Wiz Feedback

[Devilmandex]

Got my wiz saturday nice little console. the most annoying thing is the sound options. DIVX seems to work well but ocassionally stutters. Screen tear isn't as bad as it was made out to be (Or could just be me) it's still annoying. Firmware 1.00 I guess has broken alot of things. GPH ought to bear this in mind when releasing firmware or it could get as bad as the psp. Buttons are nice. Dpad is very responsive. I let my cousin play with it and he was like "woah, those controls are good!" comparing to psp) I like it. I want an option to change background colour though. Overall a good console but my one big complain is the sound. I was playing myriad turned the sound down then suddenly it went back to maximum. very very annoying.

 

[sam fisher]

I think the sound is due to Pucks Fenix ports (a lot of the onboard games such as my own are written in it). Shout at puck and not GPH for that one .

 

[emphyrio]

After using it for a few hours:

positives:
good controls, nice screen, excellent build quality. The 'feel' is miles ahead of the f100.
Picodrive on the go is really a pleasure now (with the f100 I use tv-out with joypads).

negatives:
screen tearing, touch screen, no sod.
Simply put the screen tearing is a deal breaker. Games with lots of scrolling become atrocious (try picodrive with ecco). This problem should be fixed as soon as possible.
At the bottom 5-10% in the right half of the touch screen precision drops drammatically.

 

[WarmFluffyUK]

Agreed, the tearing and touch screen is annoying, and hopefully GPH will be fixing both of these issues in firmware soon.

 

[jacksterson]

Agreed, the tearing and touch screen is annoying, and hopefully GPH will be fixing both of these issues in firmware soon.

I've got a request. I know this isn't top priority but it would make theming/skinning so much easier.

Can they add support for .gif images on the system? I want to make a test matrix theme but I can't find an animated png for the bg, only gifs.

 

[Alex.]

This is not a suggestion about the Wiz, but about its website http://gp2xwiz.com

Edit: It seems GPH completely redesigned their site, it feels faster than the old one, and looks much better

 

[rx_shorty]

This is not a suggestion about the Wiz, but about its website http://gp2xwiz.com

Perhaps it's because of my old computer, but it runs very slow and makes it hard to find relevant information quickly. I would get rid of the huge animation and flash menu, and redesign the site to be as simple and fast as possible. Most people visit a webpage with the goal of finding specific information, and become annoyed when they have to waste time trying to figure out how to open the menu, or wait for an animation to finish playing so that their browser will unfreeze.

Your old computer is not the problem... sometimes it crashes my FF as well...

 

[ninjawiz2x]

Comic book :

Is there anyway I can read my magna in upright position rather than landscape? Cause im not gonna rotate and save I dunno how many scanned images to accomplish this.

 

[jacksterson]

The date on the top is elevated higher than battery icon, and it makes skinning it very sloppy. Can you ask GPH to lower it in the next firmware release so that it is level with the battery png?

Also, it would be nice, but I doubt it'll happen... but if they could make the text part of the png files, or at least make the text optional, it would make skins much more elegant.

 

[dsamblas]

Just release the full source code of the firmware(at least the rootfs and kernel) and the tools they use to compile on each release, or even better a svn/git.

 

[jacksterson]

Have the X button make you go up one directory, instead of going back to the main menu.

The Y button should be a universal menu or mini-menu that won't move you from the directory you're in.

A could be an option to delete, but the menu could have an option to do that as well....

 

[WarmFluffyUK]

To be honest, at the menu SELECT should do what B does. Everyone I have shown the Wiz to has instantly gone for the select button to launch things.

 

[jacksterson]

To be honest, at the menu SELECT should do what B does. Everyone I have shown the Wiz to has instantly gone for the select button to launch things.

lol, i've never even thought of that.

What if there was a remapper then? Screw default settings, let everyone choose their own!

But if they were to do that, the pngs with all the letters would have to be changed, or dynamic.

