Overview of the multiplatform portable emulator GP2X Wiz
I decided to publish this review 8 months after the acquisition in order to fully appreciate the capabilities of the device and its community.
After numerous transfers (originally, the release was planned for the end of October 2008), finalizing the firmware and writing the necessary number of own applications for a normal product launch, at the end of April 2009, the GP2X Wiz came out.
The main purpose of this device is emulation of various platforms, mainly consoles, the release of which has already been discontinued and gaming machines, but this does not end the machine’s capabilities, it also supports DOS emulation and heaps of various platforms (Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum , TI99 , MSX ). Unlike analogs and emulators on other portable devices, this device is designed primarily for high-quality emulation and will easily breathe a second youth into any geek that has seen it.
In addition to its main purpose, the manufacturer supplied the device with built-in games, video and music players, a viewer of pictures and comics, an e-book reader, a multi-zonal clock, a calculator and a voice recorder.
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Specifications
Screen: AMOLED, 320x240 pixels, 2.8 inches, touchscreen;
Processor: 533 MHz ARM9;
RAM: 64 MB;
Memory: 1 GB internal flash memory, SD card slot (SDHC cards are supported);
Operating system: Linux based OS
Power supply: Removable lithium battery 2000 mAh;
Outputs: 3.5 mm headphone jack, built-in microphone, speakers;
Dimensions: 121x61x18 mm;
Weight: 136 g. (With battery), 97 g. (Without battery)
Contents of delivery
Package Includes:
- device with stylus
- USB cable for charging and synchronization with PC
- The initial manual documentation in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Korean, Chinese and Japanese.
The build quality is very good, there is no backlash, the Korean (not to be confused with the Chinese) assembly makes itself felt. The body is made of glossy plastic of dark gray color with small metallic gold splashes. Fingerprints remain on the device, but the unusual color of plastic masks them quite well.
The device’s touch screen is shipped with transparent plastic film as supplied. To protect the screen, it is better to cover some kind of good dense anti-glare protective film. The accuracy of the response to the stylus is not very good, there are small flaws in terms of the presence of "dead" zones at the edges of the screen, but this does not affect the basic functionality very much. In the sun, the screen is clearly visible when compared with PocketPC screens. In the shadows you can play without straining your eyes.
The headphone jack is standard (3.5 mm), the headphones fit tightly, the sound quality (I checked on Hi-Fi headphones) the external speakers are loud enough, they have a sufficiently high-quality sound (for their size), they are successfully recessed into the device case.
The control buttons are quite responsive, the stroke is soft. It may seem inconvenient keys on the right side, but in the process of operation you get used to.
The lithium-ion, replaceable battery, battery capacity of 2000 mAh, lasts about 7-8 hours of continuous playing and watching videos.
When connected to a computer, it is defined as a regular flash drive, while sharing either a user flash area of ​​1 gigabyte or an inserted SD card, SDHC cards are supported, I worked without any problems with a 16 gigabyte card. The file transfer rate to the device via cable is limited by the maximum throughput of the USB 1.1 protocol.
Charger and headphones are not included. For charging the device, power supplies with a USB-type "mother" plug are suitable, without any problems, it was charged from USB charging in the car.
Device functions
- Emulators of gaming consoles CPS2 / NEOGEO / NES / SNES / MAME (And a bunch of emulators in the process of porting)
- Its 3D and 2D games (there is the possibility of development using the SDK, hardware supported by OpenGL)
- Flash player (supports Flash 8, Action Script 2.0, some classes AS 3.0)
- Audio Player
- Video player
- Book reader
- Dictaphone
- View images / comics
Now more about the main features.
Built-in games
6 built-in funny arcade games executed in the native software environment of the device and ??? Flash games designed and adapted to the screen of the device, it kills time perfectly, the playability is quite good, the graphics and music are pleasant.
1. Animatch
2. Boomshine2x
3. Myriad
4. Square Tower Defense
5. Tail Tale
6. Wiztern
Flash player
Implemented as a separate application and as a flash game launcher optimized for the screen of this device. Flash drives are scaled on one side, if the resolution exceeds the screen resolution. Fonts and vector graphics are smoothed out well, raster elements are slightly worse. Supports the work of the stylus.
