I want to talk about your favorite console, which is a competitor to the family dingoo (A320-A330), which is also a portable game console, the purpose of which is to emulate old toys, as well as to know something better. It is about GPH Caanoo. Immediately I would like to say that I was the lucky owner of the dingoo A320 almost from the very moment it appeared, fell in love with the device, did not regret it last summer, and bought a small upgrade - the GPH Caanoo console. Therefore, I see it from the side of the former user dingoo, and all the advantages / disadvantages are compared to dingoo a320. I do not in any way want to scold such a wonderful creature as dingoo a320, on the contrary, for its price it was and remains an excellent purchase. However, after some experiments with dingoo (a couple of applications on SDL, console and graphics, reader), I wanted a bit more flexibility. I stumbled upon Caanoo, already being familiar with this kind of system, and it won me over. What - I write below. Q. What is the GPH of Caanoo? A. Caanoo is a portable multimedia device capable of playing video, music (mp3, ogg), viewing pictures and, of course, launching applications — games and emulators. Produced by GamePark Holdings. The ancestor is the GPH Wiz device, which has a huge number of games and emulators in the luggage, while Caanoo itself is just beginning to acquire such luggage (but the main one already exists). Initially, the device is oriented as a linux-based device capable of launching applications specially prepared for it. You should not be afraid of Linux - the interface is friendly, to install any game, you just need to copy it to the games folder on the SD card (or flash drive). You may not even know that there is Linux.
The device hooked technical capabilities that are richer than the dingoo. It: - ARM9 processor with native 533 MHz, capable of operating on both 700 and 800 MHz, as appropriate. - RAM 128 MB (which is 4 times higher than on the A320). - The internal memory is inaccessible to the user, the operating system is stored in it, and the disk, apparently, is mounted as without write permissions. You can even forget about its existence. Using the file manager (or by connecting via SSH) you can merge files from there. All games (music, video, data) are stored on the SD-card. You can also insert a USB flash drive into a USB host. This allows you not to touch the system, while maintaining its stability. For comparison, in dingux (Linux on dingoo a320) the situation is the same - native (nand) memory is not visible at all, only microsd. - The presence of a graphics accelerator (for the console, you can write three-dimensional games with support for OpenGL ES1). While in most games, this ability is not involved. Let me just say that the C test program using SDL FPS on Caanoo is about 3-4 times higher than on the A320, at the same frequency of the processor. - Touchscreen, which allows the use of programs and games that require a mouse interface. In essence, it unties the hands of the developer, giving more flexibility. By the way, USB mouse, you can simply plug into the port. 9 buttons (two shifts, 4 main buttons, a home button, two start buttons, and a hidden button can be pressed on the stick (lever). Two start buttons are convenient if you play games in the landscape position, mostly old school scrollers with helicopters-airplanes, as well as tetrises (the left hand moves the joystick, for the right one there are two buttons conveniently located.) The extra buttons again allow the developer not to steam with the control distribution - there are enough buttons. - Analog stick (joystick). This means the device marks the angle of the joystick, and also which way it is tilted. Stick practice is extremely convenient and dynamic. For example, in a self-written reader, I use a hard push down to more quickly scroll the text. - G-Sensor (accelerometer). Three-axis, the correct accelerometer. In games almost never used (yet). I myself while in the stage of early development keep a toy based on it. - USB host. Tasty stuff. You can plug in a USB keyboard, a mouse, any joystick for a second player, a Wi-Fi adapter for Internet access, or for some time charge from Caanoo, for example, a player. USB standard 1.1. The adapter is not my own, I bought it at the nearest DLink store. Not all are suitable. - The main connector for connecting to a computer universal - is used for charging and transferring files, transferring the Internet to the device over the wire, or for connecting cable to a TV or (if I'm not mistaken because I have not tried) an alternative Wi-Fi adapter connection. The format is USB 2.0. Thus, if the developers did well in dingoo, they squeezed out what was possible and impossible from the console (not so long ago they all predicted that it would be impossible to emulate a PlayStation on dingoo, and what?), Then Caanoo is left with an unplowed field of potential. In general, iron is a geek, it is such that it is targeted at developers who want to experiment. For example, here's my share - a virtual wireless steering wheel, triggered by an accelerometer and rotating the steering wheel in a game not on a laptop: www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbw6S_3rkf4 . The desktop part of a similar project under the android, thanks to Habra for help in organizing all this. The battery is ordinary. U dingoo is better. It sits down quickly if you power an external device (for example, USB-wifi dongle), while actively driving the processor. So the charge can fall in just three hours. I usually charge every 2-3 days.
