Newbie questions


delphiaddict

Still Fresh
Joined
Apr 21, 2003
Messages
49
Hi all,

Only recently discovered this amazing handheld and the thought of a portable c64 sounds almost too good to be true! I have to get one but, of course, I have a few questions.

Can the gp32 view photos on a card taken from a digital camera?

Does frodo play Bruce Lee? (man, I loved that game!)

Do the c64 games have decent sound?

Can you store multiple roms on one card?

Do the currently available ZX Spectrum emulators work well? i.e do plenty of spectrum games run?

Should I bother about a backlit version? (I hear the un-backlit gp32 is better than GBA and not much of an issue)

cheers for taking the time to answer any of the questions
 
I have played around with the program for viewing photos and .txt files. Its in korean but it fairly easy to figure out. I have not personally loaded up any photos on it but have seen video of it viewing phtos and it seems to do a pretty good job of it. If your question is can you just dump a smart memory card from a digital camera in it and view the photos the answer is no. Th gp32 requires that the photos be stored on an smc that has been formated to run on the gp32 as well the photo viewer must be installed on the card. However if you connect the gp32 to a pc you can dump any photos on it and view them with not problems.

As for the c64 games the port of frodo to the gp32 is pretty impressive. I have not played bruce lee on it but all of the games I have tried on it seem to run perfectly. The sound is awesome and very well done the speed is perfect and all. So over all the frodo emulator is very well done and if you are planing on buying it just for c64 you most likley will not be let down. Another nice thing about the emulator is that the author is still very activly working on it and has been puting out updates for it fairly regularly.

As for the question about multipul games on a card you can most deffinatly put multipul games on it. C64 games are only a few Kilobytes so you could possibly load up 10,000 games or more on a 128MB smart media card. You can also load up multiple emulators, mp3's, movies and whatever else and load them all from the same card.

Spectrum emulators are somthing i have still yet to play with so I can't really comment on much but I have heard they are decent. This would probably be better for someone else to answer.

As for the screen I own a GBA and a GP32 both of which do not have a backlight. I personally think the screen on the gp32 is much easier to see. It is bigger and the matterial used for it does not reflect the light as much as the GBA screen. True some games such as doom and ahwat not are a little dark from time to time but it is not unbearable like the GBA screen is. Some emulators not all have also added a gamma correction option inwhich you can change the brightness of the screen which does help. Frodo does have the option just to let you know it it deffinatly does help out alot.
 
DA,

You sound like me -- I would have bought the GP32 if all it DID was run Frodo (the C64 emulator)!

I would say most (over 80%) of the C64 games I've tried ran at full speed, with complete sound emulation. All the games with digitized speech (Impossible Mission, Ghostbusters, Chimaira) play the speech a little slow, but other than that, most of the sound is 100%.

Earlier today I made my wife drive us around to all the "Easter functions" and I played Ghostbusters on the way to my mom's, and Yie Ar Kung-Fu and Kung-Fu Master on the way home. All of those play 100% accurately -- except loading on the GP32 is much faster than it ever was on the Commodore, even with a Fast Load cartridge!

I haven't personally tried Bruce Lee, but I'll put it on my to do list. The only disappointment so far was that it didn't run California Games, but there are so many different dumps and ROMs for games that sometimes you get one that doesn't work, but another release does.

Check out my unofficial Frodo FAQ here: http://faq.gp32emu.com/. I also have a Frodo compatibility list posted there, which I'm about to update with another 50-100 games.

Flack
 
Thanks for the reply guys!

It sounds excellent!

You've definitely just persuaded me that the gp32 is the right way to go.
 
jeez! guess how much my GP32 is gonna cost me?

£250!!!!! That's not far off what I paid for my original c64 way back when.

One word of advice for any single guys thinking of getting married - DON'T!

My missus says if I'm having £125 to spend she wants the same amount too!!

I still can't wait though. I'm off to order it right now!
 
I wish I had all the money I originally spent on C64 equipment ...

