Why Slowdown?

[itsme]

I've been on the fence to get GP2x for the past few months, but I noticed the scene is slowed down quite a bit compared to January. Anyone has a good explanation for this?

 

[dreamwarbird]

GPH being slow with firmware updates?

 

[craigix]

What more could you possibly ask for - for free?

 

[deadlychicken22]

I think that many developers (including myself) worked very hard to get their entries for the competition and are now trying to catch up with their lives. This month is a very difficult month in school for me, so I haven't gotten to develop as much as I would like. In the summer I hope to make at least two more homebrew games which I am already working on ideas for.

 

[EvilDragon]

Well, most releases at the beginning were just quick, dirty and unomptimized ports.

Optimizing takes a while - and I guess that's what a lot of coders are doing at the moment...

 

[wipeout2000]

Yea so from what I've seen the competition produced a lot of good results,but i think the scene has evolved from getting stuff to work with gp2x (which was easy), to now pushing the limits of the hardware, and seeing what break throughs we can come up with now (such as possible use of second processor, and producing faster code). So this kind of stuff takes a lot longer to accomplish, but in the end produces things like near perfect emulators. I think its the same for the firmware updates. GPH took care of the big issues, and are probably trying to make the OS more stable. I say if you're interested grab a gp2x and enjoy the ride. I haven't regretted purchasing mine, and I'm always messing around with it (I abandoned my poor Nintendo DS). Programs and updates are constantly being worked on so its fun to test out the buggy stuff and watch it improve. I think we should give the developers time to work, because I am sure that soon enough we will see some nice results.

 

[TelcoLou]

Even if the scene died tonight, we still have several thousands of perfectly playable games from (mostly) our youth ...

</no point whatsoever>

 

[PSyMastR]

Even if the scene died tonight, we still have several thousands of perfectly playable games from (mostly) our youth ...

</no point whatsoever>

​

That... is very true. But god hope that doesn't happen.

 

[DaveC]

Even if the scene died tonight, we still have several thousands of perfectly playable games from (mostly) our youth ...

</no point whatsoever>

​

That... is very true. But god hope that doesn't happen.

​

Yeah, we still need a perfect PC-engine, Speccy, SMS, Coleco, NES, SNES, MSX, emu. Once those are done *then* it can die. *crosses fingers that f-day will still happen*

 

[Epicenter]

I'm still holding out for when the Cave driver in MAME is emulated and I can play Dodonpachi, Esp.Ra.De and Guwange on a portable system. That'll be just damn bliss. I know they can run at 100% speed without problem, too-- they use a 68000@16 MHz and Z80 pair like the NeoGeo.

 

[itsme]

I don't want to sound like a troll, but all I'm waiting for is a perfect NES emulator before I cast my vote with my dollars. Am I asking too much? Damn GBA runs NES emulator ok, and I don't see why 200Mhz Linux machine can't do it with almost no efforts. I appologize if I offended anyone with this comment.

 

[iignotus]

I don't want to sound like a troll, but all I'm waiting for is a perfect NES emulator before I cast my vote with my dollars. Am I asking too much? Damn GBA runs NES emulator ok, and I don't see why 200Mhz Linux machine can't do it with almost no efforts. I appologize if I offended anyone with this comment.

​

lol you don't have to be that worried about offending someone around here. NES emulation does need to improve quite a bit, and it is without a doubt possible to have fullspeed, fs0 with sound for every NES game on the gp2x; we just have to wait. That's not to say that fishyNES isn't amazing at the moment, with full- or half-speed on most of the games.

 

[Epicenter]

The problem is the ports of NES emulators are ports with really slow C emulation cores. The 6502 core has to be ASM if it's going to run at any kind of a decent speed-- even if it runs at 60 FPS with the ARM9 at 300 MHz, there's no reason you should have to overclock that far to emulate a 1.79 MHz 8-bit chip like the 6502 when the 16-bit 68000 @ 16 MHz can be emulated at full speed with the ARM920T at 233 MHz. That's a programming efficiency issue right there. Same issue with most (I think ALL) of the Game Boy emulators so far!