Firmware
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Q. What about the firmware? A. Firmware (as in dingoo) in fact means little. The number of emulated platforms and the games themselves depend mainly on the software that can be downloaded to the USB flash drive. There were a few key updates of the main firmware, this is support for some non-brand Wi-fi adapters, and Qt built into the system (somehow did not go, I will tell below). In fact, the firmware is not the key part, many sat on the old firmware versions, not seeing the difference. The firmware is updated if necessary, elementary. There are sources, you can build your own kernel modules to support non-standard USB devices.
Games
Q. What emulators are there at the moment? A. Just listing: NES (dendy), SNES, GBA, PlayStation, Sega Genesis / Megadrive, Sega CD / Mega CD, Sega 32x (three emulation, painfully demanding), Sega Master System, Sega Game Gear, Spectrum (emulators several), NeoGeo CD, NeoGeo, MAME4ALL, CPS2, OpenBOR, PC Engine, SAM Coupe, Texas Instruments TI99 / 4A, TO7-70, MSX, Thomson MO5, Amstrad CPC, Atari 7800, Atari 800/130/5200, Atari 2600 , Colecovision, Intellivision, Vectrex, TI-92 (programmable calculator). Separately, I note the presence of such a gorgeous thing, like the emulator of old quests ScummVM. As you can see, there is a choice. From time to time there are new emulators.
Q. What about the quality of emulation? A. I can only separately praise the quality of the Sega emulation (thanks to Picodrive), it tunes a lot, plays perfectly, as well as the gpsp (GBA emulator), which without tromoses and lags copes with games such as Tekken Advance, Doom and the Need For Speed series. Not to say that dingoo could not cope, but the difference in speed is visible to the naked eye. NES is played without brakes, as it should. It’s not for me to judge about the rest - I play little in them. In Playstation there is a gain in comparison with dingoo, Hercules, for example, is played without brakes. Worms go fine and without brakes (as, incidentally, on dingoo).
Q. Are there any ordinary games? A. Aha, this is Quake 1 (including multiplayer), Quake 2, Doom, Doom II, Wolf, several 3D games, for example, AudioRace, similar to AudioSurf, a number of casual logic games, a great handicraft of STPPC, a collection of three dozen games such as sapper, sudoku and so on, OpenTTD, Warcraft, and a lot more smaller. Considering that most of the games are written on bare C / C ++, the platform gives odds to such competitors as android (I am silent about top devices for 20,000 rubles, because the niche is different, but my tablet with 1 GHz and 256 MB of RAM shows by eye lower performance in games, however, and emulators to play, poking at the screen, inconveniently).
Q. What about media? A. Worse than dingoo. That is, the video is played without conversion, there are quite loud speakers, headphone output, but there are two drawbacks: 1. A small number of audio formats. Native - only mp3, ogg and wav. For example, for FLAC there is only one console player without a GUI, and all hands will not reach to manage it. We are waiting for the appearance of the port of one of the existing players. 2. Inconvenient (compared to dingoo) case for pulling in a pocket with headphones. That is, as a portable player is not very. The reader of the books is there, but she, like in dingoo, is just for show. I need such things as: smooth scrolling (not line-by-line, but pixel-by-pixel), automatic saving of bookmarks, Russian text, smoothed font (and not just like that, but subpixels, like ClearType in Windows). Therefore, I wrote my own, which supports all this. I read it very much and very much, I do not like it.
V. What is the story with the games on Wiz A. In the minus system, Caanoo is often put incompatibility with old applications on the Wiz console. I will answer this way: firstly, there are plenty of games and so on, the number of the same emulators just rolls over, and secondly, there is partial compatibility. There is such a GINGE (I do not call it an emulator, because GINGE == Ginge Is Not Gp2x Emulator), which allows you to run games in Wiz, as well as with the older GP2X. And these are pretty serious toys (for example, Quake 2, and some improved similarity to GTA2).
Q. I heard about fungp. Is the game paid? A. fungp.com - IMHO stillborn project. This is a AppStore, where you can buy DRM games for Caanoo. Nothing useful in my opinion there. You can even forget its existence. Everything I wrote about is free and free, including compilers, firmware and kernel sources. There are, of course, a couple of paid games from third-party developers. In general, nothing like that.
