A new portable gaming unit that runs multiple emulators.....

[Atari2600Lives]

I have recently been made aware of a product called Game Park 32.

 

It looks like a gameboy except bigger. it plays MP3s , shows movies and pictures and even has a ton of games for it's use. the real cool thing is that it is Linux based and there are a bunch of programmers that have ported over exsisting emulators!!!! It has 128MBs

 

We can now have our very own portable 2600! Current emulators that work include Commodore 64, Nintendo, Super Nintendo etc. etc. here is a shot of the product:

 

http://www.retro-games.co.uk/gp32/gp32.htm

 

here is a link to the emulators that support it.

 

http://www.emu.pl/gp32/

 

Let's go Atari 2600 programmers...Let's port something over!

 

Would Virtual 2600 work? it was linux based correct?

 

I would be willing to buy one for the person that decides to port over a 2600 emulator for it. the product cost about $150.00

 

let me know

[Mindfield]

Only problem is, the Gamepark GP32 is a Korean handheld (www.gamepark.co.kr), and as far as I know it's not particularily easy to get. And also, as far as I know, all the games are in Korean. There are a few GP32 emulators around (GeePee32, as well as official single-game emulators you can download from Gamepark's website IIRC).

 

Anyway, it has some impressive specs that certainly make the GBA blush, including some cool netplay options, but a little impractical to make a good and widely available VCS emu.

 

As for whether or not you could convert a Linux-based VCS emu to it, I'm sure you could, if you recompiled it with the proper libs, possibly with some changes to the source.

 

I think I'll wait to see how the 2600-on-a-chip progresses... that has much promise. :-)

[Atari2600Lives]

I live in the US and it took a few days to get after being ordered on the web. I saw it with my own 2 eyes and it does have English games(Linux was certainly in English when Doom was loading up, as well as Doom the game itself). In fact I played a bunch of games on the emulators....it's an awesome piece of hardware. It plays movies for goodness sakes. Instead of buying a pocket Pc you can get this for a third of the price. You can even play against someone else wireless!

 

They released the SDK...that is what makes this unique. it's a piece of portable gaming hardware released for the gamers and the programming community.

[RCorcoran]

I run Pocket VCS and Pocket Coleco on my iPAQ. I have about 200 games on the CF card and it works great (considering). I also use a Hanaho QPad (http://www.hanaho.com/products/QPad/index.html) due to the controller issues with the iPAQ. Only think lacking is a joystick... Me and D-Pads just don't get along for some reason.

[DEBRO]

Does this thing have a back lit screen? Why do companies refuse to add light to their portables? It makes the experience so much better.

[ubersaurus]

backlit=no battery life. No battery life=whats the point of a handheld?

[RCorcoran]

Does this thing have a back lit screen? Why do companies refuse to add light to their portables? It makes the experience so much better.

 

Yes, all iPAQs are back lit. Yes, it does drain the battery, but I have been able to go 2 days without recharging the battery with the backlight running...

[Raijin Z]

Backlight + power switch for it = intelligent.

[SmileyDude]

The GP32 is a neat box, but I personally think it's a limited market -- it's gonna get the homebrew support, but that's pretty much it.

 

Don't count the GBA out for Atari 2600 emulation -- I'm pretty sure that it's possible, and at a playable speed.

 

I personally prefer the GBA over the GP32 -- it's got commercial games, and better hardware support. Programming for it is similar to the consoles of old, but with a modern CPU

 

The GP32 is more like programming for a PC -- the hardware isn't very capable on it's own, so you have to program any and every effect yourself. For example, the GBA has hardware rotation and scaling -- the GP32 doesn't. The GBA has transparency effects -- the GP32 doesn't. The GBA has the ability to do 4 layers of tiles, plus sprites -- the GP32 has a framebuffer that you draw into yourself.

 

To understand the big difference, with the GBA, moving a character around on the screen is as easy as updating a register or two. With the GP32, you have to erase the old copy of the character, and redraw it in the new position. This means that a lot more of the CPUs time is spent updating the screen.

 

So, while the GP32 might have a more powerful processor, a lot of it's advantage is erased by the very poor graphics support.

 

Now, put the GBAs hardware graphics in a GP32 with the bigger screen, faster processor, and SMC support, and I'll buy one in a heartbeat

[Atari2600Lives]

How would you play an emulator on a GBA?

