I Just Got My Gp2x!!!


Okay, so I finally got around to buying a GP2X Mk2. I sold my GP32 last year and really missed it. I put off getting a GP2X because I was just too busy to use it, but my better half pushed me into getting it now.

I purchased it from GP2X.net.au, which I *highly* recommend to Australian customers. Excellent service, super-quick, and a great price. Also got the AC adapter, which came with both Euro and Oz plugs.

As with the GP32, I was again surprised by how small the unit is -- definitely a good thing. After using it for hours straight today, it doesn't hurt my hands at all. Very light, but it feels quite solid. Pulled the film off the LCD, but left the one on the battery/power strip.

The screen is enormous and super-sharp. Getting the viewing angle correct is important, but I found that setting the gamma to around 1.6 in the excellent CPU/LCD Tweaker program makes a huge difference and the angle becomes less important. Just have to work out scripts and whatnot to set it permanently. I also found that in MAME, when flipping the screen vertically, it helps to titlt slightly to the side (which is really the bottom of the unit). In any case, the Mk2 LCD is brilliant and old games have never looked better!

I was rather worried about the joystick from reading the forums the last few months, and when I first used it in the menu it seemed stiff, and the left direction was unresponsive. However, after playing games for a while the stick feels great! Shooters were accurate, platformers a breeze. Sometimes my thumb slips a tiny bit when moving down (note: I am using the new GPH cap), but I've learnt to adjust for that. btw, the new cap is not pointy at all, it just looks that way in the photos. I also unscrewed the cap a very short distance higher (0.5mm at most) which helped the left direction, as the underbelly of the cap was hitting the rim of the joystick aperture. I think I may try to fashion a small, cylindrical stick-cap to use between the fingers like an old-style stick, just for kicks. But as-is, it's absolutely fine.

At times the buttons feel too close, but again I'm getting used to that. Most emus allow you to re-assign buttons to Y/B, which is easier. The buttons themselves are okay, especially the L/R shoulder pads (the best on a handheld yet). I initially would have preferred a volume wheel than buttons, but after playing 1942 vertically in MAME, I'm actually pleased they went this route!

Speakers are good, quite loud with Volume Limiter off. Everything else physically seems great, especially the SD slot. I like the rubber port-guards as well. My Energizer 2500mAh AA's have been running for, I dunno, 3-4 hours so far and are still going strong. Haven't tried the AC adapter yet. I also picked up a TV-Out unit from Lik Sang a couple of weeks ago (was ordering something else at the time!) but haven't used that yet either. Nor have I used the USB cable, I just use a card reader. My SD (had it for a while) is a 1GB A-DATA 60x, which has no problems.

Oh, and I can overclock to 275 stable. I can reach 280 for a while in some programs, but above that it crashes immediately.

The inbuilt video player is brilliant. Music player is pretty good, but I haven't played around much with it yet. The photo viewer is excellent. Menu is fine, although other skins really make it come alive :D

Onto 3rd party software... WOW. Everything I've tried has been utterly fantastic. I haven't had time to test a lot, but here are some first impressions:

Homebrew games:
* Frozen Bubble -- excellent Zuma clone.
* Kobo Deluxe -- nice shooter, seems to be built on the ideas of Hunter's Moon, right? Very enjoyable.
* Tilematch -- Zoo Keeper, and a great version of it.
* Blockrage2X -- quite a decent Columns clone.
* Vektar -- everyone knows how good this is :)

Emulators:
* DrMDX -- flawless. Well, just about. The occasional glitchy title (e.g. Comic Zone) doesn't take much away from the thousands of perfectly emulated Genesis games!
* hu6280 -- yowza this is good! More or less perfect.
* MAMEGP2X -- superb, of course.
* SquidgeSNES -- I have to read more about the settings, because most games seemed fairly slow (or 'skippy') to me. I think I'm just using it wrong -- a script to overclock should help immeasurably too, once I work out how to do those. Still, it's very promising -- Super Mario World ran fullspeed with sound!