C64 - $200
Amdek Monitor - $100
2 1541 Drives - $200 x 2 = $400
1670 Modem - $150
2400 Baud Modem - $300 (with rs232 adapter)

Plus various odds and ends, joysticks, blank disks, cartridges (Fast Load, IcePic, Final Cartridge, etc) ... not to mention the C16 I bought to swap out keyboards (black case w/grey keys), C128 I bought a few years later, the SX64 I bought off of eBay last year ... not to mention all the therapy I'll need eventually from all these years of computing!

Flack

PS: I've been married for almost eight years now ... my wife understands the need for a "man cave" and our desire to retire to it from time to time. My room has all my consoles, my computers, my toys ... and wifey is OFF LIMITS.
 
yep, I've been down that road too, flack! :D

It's funny how I spent all that money years ago getting all the gear and now I've done it all again, like you, off ebay and various other places.

Hey that sx64 is something of a rarity! Must be worth a bit?
 
You know, I'd always wanted an SX-64 when I was younger and never could justify it. I picked one up off of eBay last year for about $50 (plus about $25 shipping). What I like about it is, about once a year or maybe every other year I get that need to pull out one of my old C64's, hook everything up, and play some old games. It seems like each year, another cable goes missing or a drive goes bad, or "something" happens. My reasoning behind the SX64 was that everything would be together in one place, so I can just fire it up and play some games. With a standard Commodore video cable you can hook it up to a monitor as well, so you're not stuck playing games on that 5 inch screen.

Of course I could play most of those games on emulators, but it just wasn't quite the same. I do, however, love my GP32. Just like Ghostbusters, I know I've mentioned it a couple of times in the last day or so ... I have probably played it more in the last two or three days than I have in the last five years. The GP32 is great like that, throw in a game or two (or a hundred) and hit the road.

If you see the Blast series out there, download that for sure. It's a large collection of C64 games in .D64 format. There are about 400 blast disks, with 4 or 5 games per disk. It sure beats trying to convert over all my old C64 stuff with an x1541 cable.

Flack
 
A friend of mine download all the games from the Arnold site so I think I'll have a few to go at for a while

(of course I own them all!!) :D
 
Yeah, that's where I got the majority of my .D64 collection from. If I remember they have all the Blast disks, PLUS all the games sorted by name. I think it took 2 CDs to burn the whole collection.

In one of though "tough to believe" tidbits, I downloaded every single game I could find for the C64 for about eight years ('85-'92). In those 8 years, I collected almost 700 disks of software. At 170k per side, that's 340k per disk, or roughly 3 disks per meg. 700 disks = roughly 233meg.

The Arnold FTP has over 700 meg of just games ... three times what I was able to collect in eight years. And, you can download the whole thing in about 4 hours via cable modem.

Flack
 
Crazy, I personally never owned a c64. I did however have a few friends who owned them way back so I played it at their houses. I hadn't played the c64 games at all until I got my gp32 in the mail a few weeks ago. It was a very nice system and its cool to play the old games I havn't seen since I was a kid. I have only downloaded a few games for it its not one of those systems that I am totaly in love with and really want to collect. So for that I have gone to c64.com which has tons of games all listed with screennshots and stuff. As for retro game systems I did own an atari 2600 which I unfortunatly sold. However last year I was able to get ahold of one in perfect condition with two joysticks and a set of paddles all in working condition with about 30 games for $20. It was a great deal the system looks brand new so I couldn't pass it up. As well I still have my original nes system which I pulled out of the closet last year and it still works great. I have since bought a ton of games that i wanted as a kid but could never afford. I think my total for that is up to about 50 games. Both of those are still out in the living room all set up to play and genrally get more play than my dreamcast which is the closest thing to a modern game system that i own.
 
This is my little makeshift entertainment center upstairs in my loft ...

consoles.jpg


Under the DVD and dual deck VCR, there's a Sega Genesis, Playstation, Dreamcast, Super Nintendo (w/console copier), N64 (w/console copier), and Atari 2600. When I took that picture, my PS2 was still hooked up downstairs in the living room. It's now been assimilated too.

Flack
 
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