 

[quote]

This is not a suggestion about the Wiz, but about its website http://gp2xwiz.com

Slow for me too, and I'm not too sure this page is a good idea:
http://www.globalgph.com/m3/sub4.php

 

[fettouhi]

Well, here is my feedback on the Wiz. Just to clearify, I have never owned a GP32, GP2X F-100 or GP2X F-200. I've had the Wiz for a week now and I can honestly say I love it, even more than my psp-2000. I commute 5 hours every day, 5 days a week, so I need something to kill the time when I'm on the train or bus. The psp is a great device but, for me at least, it was never a good video player, audio player or homebrew device. Here the GP2X Wiz really shines! I'm not a big gamer these days, I was, back in the day, when the C64, Amiga 500, Nintendo, Super Nintendo and Sega Megadrive (Genesis) were the big players. I bought a psp about 18 months ago, because I wanted to get back into gaming again, because playing games on a Xbox 360, PS3 or Wii never got me stuck. Having a psp made me stick to gaming, but again with all the cool games for the psp (God of War: CoO, FFVII: Crisis Core) I actually just wanted to play old C64 games again (Last Ninja :lol: ). Emulating those old systems on the PC wasn't what I was looking for, I wanted something portable. Reading about the GP2X Wiz and Openpandora about 9 months ago was a real eye opener for me . So I pre-ordered both of them :lol: .

Being a Linux user myself, I really want to support devices using Linux. I can't wait to get Pandora even more now that I have the GP2X Wiz. So, the Wiz is a great device but I have some suggestions how to improve things .

Audio Player:

The audio player is nice all in all in terms of audio quality. I have a 32 GB SD card in my Wiz and I have my entire my collection on the card (takes up almost 25 GB). But the player is missing a few things:

- We really need an equalizer for the player because the sound is a bit thin. A simple 5 band equalizer with a few presets (rock, pop, classical etc.) and the ability to make custom presets and save those.
- The players menu seems a bit slow. It takes time for it skip a track, pause or jump in a song. This needs to be improved!
- A shuffle function would also be very nice to have. In my case I can live without it, because not having a shuffle function forces me to listen to entire albums from one end to another. I haven't done that in years and it gives me a new experience with my music.
- Playlist creator would also be great to have and the ability to listen to music across directories. My music is all sorted into directories with artist names and album names and so forth, hence the request.
- Add support for a lossless audio codec, i.e. FLAC. The Dingoo has it and the Wiz should too.

Video Player:

The video player is also very nice but could use some improvements:

- Support other containers than .avi (.mpeg2, .mpeg4 or .mkv)
- Menu is also a bit slow but not as slow as the audio player menu. Could use some improvement there.
- General improvement of playback so one can avoid (in most cases) re-encoding (utilize hardware if possible?). I know that video playback has improved a great deal with the 1.01 firmware but I tried to but a simpsons episode on it. The newer episodes of those are in 16:9 and they looked squashed on the Wiz. I would like, that the Wiz would keep the 16:9 ratio and add black/grey bars instead or rescaling it to fullscreen.

Comic Reader:

This one very very nice but again a few suggestions:

- Improve zooming. It is horribly slow and it should be a smooth experience like when you scroll up and down in a comic.
- adding PDF support, or at least cbr and cbz?
- I simply love that I can listen to music while I read my comics. I do that a lot on the train, now having the Wiz. I really like that I can start the comic reader and go directly to my music and start the player and then go back. But what I am missing is the ability to go the other way! Let us say that I'm listing to music and I want to read comics now. Well, then I have exit the player and start up the Comic Reader and then restart the audio player. So, what I'm getting at, is an icon in the audio player to launch comics or e-books and etc.

Menu:

The menu is nice to look at but improvements could make it even better:

- We seriously need a delete function on the Wiz (file manager). Having to hook the Wiz up to a PC everytime you want to delete a file or directory is tedious and we are not always next to a PC.
- Adding customs themes or just a few more themes for the Wiz and being able to choose them under Settings.
- Wiztern does not work with the new 1.01 firmware. The game launches and I can choose a game/stage. The second I launch it Wiztern just exits out into the menu.
- Menu seems also to be a bit slower now and touchscreen is a bit less responsive.
- Improve precision of the touchscreen. It seems to be off some times while at other times it is ok.
- Remove tearing from games and flash games (on NAND). This has already been fixed the menu with firmware 1.01 but the games on the NAND still display that tearing effect.
- Spelling error in firmware upgrade. When I did the update to 1.01. It said "please upgrage" should be "please upgrade" .