Management is simple - open, close and exit, turn 90, 180 degrees. For more complex games, it is possible to bind the keys at your discretion. As it was already written above, all Action Script 2 classes and some from the third version are supported (there is no exact list). I compiled a couple of files to check the work on the device - the result can be seen on the video.
View images / comics
Essentially 2 different programs but the interface is almost the same, the only difference is in control. Through the menu, you can move between files, rotate the image, zoom in and out. While watching the top sticks stupid status period, which is somewhat difficult to read comics. The following file types are supported: JPG, GIF, BMP, PNG (animated PNG is not supported). Viewing comics almost completely borrows the interface from the image viewer, but navigating through the picture is done on-screen (or using the joystick at the zoom), jumping from left to right when the picture ends, goes down and further from left to right.
Music player
Normally perceives the Cyrillic alphabet, the control interface is simple (stop, pause, next, previous, rewind to both sides, navigation bar on the current track), the player plays music in directories, there is a random play mode, a replay of the directory, a replay of one track. Non-replaceable rendering is spinning during playback. The playback quality is excellent. WAV, MP3, OGG formats are supported.
Dictaphone
The interface is outrageously simple; it records stereo sound from a built-in microphone on a memory card in wav format, encodes a stream of 16 bits, the discredit rate is 48000 Hz. The recording quality is pretty good, with almost no extraneous noise.
Video player
The interface is completely borrowed from the music player. MPEG4, DIVX, XVID codecs are supported. Video playback of 320x240 25 fps takes place without problems, the manufacturer promises to support video with a bitrate of no more than 2048 kb / s and a resolution of 640x480 at 25 fps. Subtitles are not supported, but fans of anime and fresh products of the film industry with modern capacities of personal computers can always transcode video under a small screen by building them into the video sequence itself. I'm more than confident that third-party, more functional players will appear, but this is a matter of time.
Reader
Simple control, bookmarks, Cyrillic in all encodings I use (UTF-8, ANSI, Unicode, KOI-8R) are refused to understand. In principle, reading texts where Cyrillic characters are used is possible, but for this it is necessary to replace the font on the console with a similar one containing a set of Cyrillic characters (Linux fonts are standard). There are alternative and more functional reading rooms, but I do not use them (The screen of the device is too small for reading and I have a book reader for such things).
Organizer
It consists of a calendar, world time, calculator and a timer. There is nothing more to say, simple interface, finger control.
Multitasking
Supports simultaneous playback of music and viewing photos or comics.
Emulators
Creating this section, I didn’t try to embrace everything in any way (since this compare to the overview of all possible emulators under Windows or Linux), but touched upon the most interesting ones. I will not illustrate the material with pictures, but I will attach a video.
Nintendo Entertainment System (Known in Russia as “Dendy”)
Emulation without problems even at low processor frequencies (200 megahertz), in the emulator options menu it is possible to save both the global configuration and the configuration for each individual rum, the number of options is amazing, not inferior in quality to counterparts from desktop computers.
The following ROMs have been tested:
- Super Mario
- Darkwing Duck
- Chip & Dale Rescue Rangers
All images run without problems, you can save and load any state of the game. The emulator menu is not very conveniently invoked (by simultaneously pressing the keys for adding and decreasing sound)
Graphics, control, sound is quite good.
Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES)
The emulation is good, I expected something for the worst. In the emulator option, I didn’t go deep because the quality on the default settings was fine. In games with quite decent graphics, drawing slows down to form a diagonal across the entire screen (annoying at first, but eventually you get used to it). But this flaw comes up because of the poor firmware of the device. It is treated by setting a sweep of 120 hertz in the configuration of the application, it should be noted that in this mode the battery sits a little faster.
