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"Like he said, it's directly comparable to the Motorola Droid / Milestone...and it runs Android apps. "

People always forget: it's not hardware, it's content. Gameboy vs Gamegear circa 1990s. So you're right, the Droid wins because it runs Android which offers tens of thousands of apps for millions of users. How many people pre-ordered a Pandora? Oh right, 3,000. Would you make a game knowing your market is just 3,000 people?

Honestly these guys should replace the OS with Android and sell it for $199 like iPod Touches, I'd be far more interested it if supported a OS that already has thousands of apps.

At $330 the Pandora has crossed paths with dual core netbooks which offer a dual core 1.66ghz Atom N450, 1gb, 250gb, 802.11n, webcam, bluetooth, 10" LCD and 11 hr battery life for $325. Not only can the netbook do N64 emulation, but Photoshop, Counterstrike, and 1080p video

I'm sorry but this is a case of too little too late.

• Enter "000" in the postal code section (assuming that you're shipping to the USA)
• They've turned their credit processing security to the max so,
• They'll only ship to your billing address,
• Valid credit cards may decline (Amex seems to be a problem, no issues with Mastercard)

http://www.gbax.com/

This is by the same owner. Look at all the links for each country.

If you want an open source handheld games emulator that runs linux then just buy one:
http://www.gbax.com/ :)

I saw one at LugRadio live at the weekend and they are very nice, the only reason I did not get one is that I don't play games :)

Oh! So that's what happened to you! I wished you were still around back when I was trying to work some stuff out with fixed point arithmetic. Anyways, why don't you buy another GP2X? You were a valuable community member and anyways if you participate to such contests you could consider that an investment ;-). Plus the price has dropped, I believe.

-A_SN

And you can have the best of a lot of worlds .. SEGA, MAME, Nintendo, Playstation .. all platforms being emulated, quite well, on a handy, inexpensive, portable, 100% open, Linux box...

.. and when you're not using it to control your robot hordes, you can watch Simpsons on it or play ol'-skool video games, just for grins...

Its a nice hack indeed, to add IDE to a DS, but if you invest in an Open Game Console in the first place, you'll find its not so hard to do yourself ..

Make a Games Machine Like This!!!

Make a Laptop Like This!!!!

Make the two work together (hint: they could use the same OS) .. then there might be hope. But until you up the cool, no chance ..

Yo. Linux has got plenty of game.

There is plenty of room in the market for another hand-held gaming platform, especially an open one .. noticed something? All the handhelds, bar one, are closed to open development.

This means there's a market for an open-development handheld ..

No question about it, get yourself a GP2X ..

Wonderful platform. I have 5 ... ;)

Get a Gameboy Advance SP and a Flash cartridge, then load an emulator with Contra, SMB3, and Tetris. You could even run the GameBoy version of Tetris on the flash cartridge. Or you could get the GP2x.

Newp, but I belive you would want the GP2X which does indeed run teh Linux :) http://www.gbax.com/

I'd prefer one of these.

Im not sure about GPL but what i do know is that the GP2X i brought is the best homebrew handheld out of all of them, the releases are fantastic for fans of emulators and ported games alike. Every day i check out Emuholic and GP2X News for new software for my beloved console.

Everything about GP2X looks fabulous, but this screen "kills" it, at least for me...

The GP2X can play music, watch video's, and also display books for reading, is cheap, and 100% open. I got a laptop too (powerbook) but lately when I've got something to tote, I load up the GP2X and off I go .. very easy, very fun...

.. no gp2x?

Order one of these:
http://www.gbax.com/ordergp2x.html

Then install this on it:
http://gpx2.org/gp2x/frodo/

PS.. in a strange quirk of fate, my anonymous 'confirmation word' is "Destroy". I love Impossible Mission... I play it on my GP2X on the train each morning. Bloody hard game to beat. :)

Well, it is ok spec wise - but aside from the nice big screen most common PDAs have more powerful CPUs.
My Asus 716 which is almost two years old has a 400MHz Xscale in it as well as being easy to expand via a SD and compact flash slots. At time of purchase is was less than $400.
Just making a quick look - $400 for the top of the line Dell Axim gives you:

624MHz Xscale
64MB SDRAM
16MB video RAM
256MB Flash memory built in
VGA resolution screen (640x480)
Expandable via SD, Compact flash
Integrated bluetooth and wifi 802.11b

Yes it doesn't run Linux. But strictly as a hardware comparison the only thing the 770 has going for it is the bigger screen and landscape orientation.
I'd love to see a nice PDA styled more like a PSP with a bigger screen. Tapwave tried to do this but failed.
I'm looking at the GP2x for Linux based goodness, but this is more of a media/gaming device, no provision for wireless networking as far as I can tell.

