Is piracy a problem?


synkro

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Hi guys...

I was at GC last week and I am willing to buy a GP32 and have some questions:

* Is piracy a problem? Is the CopyProtection still intact? Hope so...
* the guy at GC said, they launch it in Germany, too :) (no question so far..)
* I can't find any info at the Mitsui homepages (gp32.europ.com isn't helpfull...) Where to look for official news?
* How is the devkit? an ARM compiler is quite expensive, isn't ?
* any free (cross)compiler and IDEs? Debugging tools?
* Are the docs (specs, api) free?
* exists a JVM ?
* is ASM needed to achive some fair performance in software/games ?
 
Piracy is a problem but not a huge one. The main encryption scheme has been broken however. Games are cheap enough not to make it worth pirating things IMHO.

There will be a Euro wide release in Oct/Nov.

The ARM DevKit costs lots however there are a number of good free DevKit's based on GCC for ARM. As for IDE's, any decent GCC IDE will work fine. There are also some workspaces for Visual C++ that use GCC as the compiler.

Docs, Spec's, SDK/API, etc. are all freely avalable and reuseable without licence though the SDK is lacking in a number of ways. There are also a large number of very good user made libs, again reuseable under GPL mostly.

There is no current JVM.

ASM can be very helpfull in speeding things up however there is no need to have to use it to get decent performance. The SDL port for example hides some very tidy ASM under the wrapper so you get the speed of ASM and ease of use of C/C++.
 
isn't waba kind of jvm ? It is said so on gp32x and gp32news ...
(though it must be very painful to code something fast enough in java for gp :) )
 
thanks for your answers!

* Is it that difficult to use a different encrcyption scheme?
* Is a real DevKit (not just precompiled VC++ libs) expected soon?
* Is it possible to protect own homebrew software? and sell it?
 
* You can develop a different encryption scheme if you want to. I think the encryption scheme developed by gamepark is using the ID of the SMC card to check if you are allowed to play the game...

* You can use ARM SDT in connection with the official SDK. There is also an official guide for setting up a real devkit with IDE, debugger, etc.
However, also if you are a professional software developper I recommend you to use Linux with arm-gcc as development environment.

* If you are a professional developer who wants to buy food for his family from the money he is earning through the gp32 software he makes I recommend to contact gamepark for further information. If you are a script kiddie or a amateur developer I recommend you to develop OpenSource software as you will be much more happier with it.
 
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