Genesis (Known in Russia as “Sega Mega Drive”)
Probably the most excellent emulator in terms of management, saving during the game and saves downloads. Diagonal strip is missing. The graphics are mapped onto the full screen, the sound is also emulated as kachetsvenno, all the Roma (I tried about 20) started absolutely without any problems. emulator earns deserved five points.
ZX Spectrum
Yes, there is such an emulator, the quality of emulation is also super, all hardware implementations of this platform are supported. The control keys can be bind at your discretion and save a personal config for each image. The sound and video emulation quality is excellent.
Application Development
Alas, even in a good product there is a fly in the ointment. I do not want to say that there is no environment for developing applications, but it is assembled by craftsmen “on the knee”, libraries are a bit crooked, but in general people write, port and compile applications.
Development will be easy for anyone who more or less owns any of the programming languages.
As for the product community, they are fragmented nationally, the developers are somewhat lazy. It will be easier for those who already had any little experience in developing for Linux in C / C ++, since inside there is a full-fledged Linux kernel.
GamePark Holdings (product manufacturer, hereinafter GPH)
I would like to briefly describe the manufacturer.
- A very strange step was the release of a product without an official SDK, it is promised by the summer (2010).
- It seems to me that because of its scarcity of its units, the GPH cannot cope with the tasks assigned to it.
- GPH plans to create a portal FunGP (development is already underway, issues with licenses are being resolved), which in essence will be an app store where you can buy licensed ROMs and native applications.
- The community of developers and users lives separately from the manufacturer (which is very illogical), does not participate in the development of firmware.
- Bugs in the firmware fix long enough, the release of firmware with the new functionality is delayed.
- All emulators are born exclusively by the community, although they are mentioned on the official GPH website as one of the device features.
I know that many of you, from the review on Habré know about the Chinese equivalent of this device - Dingoo A320 .
Yes, I agree that in some places this unit is superior to Wiz, but there is another point of view:
- Ding is no longer available, alas, this is a one-time product;
- during the life of the dingy, Linux was ported to it, but it didn’t go further (too little developer community), the console functionality with Linux onboard is almost none compared to the native environment;
- the community of Wiz users and developers “genetically” surpasses the dingy community; this is not the first product of GP2X and one should think not the last, but the dinga is a product carefully worn out by the manufacturer already at the release stage;
- VISA has a touch screen, which provides great opportunities for applications.
Iron
In this section, I would like to touch on 2 things regarding the purchase of a device and its properties.
You can buy this device by ordering from German and English online stores (which, by the way, are just resellers), but it’s best to trust the time-tested direct supplier, play-asia.com , this is where I bought my copy of the device, never had any problems I don’t have my acquaintances, and besides, they’re buying large sums of money in small Japanese surprises in parcels.
As for the connector and cable of the device, since the Korean company, part of the components of the device was borrowed from the Korean manufacturer Samsung. The pinout of the device output is known to the user community and allows users to use an analog TV & Audio output, connect the console to a computer via ethernet, charge the device accordingly and receive data from it. For synchronization, the cables from some models of Samsung players are suitable, and for charging from some models of Samsung phones. It is logical to expect from the manufacturer the output of the cradle for the device in the near future (as was the case with consoles of previous generations), it is rumored that the cradle will also have an RJ-45 output and some browsers have already been ported to Vis.
Summing up, I would like to point out the disadvantages and advantages of the platform
Pros:
- High-quality emulation of most platforms;
- High-quality assembly of the device;
- High-quality AMOLED screen;
- High-quality sound;
- Excellent growth potential;
- Good autonomy.
Minuses:
- Some inconvenient keys;
- The accuracy and quality of the screen sensor is not very good;
- No network charger;
- Non-standard connector for synchronization (I would like a mini-usb).
Related Links:
GamePark Holdings (official English site) - www.globalgph.com
File archive of the device - dl.openhandhelds.org/cgi-bin/wiz.cgi
Developer Community - gp32x.com
Community product wiki page - gp2xwiz.co.uk/wiki/Main_Page
Wikipedia article in Russian - w.wikipedia.org/wiki/GP2X_Wiz
The Russian-speaking GP2X community is mainly represented in the thematic section of the gbx.ru forum - gbx.ru/index.php?showforum=49
After numerous transfers (originally, the release was planned for the end of October 2008), finalizing the firmware and writing the necessary number of own applications for a normal product launch, at the end of April 2009, the GP2X Wiz came out.
