Wiz Vs Dingoo

[LTStone]

Wiz vs Dingoo comparison

This is all just my oppinion with what I own (I own 2 a320's 1 a330 , 2 Wiz's and a Cannoo.

Just for the record I love both systems and would be happy with just either on. Also remember these systems are open source and do not have the support of Nintendo or Sony. This means they have glitches and are not perfect, Still to me that just adds more character to these fine little gadgets.


Price - Wiz < $100 From Think Geek
Dingoo around $90 anywhere
Now that the price is about half what i used to be for the Wiz it cost about as much as a dingoo.

The build Quality is much better on the Wiz than the Dingoo, All 3 of my Dingoo's have had issues like the Shoulder buttons going soft or failing, I had to return one because it got bricked, and the a330 has split at the seam with the screws stripping. So far no issues with the Wiz or Caanoo but I haven't used them as much, I will update if anything changes. I have heard of people having issues with "screen rot" on the wiz where the pixels start to fail but I'm sure that that is much less common than the dingoo failing from a 1 foot drop or the button issue. The Dingoo does feel a bit smaller and tighter, not as "rattlely"as the Wiz.

Form factor is about the same , I feel very comfortable handling both systems. The Shoulder buttons feel much better on the Wiz but the Dingoo has a more "traditional" style Dpad and face button setup similar to a snes contoller to me. The Dingoo dpad works fine for me and I can perform all my special moves in Streetfighter etc. The Wiz Dpad is good too I just have a bit of trouble performing uppercuts on Streetfighter attaching a stick on dpad fixes that issue. The Dpad Buttons on the Wiz is misleading they are nothing like the dpad itself and are totally seperate buttons but are just shaped like a dpad. they have a nice loose feel, very similar to the Caanoo but with a bit more travel. I have no problem using them they just don't have the traditional feel like the Dingoo.

Screen quality definitely goes to the Wiz the Oled screen looks superb except maybe for video and it looks great at any angle. The dingoo screen I thought looked good till I got the Wiz But if you watch alot of video the Dingoo not only looks better but plays video better as well, it just seems to play more codecs as well as just looks better and smoother. But for games The Wiz just looks so bright , colourful and glossy. Now the Dingoo has an odd off angle viewing while the Wiz suffers with some diagnal tearing both of which are caused by the fact that both screens are meant to be 240x320 not 320x240. Both of these issues are ether fixable or hardly noticable to me so I dont care. The fact that the Wiz is a touch screen is nice as well, great for flash games, Apps and games that support mouse like dosbox and Scummvm. The Wiz also has a built in Stylus and stand.

For Media the Dingoo is the Victor It plays many Video / Audio formats, With tons of audio features like EQ both Customizable and with presets. 3d modes, headphone modes, surround modes etc. The wiz has no eq and the sound is flat, I was pretty dissapointed about that. Video is still good on the Wiz but it has this grainy grid thing happening in the background , not a big issue but noteable.

The Dingoo has 2 audio outs and one is used for TV-out. The tvout feature works 99% of Dingoo apps/games wheras the Wiz has issues with some things and you have to buy the cable seperately.

The Dingoo comes with 4 Gig interal and a mini SD slot while the Wiz has 1gig internal and a SD slot

Now for the emulators:

Mame: Compatibility is about the same but the Wiz can overclock things faster still, both play the classic arcade games well.

Capcom and Final Burn: Again compatibilty is about the same but the Wiz can overclock for more speed

Amiga - Wiz has more speed and compatibilty BUT no save state like the Dingoo and thats a biggie for me. Also rumor has it that a new and faster

Uae4all is coming out for the Dingoo..

Snes - Both systems play all the Snes games I care about just fine except Dirt trax FX which is slow on both (slower on dingoo) but for those who care the Wiz is the faster of the two systems at emulating the snes.

GBA - The dingoo emulates the GBA pretty good but the Wiz is better. I can now play Golden Sun without the annoying sound of the Dingoo version.

C64 - Whaddya know The dingoo version of Vice is much more optimized than the Wiz but both systems systems can emulate the c64 fine. Winner Dingoo

nes - its nes, they both emulate it fine

Genesis - Picodrive Rocks for both systems BUT The Wiz can emulate Snatcher YAY.

Java/mobile phone - Suprisingly both systems can play java/nokia/samsung games quite well But the Wiz is quite a bit faster and wow the Oled screen makes the games look fantastic , Castlevania Dawn of Sorrow plays super smooth.