When a fast ARM9 ASM core for 6502 emulation is found or written and implemented into an existing or new NES emulator it'll run at full speed .. probably with the ARM920T at 100 MHz, too. Give it time.

 

[thelamer]

I think someone should hold donations on a site and have certain rewards for projects .

Things like a full speed NES emu w/menu etc .

I would do it but I dont think that many people on this board would trust me handling the money .

One of the more official sites should do this .

It would be as easy as having a paypal account and maintaning a list of increasing jackpots for a completed project .



People could donate the money to wanting to see a certain project finish . I believe that this would be the ultamite motivation for devs . Much like the project to get xp booting on an intel mac .

Edit: the WIKI would be perfect for this .

 

[critical]

The point about developers now spending time optimising is a good one. It certainly applies to uae4all and others.

Yes, there's been a slowdown in releases for the gp2x, which is one of the reasons I've been putting out little projects like sbagen or gp2xtracker.

There's no reason to worry about the scene as far as I can see - there's still a lot of stuff to be done, and I'm sure people will do it.

One of the GP2X's main strengths is this website and the people on it - I don't think think community will just fade away.

The suggestion that thelamer made about bounties is not one I'd go with personally. It's lovely to get donations or thanks from people who appreciate the time you've put into something. For my part, I'd have earnt more working at McDonald's, but I've really enjoyed making things.

I wouldn't be motivated by a donation fund, but maybe others would... who knows. It couldn't hurt to try I suppose. I believe existing sites like rentacoder.com could habdle such a system.

EDIT: it's not rentacoder.com I was thinking of... I can't remember the name of the donation fund one. Maybe it'll come to me when I'm at work today.

 

[Epicenter]

What more could you possibly ask for - for free?

​

Well at we did pay them close to $200 for the system and the firmware it shipped with was pretty honestly "broken" right out of the box. When the hardware is reliant on the firmware to operate as advertised, in essence, to make the hardware do what it is made to do, shipping it with bad firmware is as bad as just leaving the features inoperable at the hardware level. It wouldn't be considered acceptable to sell someone a new HDTV but make it just function as a regular old low-definition analog set until the user wrote their own firmware for it.

If GPH/Dignsys' sense of obligation to their buyers is really that low.. wow. Even though the community will almost definitely produce a superior firmware to what we ever see from GPH/Dignsys, they really owe us a lot more than what they called a 'Finished Product' in v1.4.

 

[WrongEyedJesus]

I agree with the optimising theory. I suspect there is a lot of polishing of apps going on, plus you have some collaborations of sorts going on with the SNES stuff. The PSX stuff is still ticking away. I reckon stuff will pick up again soon.

Patience my young padawan.....

 

[sand_man]

What more could you possibly ask for - for free?

​

Well at we did pay them close to $200 for the system and the firmware it shipped with was pretty honestly "broken" right out of the box. When the hardware is reliant on the firmware to operate as advertised, in essence, to make the hardware do what it is made to do, shipping it with bad firmware is as bad as just leaving the features inoperable at the hardware level. It wouldn't be considered acceptable to sell someone a new HDTV but make it just function as a regular old low-definition analog set until the user wrote their own firmware for it.

If GPH/Dignsys' sense of obligation to their buyers is really that low.. wow. Even though the community will almost definitely produce a superior firmware to what we ever see from GPH/Dignsys, they really owe us a lot more than what they called a 'Finished Product' in v1.4.

​

I agree with every statement just made by Epicenter. GPH... :angry:

 

[Julius]

OH NOE IT'S THE FIRST "IS THE GP2X GOING TO DIE?" THREAD!!!!!111elevenoneoneone

We really loved these back in the days of the GP32

 

[pipa]

I think someone should hold donations on a site and have certain rewards for projects .

I would do it but I dont think that many people on this board would trust me handling the money .

One of the more official sites should do this .

It would be as easy as having a paypal account and maintaning a list of increasing jackpots for a completed project .

People could donate the money to wanting to see a certain project finish . I believe that this would be the ultamite motivation for devs . Much like the project to get xp booting on an intel mac .

http://www.fundable.org/ can do it.