The main purpose of this device is emulation of various platforms, mainly consoles, the release of which has already been discontinued and gaming machines, but this does not end the machine’s capabilities, it also supports DOS emulation and heaps of various platforms (Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum , TI99 , MSX ). Unlike analogs and emulators on other portable devices, this device is designed primarily for high-quality emulation and will easily breathe a second youth into any geek that has seen it.
In addition to its main purpose, the manufacturer supplied the device with built-in games, video and music players, a viewer of pictures and comics, an e-book reader, a multi-zonal clock, a calculator and a voice recorder.
')
Specifications
Screen: AMOLED, 320x240 pixels, 2.8 inches, touchscreen;
Processor: 533 MHz ARM9;
RAM: 64 MB;
Memory: 1 GB internal flash memory, SD card slot (SDHC cards are supported);
Operating system: Linux based OS
Power supply: Removable lithium battery 2000 mAh;
Outputs: 3.5 mm headphone jack, built-in microphone, speakers;
Dimensions: 121x61x18 mm;
Weight: 136 g. (With battery), 97 g. (Without battery)
Contents of delivery
Package Includes:
- device with stylus
- USB cable for charging and synchronization with PC
- The initial manual documentation in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Korean, Chinese and Japanese.
The build quality is very good, there is no backlash, the Korean (not to be confused with the Chinese) assembly makes itself felt. The body is made of glossy plastic of dark gray color with small metallic gold splashes. Fingerprints remain on the device, but the unusual color of plastic masks them quite well.
The device’s touch screen is shipped with transparent plastic film as supplied. To protect the screen, it is better to cover some kind of good dense anti-glare protective film. The accuracy of the response to the stylus is not very good, there are small flaws in terms of the presence of "dead" zones at the edges of the screen, but this does not affect the basic functionality very much. In the sun, the screen is clearly visible when compared with PocketPC screens. In the shadows you can play without straining your eyes.
The headphone jack is standard (3.5 mm), the headphones fit tightly, the sound quality (I checked on Hi-Fi headphones) the external speakers are loud enough, they have a sufficiently high-quality sound (for their size), they are successfully recessed into the device case.
The control buttons are quite responsive, the stroke is soft. It may seem inconvenient keys on the right side, but in the process of operation you get used to.
The lithium-ion, replaceable battery, battery capacity of 2000 mAh, lasts about 7-8 hours of continuous playing and watching videos.
When connected to a computer, it is defined as a regular flash drive, while sharing either a user flash area of ​​1 gigabyte or an inserted SD card, SDHC cards are supported, I worked without any problems with a 16 gigabyte card. The file transfer rate to the device via cable is limited by the maximum throughput of the USB 1.1 protocol.
Charger and headphones are not included. For charging the device, power supplies with a USB-type "mother" plug are suitable, without any problems, it was charged from USB charging in the car.
Device functions
- Emulators of gaming consoles CPS2 / NEOGEO / NES / SNES / MAME (And a bunch of emulators in the process of porting)
- Its 3D and 2D games (there is the possibility of development using the SDK, hardware supported by OpenGL)
- Flash player (supports Flash 8, Action Script 2.0, some classes AS 3.0)
- Audio Player
- Video player
- Book reader
- Dictaphone
- View images / comics
Now more about the main features.
Built-in games
6 built-in funny arcade games executed in the native software environment of the device and ??? Flash games designed and adapted to the screen of the device, it kills time perfectly, the playability is quite good, the graphics and music are pleasant.
1. Animatch
2. Boomshine2x
3. Myriad
4. Square Tower Defense
5. Tail Tale
6. Wiztern
Flash player
Implemented as a separate application and as a flash game launcher optimized for the screen of this device. Flash drives are scaled on one side, if the resolution exceeds the screen resolution. Fonts and vector graphics are smoothed out well, raster elements are slightly worse. Supports the work of the stylus.