Other:
* Quake -- marvellous to see this on a handheld. After turning the brightness up and remapping the controls (L/R for turning, thanks), it was a real treat.

That's all so far, pretty much a random assortment. Much more to come in the following weeks. My biggest problem now is working out how much $$ I can donate to some devs!

Overall impressions:

Screen: A
Joystick: B+
Build quality: A
In-built software: A-
Homebrew software: A+
 
Excellent review gaterooze - and especially resonant to me because you've ordered from where I'm likely to order from, and are talking about batteries I'm likely going to purchase. Thankyou. :)
 
Hi everyone, I just got my GP2X today, and I am having a lot of fun fooling around with it. Already watched an episode of anime on it. Sadly I only have a 512mb SD card, I need to get my hands on one of them new 4gb SD cards.

I found out about the GP2X at work. I am currently working in Korean, and was emailed an article to read by a fellow employee for my research. I can't read Korean (yet), but I saw an anime pic in the advertisements on the article page. I clicked on it, and it looked like a dating sim game, and I saw a link that said GP2x. I threw it in to Google, and found this website. Once I figured out what the system was, I ordered one immediately. I didn't read impressions or look too much in to the state of the emulation, I just knew I wanted one :p


I couldn't find anywhere in Korea to order it (even though its a Korean system...), so I picked it up from Play-Asia.com. Ordered it Friday evening, and it arrived Tuesday afternoon, though I was in Seoul doing research so I couldn't pick up the package until I got to work the next day. My co-worker and I played around with it, since we are doing reserach on PMP devices any way. I love this thing already!

I look forward to hanging out with everyone here as well, though I tend to lurk a lot...
*goes back to playing TMNT 4: Turtles in Time*
 
Just got my second unit! Yep, a spare. Any time I really like something I tend to get a spare of it...can you tell I really like the gp2x? :)

This one was ordered from GP32z.com once again, and again the transaction was flawless. Super fast shipping too.

It is another MK2 unit. My first unit can clock up to 255mhz, and this one I just recieved can do 266mhz. Not bad...

I tucked the new unit away after a few quick tests. It's gonna be nice to crack it open in a few years and once again have a "new" gp2x! :)
 
Sh*t Dude, I think you just invented a new genre of literature - "Console Porn"!

Yamaha YM3812 posted on May 21 2006 at 09:45 AM said:
I just got my GP2X!

This is what happen..

It arrived 8:30 morning from the parcel post guy..came with his van.
I took the parcel into my bedroom, I open it nice and carefully. I felt a sexy feel to the gp2x box
the box had cool pictures all over it. I open the box and there was a clean plastic
covering the gp2x! i slowly opened the plastic and this huge electronic nintendo Odour came flying out into my nostrels and I was in heaven! boy i couldnt wait!

I saw the gpx2 and I took it out! it feels great it was black and I saw brand new battrerys i put it all toghther i turned it on and it light up the display! and there was a menu.. it was better than the PSP it was maaaagic!

I heard this tinglely twinkly sound greeting me with this "im all yours!" you should of seen it!

later on i was playing neo geo games! and street fighter.. and mame! you should of seen it. it was amazing trully amazing!!!

I dont think i want to use the computer anymore! anyhow this is all bullshit story i made up.
I just cant wait to get my hands on my gp2x :rolleyes:
 
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Hi all, just got mine a few days ago.

I had a few problems with my order with gbax, they were behind in orders and it was delayed, they were out of power adapters and the case is to follow, whilst the supplied extras cd appears to be blank....:( but im glad it finally showed up and forgive them the minor hassle. I picked a 2gb adata card 150x that works fine and I'm getting 4-5 hrs from 1800mAh batteries it seems. Will invest in some more powerful ones and another sd card too I think.

I picked it up mainly to run documentaries on 9/11 to show people whilst debating false flag terrorism, as I'm one of the Scholars for Truth http://www.st911.org that have proved and are proving the inside job angle on various events and I couldnt stretch to a full harddisk backed video player, plus I also wanted some nostalgic emulation as a break, and I'm not disappointed on either side. GP2X rocks!!