NeoGeo - Both systems emulate the neogeo games I like just fine but Many Dingoo's have a major Zoom glitch in the native Emu that is very annoying. My good Dingoo does not have this issue. Final Burn can play neogeo games without the glitch but some games don't work or are slow using FBA. The wiz has more Neo emus including neogeo cd games so if you are a Neo Geo fan the Wiz is the winner.

Flash - Only Wiz can play flash, it even gives you the option to define keys to the contoller , very cool. Still not all flash games work but is a cool bonus non-the-less


PS1 - I haven't had much luck with the PS1 on the Dingoo (no sound/too slow) the the Wiz is Ok I have played Resident evil 3, Dragon Warrior 7 and Final Fantasy 8 and Megaman x4 and pretty much full speed with sound. Still overall its far from perfect.

Scumm - Great on both systems but the touchscreen on the Wiz is a nice bonus

Dosbox - Both need work, glitchy,slow and poor interface.

Extras and apps

Both systems are great for comics and pdf's, Dingoo has picshow and an almost infinite zoom and the Wiz picture viewer is just as good. I use them to read game guides and articles I have converted to jpegs.

The Wiz Pdf viewer reads almost all the pdf's I have loaded and now has a nice goto page feature the on flaw is that it is a bit slow scrolling. The Dingoo Pdf viewer is much faster but has a memory leak and is very unstable. Still a very handy app for both (thanks Hardyx and Darfgarf) that I use alot.

Both systems have good and effective file browsers available Dingoo has the native browser and the very nice Dinguxcommander while the For the Wiz I

use the Win2X frontend to copy,paste run files etc.

The Wiz has a new app called Ginge that allows many older Gp2X games and apps to run like some emulators and games like Cave Story etc.


So there , those are some thoughts and observations I have noticed with the Wiz and Dingoo, If anyone has any specific questions or want's to add they're experienced feel free. If people are interested I can put my oppionions and comparisons of the Caanoo up as well.

 

[HunterZ]

Thanks for the write-up. I've only tried the Wiz from thinkgeek.com, but I've found that it meets my needs almost 100%. I primarily purchased it in hopes of having a handheld that can emulate 8- and 16-bit game consoles well.

I'm not sure why people like the Wiz screen so much. Maybe it looks worse for me because I always use it on the lowest brightness, but I've noticed that the different pixels on the screen seem to vary randomly in brightness compared to each other, which results in a bit of a grainy look. It also seems to suffer from a short-term burn-in effect, where I can see a faint ghost of some images after they go away (e.g. menus in NES games). None of its problems approach the level of annoying, though, so I'm perfectly fine with those quirks.

I was hesitant about the Wiz controls when I saw them, but they work well. They also don't seem to make a lot of noise, which is nice when playing in a quiet room when others are present (some of my GBA's buttons tend to be clicky, and I am always worried that they might bother people). I can't say I've had any issues controlling any games, other than due to the nonstandard arrangement of the A/B/X/Y and Start/Select buttons compared to an SNES. Fortunately most emulators also let you remap the controls to make things more intuitive.

Since I've been mostly playing console emulators, I can't comment much on the touchscreen. It does seem to work well in POWDER and ScummVM, although the latter has a cumbersome GUI for typing parser keywords via a stylus; I think the Wiz port of ScummVM would probably work best with pure point-n-click adventure games.

The 1GB built-in NAND storage on the Wiz has not been an issue for me, as I haven't written anything to it in case I need to re-flash/upgrade the firmware at some point. Instead, I'm currently using a random 4GB SD card that I had laying around, which is big enough to hold all English GB/GBC/NES/SNES/Genesis ROMs with plenty of room to spare to play with other things as well (although I'm still thinking of stealing the 8GB SD from my wife's digital camera and using that instead ). Putting everything on SD is also convenient because my laptop also has a built-in SD slot, so I don't need the Wiz USB cable unless I'm charging or interfacing with my desktop.

Speaking of the Wiz USB cable: I've found that it can plug into iPhone AC-to-USB adapter bricks for charging. Also, it is a largish connector with a somewhat thick cord that plugs into the bottom of the Wiz, which unfortunately makes the Wiz unwieldy to use while plugged in. Fortunately the battery life seems to be really good: a session of a couple hours with the screen at lowest brightness seems to only drain the battery around halfway.