Management is simple - open, close and exit, turn 90, 180 degrees. For more complex games, it is possible to bind the keys at your discretion. As it was already written above, all Action Script 2 classes and some from the third version are supported (there is no exact list). I compiled a couple of files to check the work on the device - the result can be seen on the video.
View images / comics
Essentially 2 different programs but the interface is almost the same, the only difference is in control. Through the menu, you can move between files, rotate the image, zoom in and out. While watching the top sticks stupid status period, which is somewhat difficult to read comics. The following file types are supported: JPG, GIF, BMP, PNG (animated PNG is not supported). Viewing comics almost completely borrows the interface from the image viewer, but navigating through the picture is done on-screen (or using the joystick at the zoom), jumping from left to right when the picture ends, goes down and further from left to right.
Music player
Normally perceives the Cyrillic alphabet, the control interface is simple (stop, pause, next, previous, rewind to both sides, navigation bar on the current track), the player plays music in directories, there is a random play mode, a replay of the directory, a replay of one track. Non-replaceable rendering is spinning during playback. The playback quality is excellent. WAV, MP3, OGG formats are supported.
Dictaphone
The interface is outrageously simple; it records stereo sound from a built-in microphone on a memory card in wav format, encodes a stream of 16 bits, the discredit rate is 48000 Hz. The recording quality is pretty good, with almost no extraneous noise.
Video player
The interface is completely borrowed from the music player. MPEG4, DIVX, XVID codecs are supported. Video playback of 320x240 25 fps takes place without problems, the manufacturer promises to support video with a bitrate of no more than 2048 kb / s and a resolution of 640x480 at 25 fps. Subtitles are not supported, but fans of anime and fresh products of the film industry with modern capacities of personal computers can always transcode video under a small screen by building them into the video sequence itself. I'm more than confident that third-party, more functional players will appear, but this is a matter of time.
Reader
Simple control, bookmarks, Cyrillic in all encodings I use (UTF-8, ANSI, Unicode, KOI-8R) are refused to understand. In principle, reading texts where Cyrillic characters are used is possible, but for this it is necessary to replace the font on the console with a similar one containing a set of Cyrillic characters (Linux fonts are standard). There are alternative and more functional reading rooms, but I do not use them (The screen of the device is too small for reading and I have a book reader for such things).
Organizer
It consists of a calendar, world time, calculator and a timer. There is nothing more to say, simple interface, finger control.
Multitasking
Supports simultaneous playback of music and viewing photos or comics.
Emulators
Creating this section, I didn’t try to embrace everything in any way (since this compare to the overview of all possible emulators under Windows or Linux), but touched upon the most interesting ones. I will not illustrate the material with pictures, but I will attach a video.
Nintendo Entertainment System (Known in Russia as “Dendy”)
Emulation without problems even at low processor frequencies (200 megahertz), in the emulator options menu it is possible to save both the global configuration and the configuration for each individual rum, the number of options is amazing, not inferior in quality to counterparts from desktop computers.
The following ROMs have been tested:
- Super Mario
- Darkwing Duck
- Chip & Dale Rescue Rangers
All images run without problems, you can save and load any state of the game. The emulator menu is not very conveniently invoked (by simultaneously pressing the keys for adding and decreasing sound)
Graphics, control, sound is quite good.
Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES)
The emulation is good, I expected something for the worst. In the emulator option, I didn’t go deep because the quality on the default settings was fine. In games with quite decent graphics, drawing slows down to form a diagonal across the entire screen (annoying at first, but eventually you get used to it). But this flaw comes up because of the poor firmware of the device. It is treated by setting a sweep of 120 hertz in the configuration of the application, it should be noted that in this mode the battery sits a little faster.
Genesis (Known in Russia as “Sega Mega Drive”)
Probably the most excellent emulator in terms of management, saving during the game and saves downloads. Diagonal strip is missing. The graphics are mapped onto the full screen, the sound is also emulated as kachetsvenno, all the Roma (I tried about 20) started absolutely without any problems. emulator earns deserved five points.