[ubersaurus]

A flashcart of course! I believe they can be ordered online.

[IceCold]

I live in the US and it took a few  days to get after being ordered on the web. I saw it with my own 2 eyes and it does have English games(Linux was certainly in English when Doom was loading up, as well as Doom the game itself). In fact I played a bunch of games on the emulators....it's an awesome piece of hardware. It plays movies for goodness sakes. Instead of buying a pocket Pc you can get this for a third of the price. You can even play against someone else wireless!

 

They released the SDK...that is what makes this unique. it's a piece of portable gaming hardware released for the gamers and the programming community.

 

So you actually bought one? It looks really sweet. Is doom as good on it as it is on GBA? Are you satisfied with your purchase? Maybe one of these days I'll be able to pick one up.

[Atari2600Lives]

Buddy of mine got one....doom looks exact except for the sound. they are still working on it. The screen is bigger than the GBAs. I am getting one to play MAME, NES and SNES emulators. Since the SDK is released it has to be easier to port over an exsisting Atari 2600 emulator rather than doing the same with the GBA.

 

How do you load the emulator amd roms on the flash cart on a GBA? How much memory does it have?

 

The game park is USB, hook it up to your computer and dump stuff in it.

[Mindfield]

You have to get flashcarts from one of the few companies that still sells them. Bung used to, but they got sued out of existence by the big N. Currently you can still buy them online from Lik-Sang or anyone who distributes their products. They're not the easiest things in the world to work with; making multicarts (carts with more than one game flashed) can be a pain in the butt. The flash carts usually come in 16, 32 or 64 meg flavours, and aren't cheap. They're flashed with an accompanying flash linker hardware and Windows software.

 

By contrast the GP32 is much easier to work with, given it's USB. But then keep in mind, Nintendo passionately loathes anything smacking of piracy and emulation, so they make their hardware difficult to work with when it comes to stuff like that. (Impossible, in the case of GC's proprietary hardware and discs) GamePark on the other hand are newcomers and seem to be more interested in encouraging hobbyist developers.

[SmileyDude]

How do you load the emulator amd roms on the flash cart on a GBA? How much memory does it have?

 

With a device called a linker that connects to your PC (via Parport or USB) and you plug the cart into that to program it.

 

The cart sizes are measured in megabits, not bytes. So you have to divide by 8 to get the size in megabytes. I have a 256 megabit cart, which is 32 megabytes.

 

There are already a few emulators out for the GBA -- a couple of Spectrum ZX emus, a couple of NES emus, and a few more that really aren't at a usable state yet.

 

As far as specs on the GBA, in addition to the cart ROM/Flash, you have 3 blocks of internal RAM -- a 256k block, a fast 32k block, and a 96k block for video. The GBA actually supports loading code over it's link port, and executing out of RAM -- there are a number of commercial games that support this, and one of the emulators also supports this (PocketNES).

[mos6507]

The lines are blurring between PDAs and portable game systems just as they are between consoles and PCs.

 

What I like about the GP32 spec is the larger screen that is more in tune with the native resolutions of classic systems. But it only has 8MB of RAM which makes it underpowered if you intend to do any kind of PDA-style programming on it.

 

I don't know what they are trying to sell these for to see what the pricepoint is vs. a PDA.

 

Personally, I'd rather have a PDA, although the battery life is probably worse than a GP32.

[Albert]

How is the screen on the GP32? One of the things I can't stand about the GBA is the horrible screen. I rarely even use my GBA because of this, even though there are some excellent games for it. Given all the emulators already out or in development for the GP32, if the screen is better than the GBA's I might spring for one. I'm much less interested in games written natively for this system--I'd probably use it exclusively for emulators (MAME, Gameboy, NES, PC Engine, SMS, Super NES, etc.) Those alone could keep me occupied for a life time.

 

..Al

[Cupcakus]

I play pocket NES on the GBA, there are some issues that would make the GP32 better. For one, to load games onto the GBA you're going to need a flash card, which is about $1.5 per MBit, and 128MBit is about the minimum you want to own. And the flash linker which cost me about $150 when I bought mine, but it might be less now, which allows you to upload roms into the flash cart via the printer port on your PC.

 

GP32 has native PC connectivity, it's "designed" to be an emulator. I for one would pick one up just for it's multiple emulator support, the GBA is cool for it's own games.