The video playback is fantastic, a very minor bugbear being having to convert files to correct formats (from the advertised ones, small penalty!) but pocketdivxencoder is working wonders on that score. The snes emulation is good with most things I've tried running full speed and sounding nice but I've yet to get my Mame set converted to test that out. Pc engine runs well without sound on sguidegeengine, good stuff, but I cant seem to get Vobbos Hu6280 to see my roms, buts thats my fault I'm sure and I'm very impressed by the speed that guy is developing things and will donate as soon as I can get this working, so any help appreciated as I lack time. Same issue with DrMDx aswell. The mp3 playback is great but I'm not sure I'm getting stereo, regardless of the fix patch, but it sounds good regardless and this thing is very nicely designed, smaller than I thought it would be, and very versatile. Are there any plans to get readable pdf's as ebooks upon this as that would be great, but I appreciate this is a collective of hardworking dev's doing what they appear to be very good at, so whatever, whenever, its all good so far.

Overall I'm very impressed by the gp2x and am pleased, as prior to taking the plunge, having lurked and tracked its progress (that was very mixed), coupled with a major bad luck streak with electricals I seemed to have in the past, , it has all worked out very well. A seriously impressive piece of kit, ty gamepark and ty to all the devs that have made this piece of plastic so very useful. It replaces a whole bunch of consoles I havent had time for lately and does so much more to boot.

Regards
 
I awoke an hour ago to find the Energizer 2500mAh AA batteries fully charged. Here is
a report on my first sojourn into the GP2X.

First Use) Completed boot sequence in FOUR SECONDS!!
DrMDx ) Navigated to binary, pressed B, unit froze :(
Rebooted, then it worked. What gives :)
Played "Streets of Rage 2" on default settings,
sound was a little off so switched Audio Rate to 22050mHz,
worked perfectly. BTW, according to Reesy's readme,
DrMDx supports stereo audio, yet I pretty sure I was
hearing mono (it's easy to distinguish with Streets of Rage 2).
Was I doing something wrong?
Update: Didn't fully insert the headphone jack :rolleyes:
GnuBoy2x ) Played "Kingdom Crusade" (a fun Archon clone).
Perfect speed/audio. K-teto: You probably get
this alot, but you rock!
OutcaST ) Played "War in Middle Earth" (Automation #264 I think).
Perfect speed/audio. CAN i GET A w00t ON THAT!?
FCEU ) Played "Castlevania". This emulation seems to be incomplete
with respect to speed/features. It worked, though.
fishyNES ) Played "Castlevania". A little slow, needed frameskip=1. Neat
menu screen by the way :)
gpfce v2 ) "Castlevania" perfect! "Akumajou Densetsu (J) [T+Eng1.0_Vice]"
was somewhat slow and choppy at 50 fps.
Columbo ) Played "Beamrider" with Alpha 001 release. Incomplete, but
shows great potential!
fMSX2x ) Played "Metal Gear". Good speed/audio, but
needs better documentation. For example, I learned the hard way
that the START button abruptly terminates the app. Also, are
save states supported?
UAE4All ) Using Kick1.3, tried "War in Middle Earth" (2-disk). Apparently this
emulator only supports 1-disk games. Got a white screen. Tried
"Hostages", heard audio but got black screen.
mamegp2x ) Played "Black Tiger", perfect speed/audio at 233MHz overclock and
0 frameskip. BTW, does this support savestates?

MUSIC MODE
Tried various MP3s and OGGs. All sound excellent - better than on my
Creative Labs MuVo with the identical earphones.

MOVIE MODE (approx 90 mins / movie)
"Serenity" (Xvid, 720x304) Perfect
"Land of the Dead" (DivX, 720x304) Frame rate issues (I'll try Xvid next)
 
I got mine last week. With my 2500mAh batteries I got a few games from an emulator and all of Princess Mononoke (~2 hours 15 mins) out of it. The screen's viewing angle isn't particularly wonderful, being best oriented in the typical hand-held position and not good from other angles.

I didn't fare particularly well with MAME, but then I didn't buy the device for emulation; it seems there are depressingly few of us who didn't.