ZX Spectrum
Yes, there is such an emulator, the quality of emulation is also super, all hardware implementations of this platform are supported. The control keys can be bind at your discretion and save a personal config for each image. The sound and video emulation quality is excellent.
Application Development
Alas, even in a good product there is a fly in the ointment. I do not want to say that there is no environment for developing applications, but it is assembled by craftsmen “on the knee”, libraries are a bit crooked, but in general people write, port and compile applications.
Development will be easy for anyone who more or less owns any of the programming languages.
As for the product community, they are fragmented nationally, the developers are somewhat lazy. It will be easier for those who already had any little experience in developing for Linux in C / C ++, since inside there is a full-fledged Linux kernel.
GamePark Holdings (product manufacturer, hereinafter GPH)
I would like to briefly describe the manufacturer.
- A very strange step was the release of a product without an official SDK, it is promised by the summer (2010).
- It seems to me that because of its scarcity of its units, the GPH cannot cope with the tasks assigned to it.
- GPH plans to create a portal FunGP (development is already underway, issues with licenses are being resolved), which in essence will be an app store where you can buy licensed ROMs and native applications.
- The community of developers and users lives separately from the manufacturer (which is very illogical), does not participate in the development of firmware.
- Bugs in the firmware fix long enough, the release of firmware with the new functionality is delayed.
- All emulators are born exclusively by the community, although they are mentioned on the official GPH website as one of the device features.
I know that many of you, from the review on Habré know about the Chinese equivalent of this device - Dingoo A320 .
Yes, I agree that in some places this unit is superior to Wiz, but there is another point of view:
- Ding is no longer available, alas, this is a one-time product;
- during the life of the dingy, Linux was ported to it, but it didn’t go further (too little developer community), the console functionality with Linux onboard is almost none compared to the native environment;
- the community of Wiz users and developers “genetically” surpasses the dingy community; this is not the first product of GP2X and one should think not the last, but the dinga is a product carefully worn out by the manufacturer already at the release stage;
- VISA has a touch screen, which provides great opportunities for applications.
Iron
In this section, I would like to touch on 2 things regarding the purchase of a device and its properties.
You can buy this device by ordering from German and English online stores (which, by the way, are just resellers), but it’s best to trust the time-tested direct supplier, play-asia.com , this is where I bought my copy of the device, never had any problems I don’t have my acquaintances, and besides, they’re buying large sums of money in small Japanese surprises in parcels.
As for the connector and cable of the device, since the Korean company, part of the components of the device was borrowed from the Korean manufacturer Samsung. The pinout of the device output is known to the user community and allows users to use an analog TV & Audio output, connect the console to a computer via ethernet, charge the device accordingly and receive data from it. For synchronization, the cables from some models of Samsung players are suitable, and for charging from some models of Samsung phones. It is logical to expect from the manufacturer the output of the cradle for the device in the near future (as was the case with consoles of previous generations), it is rumored that the cradle will also have an RJ-45 output and some browsers have already been ported to Vis.
Summing up, I would like to point out the disadvantages and advantages of the platform
Pros:
- High-quality emulation of most platforms;
- High-quality assembly of the device;
- High-quality AMOLED screen;
- High-quality sound;
- Excellent growth potential;
- Good autonomy.
Minuses:
- Some inconvenient keys;
- The accuracy and quality of the screen sensor is not very good;
- No network charger;
- Non-standard connector for synchronization (I would like a mini-usb).
Related Links:
GamePark Holdings (official English site) - www.globalgph.com
File archive of the device - dl.openhandhelds.org/cgi-bin/wiz.cgi
Developer Community - gp32x.com
Community product wiki page - gp2xwiz.co.uk/wiki/Main_Page
Wikipedia article in Russian - w.wikipedia.org/wiki/GP2X_Wiz
The Russian-speaking GP2X community is mainly represented in the thematic section of the gbx.ru forum - gbx.ru/index.php?showforum=49
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/82223/
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