So after several months of pondering when would be the best moment to buy a Wii (as won't have time to play it extensively for now), I finally caved to an old urge and got myself a gp2x. Figured that it's portable so I'll make better use of it. I also wanted something where I could bring around a large amount of games so I can switch if I get bored.

Turned out to be better than what I expected; it doesn't have a reputation for emulators for nothing. I haven't tried all of them yet, but already both SNES and Genesis work great on it (full speed on Genesis, and 50 fps on SNES). There's also many ports of old or GPL'ed games available too. Still have to get Neogeo and Mame to work, but reports are good, and based on what I have seen it's promising.

The thing is underpowered compared to a PSP, but I don't have to worry about the parent company wanting to squash homebrew. Sure, for the same reason there are virtually no commercial games for the device. Doesn't really matter though when you still have to finish a few RPGs from way back when. I don't care about the latest 3D soccer game or another brainless shooter.

The machine has two 200 Mhz CPUs, that can be overclocked. Mine seems to handle 250 Mhz and maybe a bit more without freezing. This seems to be quite common on newer units, and as a result some people started to make 3D engines that are not too bad (for a portable system). Quake 1 runs on it, and somebody ported Egoboo playing at decent speeds.

Homebrew games come in all sizes. Some are really shitty but can be fun if you like repetitive gimmicky games. Some (that are not ports) have some decent amount of effort into them and makes you want to keep it. Some were successful enough that the devs try to sell it, but most of them are not my cup of tea (asteroids clone, GTA 1 clone).

The machine has TV-out and USB support, but you need to buy some adapters for both. I got the TV-out and it's nice bc it uses a bigger resolution than the LCD. Not all games/emus can work with it though, as it means they have to output one resolution to the LCD and another to the TV. Nevertheless the ones that work (e.g. Frodo, C64 emu) looks fantastic. The USB thingy allows to connect a mouse, a gamepad, and (I think) a keyboard. Maybe for later on.

Machine resolution is QVGA (320x240), and runs games off an SD card (up to 4 GB). It runs on 2 AA batteries so I strongly recommend rechargeable packs (got some 2700mAh, and the unit came with 2500 mAh, so I'm pretty much covered for long trips ;-).

Only negative things? Well first of all I would have liked more CPU and RAM... but it would have driven the cost up. Perhaps on a newer version. The machine has a media player but it doesn't support MPG1... that's a bit of a WTF since apparently they're based on Mplayer, so there's no reason to leave it out. Perhaps it was a patent thing. Last but not least, there's a caveat emptor if you want to buy one on e-bay: there's many older models going around that have screen problems and don't overclock as nicely. I got mine from one of the distributors and checked that it's a brand new MKII (built in July this year).

So, all in all, I'm a happy panda with it. :-)




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