I set up the devgp2x development environment with Visual Studio and had a bit of a hack to get it to assemble and link a couple of .s files too (many thanks to whoever put up the Visual Studio wiki page, btw). Expect a "real" homebrew game to appear later this year. Maybe. ;) I need to have a good poke at the hardware and work out what I can do with the blitter, etc.

I'm quite impressed with the gadget itself and have persuaded other people to purchase one. :)
 
Got mine on Friday last week with a 2gig card, a set of 2500 rechargable batteries, and a tv out cable.

Had a play with the megadrive, C64 and neogeo emulators...all seem really good.

Downloaded a few of the original games from the archive... most are a bit rubbish to be honest...with a few gems tucked away in there.

Stuck an ep of Family guy on it, plays pretty well...no frame reate issues that I could tell when playing from the begining right through, but when I fast forwarded a little and then went back to play, it seemed a bit stuttery... but only the one time.

Not tried any music on it yet so cant comment.

Battery life seems decent so far... stuck a fully charged set of 2500 rechatgables in on Saturday, and still showing in the menu as "full".... but then again, I've not really been caining it.

I need to get a new card reader though... the one I have only works as usb 1.0... so it's pretty darn slow. Although, I tried a direct usb connection to the gp2x today, and it was a bit faster.

Not tried tv out yet, as I dont have all the right cables to get it hooked up to my tv.

I've changed the skin of the menu's too.. much better that the orange thing now :)

all in all.. so far... I like.

Sparky.
 
Finally got mine (it's been sitting at the post office since I was out of town).

I had my SD card (4gb adata) all setup prior, so just plugged it in and tried a few things

- general. I'm a little put off with the lack of viewing angle...seems you have to hold it just right to see it well. Not a major issue, but so far my only real negative about the thing. If you have the right angle though, the screen looks amazing.
- movies. Works great. I had used pocketdivx decoder to take a couple of 24/lost/mystery science theatre. The first 2 were a bit hard to see because they were 16x9, but MST was 4:3 and took up the whole screen. Quality on all was excelent. I love that pocketdivx utility...makes encoding for this thing super easy (it will even convert ty files exported from my tivo!).
- audio. I have an mp3 player so no use for this feature, but did copy over an audio book to try it (mp3). Worked fine, though had a low volume (I assume because I haven't changed the setting yet in the utilities regardling the volume limiter)
- homebrew/ports. Tried a few (bubbletrain, vectar, lady killer, suduko). All work great and the graphics impressed me. They all seemed pretty fun.
- emulators/interpretors. Duke Nukem seems to freeze on me after I select new game..not sure what's wrong there, but will look into it. Doom works, but seems difficult to play on handheld. Tried exult and ultima7...works and looks good, though didn't try to play it much.

As for the emulators
fishynes - worked, but some games had issues (tecmo super bowl had graphic glitches)
gpfce - worked great on the games I tried (even those that had issues in fishynes). Tecmo on a handheld was cool
drMD sega - worked great on the few I tried. Daughter wanted to take it away from me to play :)
mame - worked ok on a few, bombed on others. Will have to look into this but I expected it to work as I had already used clrmame to make sure my romset was correct (assuming I used it correctly!)
squidgesnes - couldn't find my rom folder, though I could have swore I had it setup right. Will look into this
stella - couple of games came up but had some problems actually playing them. will look into it.
gngeo - was giving me bios and rom errors. Will have to look into it (I know it's expecting bios but not sure the ones I had were correct or where to get the right ones?)

All in all, good experience...though obviously still need to tweak some things. Other than the poor viewing angle, my biggest pet peeve is all the different button mappings across all the different games and emulators! Figuring out how to exit games or get back to the menu was a horrible experience. Some I couldn't ever figure out and had to power off. It's a shame the developers can't agree on a standard or at least allow button mappings to change to the users tastes.

