardware design... (linux took too long to load for a handheld @ 200Mhz, batteries didn't last for shit, etc.)


Ermagherd! Lacuna on a watch? Y u so crazy??!?!??!!!!

 

[EvilDragon]

Woooot
How is CACK doing? I was always anticipating it's final release (I am an RPG fan, after all )

 

[sam fisher]

Hi Hooka That's the problem with having kids, no free time plus the GP2X was never quite as much fun as the GP32.

Coding Pebble apps these days. Great hardware, and a nice little community that really reminds me of the GP32 scene. http://www.sector808.org/pebble/ if anyone is interested. Some of you may recognise a couple of the apps

Any chance the source for lacuna is up on github or somewhere ? Lacuna is amazing btw, still just as addictive as ever

 

[___]

i still catch myself sometimes thinking: "you should really get a 128mb smc and make use of your chatpad, the you'd have a portable atarist and c64." and then I always remember that my pandora can do exactly that while having way better ergonomics then the chatpad dangling off of a gp32 and lasting 10x as long.
still the gp32 is just so cool, it still does this to me ^^

 

[the_Diabologic]

Ahhh, I haven't done any serious gaming or game development in such a long time (not that I ever did the latter lol).

Some years ago I dusted off my GP32 (a BLU+ no less!) and had a go with it. It loaded up the firmware just fine, however my only SMC appears to have died of either old age or loneliness and I didn't have the tools set up to execute code via USB.
Heck, I don't have any of the tools set up.

After all these years I did some digging. It's awesome that the gp32x posts have been preserved on this board and that most files are still around. Unfortunately many of the developers pages are down.
It's good to see that the cracked FreeLauncher is still hovering around and that a lot of the dead pages can be viewed from the archive (mr spivs page for anyone who cares - it's a treasure trove).

And it's a little sad that beside geepee32 there's still no gp32 emulator around (I would love to see some gp32 classics running on a pandora or android phone)

 

[Iorgy77]

Gotta fire em up some day soon... I remember how awesome the battery life was on them.

I was one of the emu parasite kids.

 

[slaanesh]

Reesy's SMS emulator was probably my favourite emulator on the GP32.

Also loved Nethack which had an awesome input method so you didn't need a keyboard or a soft-keyboard, was all nest menus with the controller and buttons.
That input method would still be good for later handhelds lacking keyboards.

I enjoyed enhancing Franxis's MAME on the GP32 though it never really had enough RAM to do it properly. Speed was actually fine for lots of older MAME games especially when Cyclone and DrZ80 matured sufficiently.

I have an Atari 2600 emulator for the GP32 which runs pretty much everything perfectly well. This was already released well after the GP32 had lost popularity.
The reason was that I tried porting Stella but I couldn't get C++ to go properly with my toolchain, so I cobbled together vAtari. I'm in the process of converting it to SDL so that it can be used with other consoles (though I already made a native Dingoo A320 version of it).

Despite it's dumb controller ( I quickly modded mine to DaveC's NGAGE controller), I think the GP2X was better - great hardware and so much more accessible and easy to dev for thanks to Linux. The GP32 was such a pain when it was crashing due to some bad code ( I never got GDB working properly with it either).

 

[Charge]

Hello, everyone. Been a while since I looked for a GP32 site, but I was happy to find this one still going. I never really had the time to do what I wanted on the GP32 due to work commitments and having about a million personal projects that never got finished. I always tended to get started on something, but then found it more of a grind when all the interesting bits had been done and started something else. I always respected everyone else's commitment to completing things, especially in the GP32 community where a new emulator would pop up every month or so.
Good times

 

[WhiteFalcon]

Seeing even Skeezix here, I just had to at least drop a line Coded only a few pieces on the GP32 and released even less, but the memories are still fond. Nice to see the people are still there and remembering..

Iorgy77: Good to see you are still alive albeit otherwise inert

 

[jum]

So I pulled out my old GP32 (not used for the last 10 years), so that I could make a Youtube video of my old GP32 homebrews I made back in 2003.

Switched it on, and sadly it seems to have the blank screen of death

If anyone has a link or info for possible ways to fix, or things to check, please let me know.

I see a lot of familar names/nicks here from the GP32 scene from back in the day. (Hi Kojote!)

Remember gp32dev yahoo group? (Dave Murphy / wintermute) (devkitpro toolchain). I also remember emails back and forth to Mr. Park from GamePark, before they were released, can't remember exactly what about, but probably trying to get a free one by promising to dev software for it?

After GP32, went back to PS2 and PSP homebrew (Jum52, ColemPS2, PXDrum etc). Been messing around with Ardiuno and RPi projects in recent years.

My GP32 stuff and some probably broken links: jum.pdroms.de/GP32/gp32.html

 

[EvilDragon]

Hmm, my GP32 has the same issue, and I heard the same from others.
Apparently, something in the GP32 dies :/
My guess it's either the storage (so the firmware doesn't boot) or some capacitor :/

 

[levi]

Popped capacitors from the late 80s to early 2ks are easy to spot if you can get the circuitboard out. The electrolyte which leaks out forms crusty crystals, a bit like the stuff that leaks when batteries leak in my experience, and may have darkened some of the metal traces.