As for emulators, here are my impressions:

• Gameboy: LemonBoy and OhBoy run great, but suffer from the emulated screen being really tiny when you don't use scalers. LemonBoy has a good GUI but unfortunately the scalers aren't all that great, while OhBoy has great scalers and an immature interface. I'm almost tempted to try to hack together something that has the best features of both.
• NES: GPFCE is great. It seems to run everything I've thrown at it perfectly even without overclocking (some people report problems with Punch-Out, but I haven't tested that one myself). Only quirk is that scrolling and flashing effects don't look 100% perfect due to GPFCE not quite optimally dealing with the quirks of the screen hardware, but it's really minor.
• Genesis: PicoDrive is AMAZING. Every Genesis title I've tested runs perfectly smoothly with no overclocking needed. 32X games don't run well at all even with overclocking, although this is not an issue for me because I have no great interest in those.
• SNES: DrPocketSNES does a playable job with overclocking, but transparency effects seems to drag it to its knees. I was really looking forward to playing Super Metroid on my Wiz, but it's rather disappointing that my FPS drops to a bit over 30 whenever transparency effects are on the screen, so I've been sticking to playing games on the other consoles for now.
• DOSBox: Only tried Betrayal at Krondor but it was unplayable. I can't think of many older games that wouldn't be a pain to play without a full keyboard.

I should mention that there also some good native Wiz ports of various games, including Cave Story, Ur-Quan Masters (Star Control 2), OpenTyrian, and a statically-recompiled version of X-COM.

 

[Darkknight512]

I can't say that there is anything wrong with video playback on the Wiz, provided that you use the source built version of Mplayer and add the extra file extensions. However for PDF I have yet to get a single PDF to open, they all throw errors, so right now I just convert all my PDF's to RTF and read it on Reader2X.

 

[LTStone]

I can't say that there is anything wrong with video playback on the Wiz, provided that you use the source built version of Mplayer and add the extra file extensions. However for PDF I have yet to get a single PDF to open, they all throw errors, so right now I just convert all my PDF's to RTF and read it on Reader2X.

Where can I get the source built version of mplayer? And as for Pdf you have to make sure your pdf's are in the Documents folder within the pdfviewer folder or you will get that error 1 every time.

Thanks for the support Hunterz, have you tried any of the Gp2x snes emus with ginge? I wonder if they might be more optimized and possible to play games faster?
As for the screen I haven't seen the burn in issue yet but I do agree with the grainy look, But I only notice it in some menu's and videos, but games look really nice to me on the screen, no graininess.
Sorry about the poor format, I guess the forum does not like my notepad cut and paste.

 

[Crazyteknohed]

With regards to the Wiz rattling, it's the battery hitting against the battery cover. Just use a small screwdriver to remove the battery cover and place a spacer between the battery and the battery cover (I used a small piece of folded card), and your Wiz should feel much more solid.

 

[mnm]

Thanks for the support Hunterz, have you tried any of the Gp2x snes emus with ginge? I wonder if they might be more optimized and possible to play games faster?

i'm interested to know as well, did someone already test it?

 

[HunterZ]

I have not tried any GP2X SNES emulators with GINGE. I did try the Wiz port of PocketSNES 7.1.0 with GINGE because some people said it can help with stability issues, but it cut the framerate in half. I'm not sure if the GP2X emus would fare much better, but it might be worth a try.

Bitrider also told me in a PM that he is working on PocketSNES 7.2.0 for Wiz/Cannoo, so maybe that will run better as well.

 

[Darkknight512]

Where can I get the source built version of mplayer? And as for Pdf you have to make sure your pdf's are in the Documents folder within the pdfviewer folder or you will get that error 1 every time.
*Snip*

http://dl.openhandhelds.org/cgi-bin/wiz.cgi?0,0,0,0,114,413

Thanks for the tip on the PDF's I'll give it a try.

 

[mnm]

Bitrider also told me in a PM that he is working on PocketSNES 7.2.0 for Wiz/Cannoo, so maybe that will run better as well.

Awesome news!

 

[jonezy1984]

This is all just my oppinion with what I own (I own 2 a320's 1 a330 , 2 Wiz's and a Cannoo.

Does your Dingoo a330 still work? (Gemei or Dingoo Digital)

I had one, shoulder buttons broke in a matter of weeks and after 3 months the screen broke too.
This was a Dingoo Digital which where known for crappy build quality.

After that i bought a Wiz, and never regretted it eversince

 

[LTStone]

This is all just my oppinion with what I own (I own 2 a320's 1 a330 , 2 Wiz's and a Cannoo.

Does your Dingoo a330 still work? (Gemei or Dingoo Digital)

I had one, shoulder buttons broke in a matter of weeks and after 3 months the screen broke too.
This was a Dingoo Digital which where known for crappy build quality.

After that i bought a Wiz, and never regretted it eversince

Yes the Dingoo a330 still works, I just glued it back together. but soon I will have to open the a320 up and change the 2 shoulder buttons as well as the Start button. Also the sound is now screwed up when using either headphone jack, it sounds very distorted, so I'll have to check that out as well.