What Is The Next Great Emulation Handheld?

[Antiriad]

Now...dont get me wrong, im going to be sticking to my GP32 for as long as possible, but eventually another company's product will become the new emulators' choice of handheld. And which do you think it will be?

First up we have the Zodiac 2 which is available already: 128MB Ram, 200Mhz ARM9 SPU, 480 x 320 Screen, Palm OS

Then the Gametrac which arrives this summer: Unconfirmed Specs: 8MB Ram, 400Mhz ARM9 CPU, 320 x 240 Screen, Windows CE OS

Then the two industry heavyweights forthcoming contributions next year:

The Sony PSP: Rumoured Specs: 8MB Ram, 333Mhz CPU, 480 x 272 screen, Sony OS

And the Nintendo DS: Rumoured Specs: 4MB Ram, 67 and 33Mhz CPU, 256 x 193 screen, Nintendo OS

Finally, the Sharp Zaurus which makes its way here before the previous two: 64MB Ram, 400 MHz Intel CPU, 240 x 320 screen, Linux OS

 

[Octavious]

voted gp32 but the sharp thing is sexy....

~Octavious

 

[Enslaved]

I voted GP32.

Why is it called the zodiac 2? Was there a zodiac 1?

 

[Antiriad]

Yes, that one has only got 32MB of Ram. And I agree, the Zaurus is very sexy, someone i know was running UAE on it!

And ill repeat for any flamers, I am sticking to my GP32 until one of these emerges as the clear winner in over 18 months time!

 

[diablo2]

i think psp will
they will find a way to chip it
plus it will sell very well

but will only make the switch when it become really good & i will probably never give up my gp32

 

[Dozer]

The gametrack has 8mb of ram?! Thats awful! How does that match the rest of the specs for it!?

 

[Daz_Genetic]

Here is my predictions:

When the ball gets rolling, the Zodiac will completely kill the GP32 in the emulation arena, solely because of the button layout. The scene is already pretty big and when the workdwide release is announced, I can see it really hitting big time. I would love to see the next Zodiac operating on a 400Mhz Arm processor though.

Unfortunatly I think the Gametrac will only have a small following and will probably go the way of the NGage. I would hate to see something like this happening though as it has the best specs, along with an appropriate buttong layout for emulation. It has the best potential for emulation, but the least potential for success.

Emulation will hit the PSP on a big scale when people manage to reverse engineer it. This may take some time as the PSP is designed similarily to the PS2, which is infamously difficult to code for.

The Nintendo DS will definatly have it's own fair share of emulators, as nintendo has a huge following of uber coders. I would think that the real successor to the GBA will be a bit more successful in this area though.

The Zaurus already has pretty good emulators already. The specs of this Zaurus are no better than the Zaurus SL-5600 which is already out, but since it operates on Linux, it can be difficult to use and only has a good following in the geek market. I can't see playing games on this system being any fun, unless someone makes a controller adapter.

The GP32s range of emulators aren't going to get much better. More and more of our coders are experimenting with new systems. It's a bit much to expect a 4 year old system with a following in the low thousands to fend off the next crop of systems that feature dedicated sound processors and graphics subsystems.

 

[thebluenewt]

If you're asking which will come out on top, then the PSP without a question.

 

[Mikey]

Two answers to this question really

The Psp will probably be the most popular while I think the Zodiac will probably emerge as the machine of choice for emulation. Although I'd love to see the GameTrac do well I personally think it'll fail.

 

[geo12]

wat's up with the dual-screen? has there even been a confirmed release?

 

[Alpha2]

There's been "leaked" specs for the DS if they;re true you;ll probably see some sort of emmulators for it.

I seriously doubt beyond all doubts that the PSP will get much of an type of EMU scene. it has region protection and it;s a sony product. it's NOT going to be very open at all for monkeying around with its innards.

The Z looks okay, I have to think some people will get tired of trying to code for it if the DS comes out and actually becomes a big hit, because of the whole "submit to the company before you can get the licence" thing... eventually this could mean they;ll tighen their policy when people start making more and more un licenced ports or emulators when companies start telling them they;re gonna sue if they allow it to continue.

The game trac looks uncomfortable to me, not saying its a bad piece of equipment but it looks like aside from it's form it's could end up right next to the GP32. It just dosent have the look of a big name.

ANything linux is probably an easy choice assuming you're familiar with the platform so that machine is in a class all its own.

 

[craigix]

I like the looks of the gametrak, probably just because its the outsider

-Craig

www.gbax.com

 

[diablo2]

you know how yoyo said he was developing for zodiac and gp32 at the same time because they had the same processors well gametrack has that processor too

 

[RockOut]

I have seen "official' information on the Nintendo DS on several agming magazines and on the internet as well.

 

[nerd of nerds]

The gametrack has 8mb of ram?! Thats awful! How does that match the rest of the specs for it!?

ummm.... not sure if anyone has answered this yet, but...

THE GP32 HAS 8MB OF RAM YOU STOOPID F***TARD!!! :rolleyes:

 

[Shadow of Chaos]

The only reason the PSP will be popular is because of its following, just like the ps2 even though the Xbox has much better games.

 

[Daz_Genetic]

The gametrack has 8mb of ram?! Thats awful! How does that match the rest of the specs for it!?

ummm.... not sure if anyone has answered this yet, but...

THE GP32 HAS 8MB OF RAM YOU STOOPID F***TARD!!! :rolleyes:

It's not even factual. The specs of the gametrac have went through a number of revisions.. The graphics hardware has changed, the resolution has went up. And of all the information I have followed, there has been no mention whatsoever of the memory inside the Gametrac. Except for the fact that there is a dedicated memory controller that can handle 64Mb. I sure hope they will top this out.

 

[Robster]

I'd like to know why people *really* like the GP32. Is it really the emulated games, that let you re-live the good games of days gone by, and let you play games you already own without getting the old systems out of the cupboard?

Or is it because there are a lot of freeloaders around who want to be able to play warez games?

I like my GP32 because it's fun to program. And it will never be beaten for that, because every system that comes out in the future is going to have dedicated sound and video chips etc. It's like the GBA: its graphics hardware decides what types of games are made for it. Or PCs with their giga-polygon engines: most games end up being polygon based.

Gimme a nice fast processor and sod everything else

 

[Robster]

And another thing: the Zodiac will never be much better than the GP32 for emulation. It's got a 200MHz processor where the GP32 has 166MHz - a 20% increase. But, it's got a 480x320 screen which will take a lot of extra processing power to fill up. So it'll probably end up about even.

Zodiac's graphics and sound chips are no use when you're emulating, everything has to be drawn dot by dot, and sounds are made sample by sample. Nothing much can be done to accelerate that!

The bigger memory might help, but 128MB isn't necessary for *any* emulatable system. GP32 can go to 32MB, so why worry?

 

[Hooka]

I personally like my gp32 because of the scene, lots of talented developers giving an almost dead system artificial life support (that sounds kinda depressing, but hopefully the euro launch will fix that!) The gamepark will live on quite awhile because of this and other features. But I voted zodiac for emulation machine, because if anybody got a neo-geo emulator on that thing it would have enough memory to handle it or atleast cache it from memory Robster is quite right though. I just wish I could solder