Q. And what programs are there? A. There are standard ones, like a calculator, and there are minor, interesting ones rather to geeks. This is an SSH server, Samba server, FTP server, console. There is a PDF reader, there is a picture dresser, and a number of programs. Separately, I note the presence of the browser Arora with a bilingual on-screen keyboard, with which I personally left a couple of comments on Habré (that is, it will go for practical use). Besides her, there are two or three browsers.
Rest
Q. What and how does all this expand? A. For Caanoo, there are a number of language-interpreters and compilers that allow you to indulge yourself. It: Classic - C and C ++. You can build ready-made Linux applications through configure-make, both on Windows and on a Linux machine. You can write yourself. Qt 4.7.1 - a ready-made Qt-application is taken, qmake is done and voila - we launch it on the console. I note that I personally don’t like the Qt libraries of my own, so I use my own production. Unlike relatives, there is everything - from UI to Webkit and Javascript. No QtOpenGL (white spot in the knowledge, I do not know where to dig). There is also a Qt binding for PHP. PHP, with compiled graphics output functions via SDL, as well as reading accelerometer, touchscreen, stick and button readings. BennuGD is a Fenix based game engine, the most popular among Caanoo games. FreePascal, the project is young, but the prospects are broad. ARM binaries are compiled on an adult machine. LOVE (extension language Lua). Extremely simple and pleasant to learn language. Unfortunately, slower than PHP or naked Xi. Javascript. Yes, it sounds weird, but Arora browser holds 99 in the ACID test and successfully scrolls some of the demos from the Chrome Experiments. I can demonstrate a video of Raytrace rendering on Javascript running on Caanoo. Given the presence in the console httpd (Apache) and PHP, you can collect some text quest. From being in development or frozen there is SDLBasic, Python and Java. Some of the utilities are written in bash, there is a full-fledged console for the graphical interface.
Q. Purchase, payment, delivery, Chinese? A. The device is more expensive dingoo. From myself I’ll say that, having already had experience with dingoo, I would have bought it for 10,000. The same with Caanoo. It does not collect dust on the shelf, it is used more often than, for example, a tablet with an android. Price - 150 evergreen presidents. And the main audience of IMHO, those who managed to fall in love with dingoo, began to try to do something of their own, but the platform limits. Delivery was quick - in a week. The box comes perfectly packed, inside a layer of white soft balls, a spare stylus. Paid through QIWI Visa Virtual. Now it is possible through QiWI VC. Bought on play-asia.com.
Q. People, community? A. There are two sites in RuNet that consecrate the Caanoo scene, this is a320.emulate.su and a narrower resource wiz.rusbase.net . There are foreign forums, but we have all the news promptly duplicated. Again, the device for geeks, and the contingent is usually adequate and knowledgeable. Now there are sprout holivar dingoo vs caanoo, but this thing is empty. I'm already silent about PSP vs Caanoo / Dingoo holivars. In this case, there is a simple rule: if someone scolds a device (any), first find out if he has any experience with owning this device. I also want to mention where new games come from under such platforms. It used to be a tradition for Wiz and GP2X to organize paid contests. People collect donations, and the prize fund is divided between the winners, who gave the world the best toys. For Caanoo, such competitions have not yet been held, but right now the first such competition is underway. Ends in June. Promises to catch new games. I myself tried to organize a community of programmers, but the project (site format) by design was erroneous. Now there are a couple of articles on how to port existing games yourself, a couple of releases and that's it.
Q. What else? A. Of the irrelevant - skins can be changed, if you start the Qt server, then the mouse appears in the main menu, you can use an alternative launcher, you can run binaries (if they have the .gpe extension), there is flash support (that is, you can play part of SWF games, pleasure is dubious), you can view pictures, and so on, in general, the usual set of similar features.
Q. And what is the result? A. Oh, the result is great. Thanks to Caanoo, I learned the basics of C, learned how to cross-compile, set myself a second Ubuntu system, got a lot of interesting experience, learned how to build my own extensions for PHP, discovered Qt for myself. And, of course, in waiting periods of queues or in my free time I can always read a book, slash in Mario or tekken advance, or win a couple of games in an interesting logical toy. The format of the case only contributes to this, it is convenient to hold in the hands, and in the same Mario I can reach such heights that I would never have reached on a computer emulator that is played from the keyboard. And the device continues to be not revealing its true potential, the possibilities still remain above what is now.