Jolt Country

Posted: **Mon Jan 02, 2006 2:50 pm**

Well, who can't like it, then.

http://www.gbax.com/main.pl/

Here is what they say about it on their site.

To sum up the GP2X:

It can play games. It can play your Movies. It can play your music. It can view photos. It can read Ebooks. It runs on just 2 AA batteries - And it can do all this in the palm of your hand or on your TV screen.

Yes that's right, this handheld can connect to the TV, console style. Watch your DivX movies on the TV. Play emulated classics on the TV. Try big screen Quake. Or just play them all on the GP2X's large 320*240 backlit screen. You get the best of both worlds.

It runs the free Linux operating system. This means a whole world of Games, Utilities and Emulators are at your disposal. Quake, Doom, SNES, Megadrive, MAME, Media players and Applications to name just a few.

It's powerful - Two 200mhz CPU's with 64meg of RAM, custom graphics hardware and decoding chips. Takes SD cards and has 64M of NAND memory. Plenty to play with. One of the most powerful and advanced handhelds today.

That means it can play movies without any re-encoding. Just put them onto an SD card. Any size. Any resolution. No messing about. The GP2X scaling chip will resize to fit the screen. No other handheld can do that.

It's cheap. Just £124.99.

It's open. You want to develop your own games for the GP2X? Go right ahead. The SDK is included with the system free. Not since the days of the Amiga has a system been so easy to develop for, commercially and for fun.

The GP2X isn't just another wannabe be Gameboy. Its a whole different design. A whole new idea for a handheld games system.

But wait, we're not new to the scene. Heard of the GP32? An accidental experiment in an open source handheld that went right. Some 30,000 units were sold worldwide, mostly in the UK and parts of Europe. The machine has an astonishing following. The GP2X is the successor.

We hope you will enjoy it.

-Craig Rothwell

So I don't know. Perhaps it is just a niche device for old hipsters like myself. But a no-hassle way to play old shit sure would be fantastic.

Posted: **Mon Jan 02, 2006 3:25 pm**

This looks freaking awesome. What's the control method?

Posted: **Mon Jan 02, 2006 3:45 pm**

It's got a little thumb pad on the left side and buttons on the right.

Downside is.... the thing just chews through batteries. I think the PSP has weaned me off batteries altogether. Being able to plug it in (and still play it while it's charging) is just a huge boon.

Posted: **Mon Jan 02, 2006 5:30 pm**

Cool.. I thought it was the gp32, on first glance. no idea they'd made a newer one.

my AA battery charger has 4 slots, so if this uses 2 batteries you'd never be without good batteries. how much is £124.99 in real money?

Posted: **Mon Jan 02, 2006 5:33 pm**

Google says the following:

125 British pounds = 215.3125 U.S. dollars

Now I wonder if it is at all buggy. Time to investigate!

Posted: **Mon Jan 02, 2006 5:34 pm**

The following was posted on Slashdot:

I was given a GP2X for Christmas so I've not had too much time to use it. There are certain flaws which are evident though.

1. The LCD screen has a problem with refresh rates as it appears to be interlaced. This apparently can be tweaked by running some third party utilities which adjust the clock speed of the CPU and the LCD timing but it isn't perfect. You either get a washed out screen or a flickery interlaced screen. Alledgely a future firmware upgrade will fix it...

2. The unit is very plasticy and poorly finished. The edges around the shoulder buttons are quite sharp.

3. It is very easy to brick the unit as the firmware upgrade system is very unreliable. The safest way appears to be using a third party utility.

4. How it appears as a USB device is odd. It tells the computer that is a HD instead of a removable disk. This means that your PC expects the SD card to be formatted with a partition table.

5. The unit is quite fat. They never show you a side profile view or the back for a reason and that is because there is a lump where you put the 2xAAs.

I've tried the Megadrive/Genesis and SNES emulators so far and they both work quite well apart from the lack of sound in the SNES emulator. Playing DiVX files also works but I've had some problems where it crashes and required you to turn the unit on and off. Both of these problems should be fixable with new firmware.

Basically, if you want a games console then buy a DS or a PSP. If you want to run your own stuff or that the idea of a games console running Linux appeals then get a GP2X.

Hmm.

Posted: **Fri Jan 27, 2006 7:27 am**

I wonder if I should actually grab this. In the moments that I sit and wait, and wait, I've been thinking about a handheld.

The DS apparently only has Japanese GBA games that were never translated, all it's games should currently be emulated, but I guess that retarded touch screen fucks shit up. The PSP lets me do picture and movie viewing. So pr0n and comix are covered. Already have an MP3 player, and I probably can't give a fuck about games I don't want to play on the PS2.

So it seems like this Linux thing is for me. Any updates from slashdot?

Posted: **Fri Jan 27, 2006 7:59 am**

It still runs on batteries, which is a deal breaker for me. The battery that you charge by plugging it into the wall, like the PSP and every laptop on earth has is the way to go. I think I might wait until there is a solution there.

Posted: **Fri Jan 27, 2006 8:55 am**

Yeah, I just can't give a fuck about recycled GC and GBA games for the one handheld and recycled PS2 games for the other handheld. The ability to play Harvest Moon, Final Fight, Golden Axe, and Pokemon on one console really appeals to me. However, these are not games that I wish to devote any inordinate amount of time to playing when I am sitting down.

Personally I would prefer cheap batteries because at least I won't find myself sitting with an intermittent shitty batteries because a new one is thirty dollars. Which is currently the case with my mp3 player.

It runs SCUMM! So does the PSP apparently, any idea how the PSP holds up to the GPX2 for emulation? Does milker have one for sale?

Posted: **Fri Jan 27, 2006 4:42 pm**

Thinking about it. I wonder if I'm better off getting the GP32 off of ebay or somewhere. It seems like it has all it's emulators done and developed. I don't like the aspect of bricking my PSP simply because what I want to do isn't what the thing is designed for.

Posted: **Mon Jan 30, 2006 12:21 am**

If you do get this, please let me know. I'd be very interested in how often you use it. To be honest, I've played just the Tecmo game for the PSP for the longest time now and ... is it just me, or did a lot of NES games kind of suck?

And apparently the guy porting MAME to the PSP took the last 5 months off.

Posted: **Mon Jan 30, 2006 8:26 am**

I ended up being won over by the fact that I can browse through dead bloated bodies with the Ogrish RSS feed on my PSP. Still, since spending 200 bucks isn't half of your worldly finances, maybe you should just pick it up?

Jolt Country

The GP2x console -- it emulates!

The GP2x console -- it emulates!