mame handheld??

Spacedog

I was in easons there yesterday dogearing the computer mags where I saw this ad in a retro games mag. it was for a handheld console which you could connect to your pc and download mame and other format emulator roms and play them on the go. I forget the name of it but it looked pretty cool, was wondering if anyone knows the name of it/web address, or better still if someone has one, the ad said it was the first open source based handheld console.

brianon

i think its called the gamepark 32.
check out lik-sang.com

Spacedog

http://www.lik-sang.com/info.php?category=126&products_id=812&

that's it alright, looks like a cool lil dowackey! divx and xvid and nearly all emulators!

Product Features
# 1 Year Extended Warranty
# Latest International Firmware Pre-Installed (English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Korean)
# 32 Bit RISC CPU (ARM9), up to 133/166MHz (GBA, 16 MHz, NGage, 100 MHz)
# TFT 3.5" Reflective TFT LCD Display (65,536 colors, 320 X 240 Pixels)
# Smart Media Card Compatible
# USB Port for PC Connection
# 16Bit PCM Stereo Sound, MIDI Support, 4 Channel WAV Mixing
# Powered by 2 AA Batteries (12 Hours Play-Time)
# DivX, XviD and MP3 Compatible
# Tons of free Emulators available (Atari, GB, NES, SNES, PCE, ZX, SNES etc)

Ste-

Iirc Ronan|Raven was or is getting one of these.
He might be able to answer questions on it, if he's around.

Ronan|Raven

Didnt get one, wish I did! They are a great peice of tech to buy yerself. There are numerous emus developed for it. http://consoles4u.8m.com/gp32.html has info on it.

TinCool

I was seriously contemplating getting one of these too, playing Impossible Mission out in the garden or on the bog has some serious merits I decided to buy a kick ass rig instead for uber gaming. May be those Midway games will run at full speed now.

jimi_t

They're a fanatastic piece of technology but they have their limitations. Many of the third party emulators will not run close to full speed, and the few that do have poor or non existent sound emulation. You are limited by the 64mb cap on the size of smartcards you can use, so you are forced to carry three or four around at all times. Installing many third party software on it requires you to flash the bios etc... Also, GBA games will never run on it - don't be getting your hopes up.

RichyX

I've had a GP32 for about 9 months now. Great little handheld even though as a mp3/ogg player the sound is quite weak. The DivX ability is nice but you have to drop the framerate and screw around with the files alot to get them to work ok.

The limit is 128MB SMC's. It can't use anything over that due to the different voltages.

One of the best things about the GP32 is that it can be overclocked. It's clocked at 133 to begin with but people have been pushing their's to around 200. How high you can go seems to depend on the quality of the RAM used. There seem to be a variety of manufacturers that have supplied RAM for the GP's over the years. My own GP only goes to 156.

About many of the 3rd party emu's not running near full speed, all the emu's are 3rd party. Gamepark themselves don't produce any emu's. The SNES and MD emu's are still works in progress but both have improved greatly in the last year. If your GP can get to 166 MHZ I'd say you could get full speed out of the SNES one with sound.
Master System, NES, GBC etc. run full speed no bother.
There's been alot of work going on with GBA emulation and it's certainley getting somewhere. To even call it emulation isn't very accurate, they're using another method relating to the fact that the GP and GBA have similar processors (GBA-ARM7, GP32- ARM9)

For alot more info and a very busy forum check out GP32X.com
I'd highly recommend getting one if anyone is interested. Try eBay, could pick up a bargain there.

BLITZ_Molloy

Keep an eye out for the Gizmodo coming out later this year. 400mhz, 1 gig storage and WinCE based so theres alot of potential for emulation.