Other things:

- Release the full firmware source .
- Add an analogue stick in the next revision of the GP2X device.
- Better buttons, they are not bad and the D-Pad works fine for the games I've played so far.
- Remove the 24 pin connector and add a usb port directly.
- Better power button, its to small simply.
- TV-out, Wifi!

That's it for now! Thanks for making this device!

Regards

André

 

[b1ueskycomp1ex]

Things it needs:

Audio Player:
- Needs to be faster, instant skipping between songs, a CD player does a better job of this. =/
- Get rid of the needless flashing (fake?) Visualiser, in favor of bigger controls you can hit with your thumbs
- Make the output louder when using headphones (dB boost in software?)
- Implement some sort of equaliser, or at least Treble/Bass tone controls
- Implement some sort of way to shuffle through a folder tree (play all the music in one folder, and any folders in that folder.)

Video Player:
- FLV support ( would be perfect for 320x240 youtube rips, etc, with no need to reencode)
- REAL mp4 support, so files for ipod/psp, etc. will play without reconverting
- 3gp support, so files created on phones could work (eh, it makes sense to me. =P)
- Maybe someone could throw together a homebrew video play for use with the wiz (on an unrelated note. =P)

Comics Viewer:
Viewing them on the wiz's 320x240 screen is almost impossible, implementing some sort of (DECENT) zoom feature would be nice, with smooth scrolling across the image, so reading doesn't hurt so bad. =P
- Implement some kind of rotation that doesn't change per-file (rotate sideways, and then continue viewing all the files in this way, etc.)

Photo Viewer:
Not sure about this. It doesn't seem terrible.

Flash Player:
Ouch. This thing hurts, not sure what you can do aside from someone finding out how to overclock while using it, and even then at 320x240, it's going to be tough to get flash games running.
- Add the ability to set the quality (low, medium, high) of the flash animation, for performance.

E-Book reader:
... This one is a little self-explanitory, but I'll point it out anyway:
- Maybe implement ACTUAL PDF SUPPORT?
- When viewing a text file, the text isn't wrapped correctly, and instead some words end up cut off with some letters on the first line and some on the second, it would be nice to have word wrapping that doesn't make it impossible to read the text file
- Add font size option to make the fonts larger/smaller
- Optionally, and editor would be ideal for making small notes, etc.

Main Menus:
- add an option to easily create a link to a game/app without having to make INI files
- add an option to change the default pinging noise when scrolling through menus (I would like to have something quiter and less annoying, rather than having it off entirely.
- make the scrollbars actually scroll without hitting the scroll buttons. what's the point of scrollbars if they don't actually do anything?

 

[sbock]

QUOTE
Video Player:
Someone said this was based on Mplayer, which amazes me because mplayer supports every codec known to man, and some known to lesser creatures of the animal kingdom =P here are some suggestions:

The player is the Core Pocket Media Player. Even if a codec is supported there could be licensing or performance issues.

 

[jacksterson]

QUOTE
Video Player:
Someone said this was based on Mplayer, which amazes me because mplayer supports every codec known to man, and some known to lesser creatures of the animal kingdom =P here are some suggestions:

The player is the Core Pocket Media Player. Even if a codec is supported there could be licensing or performance issues.

How hard would it be to switch media players?

 

[b1ueskycomp1ex]

QUOTE
Video Player:
Someone said this was based on Mplayer, which amazes me because mplayer supports every codec known to man, and some known to lesser creatures of the animal kingdom =P here are some suggestions:

The player is the Core Pocket Media Player. Even if a codec is supported there could be licensing or performance issues.

Ah. thanks for clearing that up. Do you have any idea if some form of mplayer could be ported over, with a minimal GUI, to play whatever formats/codecs you choose to install? Would that be possible at all as a homebrew app, or would that be asking too much?

 

[u9i]

I tried to write earlier but i think it got lost in transit. Anyway, i haven't got a wiz yet but i will still give some feedback. Audio control really needs to be unified/globalised across all applications, e.g like my ipod touch. Surely if i turn down the volume i dont want it to pop to a new setting when i run my next game. This was also my biggest disappointment with my gp2x. The excuse there is that the buttons could be and were put to good use in games, but their placement on the wiz doesn't really provide the same affordance. So, global volume please!!!

/u9