Couple of questions:
1) It came with a joystick with GP2x (tilted sideways) attached and another cap which has no label on the cap, but has a raised bump in the middle. Which is supposed to be the better cap?
2) Is there any common game launcher like rage that shows screenshots along with rom names for all emulators? If not I was thinking about writing one myself, similar to mamewah I use on my arcade cabinet.
 
squidgesnes - couldn't find my rom folder, though I could have swore I had it setup right. Will look into this

IIRC they can either go in <emu dir>/roms, or <SD card>:/roms/snes/ -- and you switch between them by changing the "Absolute path" option in the menu settings.

2) Is there any common game launcher like rage that shows screenshots along with rom names for all emulators? If not I was thinking about writing one myself, similar to mamewah I use on my arcade cabinet.

There's Selector, but I don't think that has screenies (haven't tried it out yet). What you suggest sounds brilliant -- go for it! :D
 
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I ordered my GP2X last night from GP32z.com! I also ordered a SD card and rechargeable batteries from newegg! sweet! I can't wait to try it out.

Anyone know aprroximately how long it will take from placing order to ship to the east coast (US)?
 
I ordered last night from GamerSection.ca (GP2X + SD reader)

Considering it's Montreal-based, it shouldn't take long to get to Toronto via standard FedEx, what without customs :)

- Alex
 
Time to get my contribution buried in here for posterity and tradition's sake:
  1. GP2X
  2. TV-Out Cable (no extra cables to actually use that S-cable yet)
  3. 128mb SD card (4gig on the way)
  4. Carrying Case
  5. 8x2500mah AA's, charger (Energizer)
The screen has a great viewing angle, and I have a Mark 2/Mk2... check my videos!

Overclocks stabily to 280MHz, speedtests to 300MHz (as my sig suggests). THANKS TO EVILDRAGON FOR THIS UNIT!
I enjoy playing:
  • Quake 280MHz using every single key (look up/down is volume +/-, strafe is L & R)
  • Beats of Rage - When I finally got it running, I was amazed by the fluid animation of the game, the beautiful backgrounds, and the music! Techo from Mortal Kombat? Boss music from Streets of Rage? Awesome!
  • Streets of Rage 1 & 2 (3 has sucky music) for Genesis
  • Sonic - 'cause I missed that growing up
I can tell I'll need a lot more Beats of Rage mods (around 50 megs a pop) because that's just too much fun. I really enjoy Quake.

My oldest daughter doesn't have a favorite game yet. She asked me to look up Genesis strategy games. Herzog Zwei comes to mind...
 
My oldest daughter doesn't have a favorite game yet. She asked me to look up Genesis strategy games. Herzog Zwei comes to mind...

Shining Force 1 + 2, Warsong, King's Bounty, Dune, Mega Lo Mania, General Chaos, Populous 2, Powermonger, Risk, Romance of the Three Kingdoms series, P.T.O. (Pacific Theater of Operations) 1 + 2, Operation Europe, Nobunga's Ambition series, Liberty or Death, Gemfire, Dominus, Cannon Fodder (more action, really), Warrior of Rome/Ambition of Caesar 1 + 2... probably more. Some of those are pretty heavy-going though!
 
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I ordered last night from GamerSection.ca (GP2X + SD reader)

Considering it's Montreal-based, it shouldn't take long to get to Toronto via standard FedEx, what without customs :)

- Alex

Yup, GamerSection.ca got good folks working there. Welcome to the community!


My oldest daughter doesn't have a favorite game yet. She asked me to look up Genesis strategy games. Herzog Zwei comes to mind...
If I'm remembering correctly, I think Buck Rogers was a Genesis strategy game, too.
 
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Herzog Zwei hasn't run on past DrMD's (inc. GP32), I'll have to check to see if it runs on the current one. I doubt it though.
 
Thanks for the welcome, I plan to actually do some SDL coding for the 2X, unlike my false GP32 ambitions...

A great strategy game for the Genesis is Dune II: The Battle for Arrakis. It has most of the traits present in modern RTS's, being the grand-papa of the genre and all :) It worked fullspeed with sound and FS2 on the 144mhz GP32 DrMD, so I assume that it can reach fullspeed on the 2X.

- Alex
 
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