.. this is the hand-held linux portable machine de-jour...

i mean, you can't beat the last 3 weeks worth of nice, adventurous, linux-like hacking the gp2x has had done for it, nossir.. way ahead of the pack.

A group of people DID make an open-source-friendly, Linux-based handheld game console called the GP2X, a successor to the GP32. It rocks. Two 200MHz CPUs (one acts as a 2D GPU), emulates pretty much everything up to SNES (and PSX very very slowly). 3.5" screen, 8 buttons and an 8-way dpad.

A group of people DID make an open-source-friendly, Linux-based handheld game console called the GP2X, a successor to the GP32. It rocks. Two 200MHz CPUs (one acts as a 2D GPU), emulates pretty much everything up to SNES (and PSX very very slowly). 3.5" screen, 8 buttons and an 8-way dpad.

.. as this machine is. And yes, this machine is very, very easy to port to .. it was designed to be so..

Or, if you're really only after emulation then you could go with the cheaper, open source GP2X that was just released a month or so ago. It seems to be coming along nicely with a thriving homebrew community.

If they'd stop pushing out buggy crap before it's finished just to meet a deadline maybe more of us would buy more games. As it is now I don't have a whole lot of time to play anymore and I need to be extra choosy about what I spend my money on. I'd rather not spend what I thought would be my first play session with a game just patching the damn thing.

Originality seems to be lacking too, developers (I'm looking at you EA) seem to want to stick to what they're sure will work. So we end up with GenericFPS2005 or GenericWWIIShooter or another iteration of [insert professional sports league] 200x. There really is a difference between older games and those that have been developed recently, it seems like the developers genuinely cared about their product back then instead of just meeting a deadline.

There's a reason I've ordered a GP2X (SHIP ALREADY DAMN YOU!) over a PSP.

http://www.gbax.com/indexgp2x.html

PSP?? I'll stick to my GP2X, thanks

I couldn't agree more. That's why I intend instead to get one of these. Admittedly it won't play Burnout 26: Chunderstrike, but I would have been more interested in the hobbyist side of the PSP anyway.

And that's the reason why I plan on buying a GP2X. Open development platform, Linux-based, and you can put your games on SD cards. http://www.gbax.com/aboutgp2x.html

This is great news for PSP owners but i still am waiting for the killer homebrew and emulation console that the GP2X is going to be, even today 1 week before its released the homebrew community already has Screenshots of Quake runnin on the machine. So im happy for PSP owners but im going for a machine that they wont be releasing new firmware for :)

The GP2X intrigues me though, even though there is some claim that it will be DRM enabled,

The GP2X website has details about the DRM used, and the reasoning behind it!

(As a first side note, I think the GP2X is an interesting throw at an open handheld console.)

That was cute, but you forget one major aspect of humanity in general and geeks in particular:

We're lazy.

And that means we don't uphold our principals 100% of the time. Sure, I'm against closed standards. What's that? A dirt-cheap linux box, with a small (for a PC) form-factor, and they're all identical? I'll take three!
What? Microsoft? Bah, you know they actually LOSE money on the X-Box hardware, don't you?

That said, you could hope the geek masses are more educated than the rest of the tarket market for consoles. Even so, we're a minuscule fraction of the effective market.
You should have realized, by now, that the mass-market actually doesn't care about DRM! As long as they can play Dead Or Alive 5 they just bought on their latest consoles, they're happy.

And finally, sadly, if a console is open, you can bet that the openness will be used 95% of the time to play pirated games, not homebrew ones. Quite simply because commercial games are of much higher quality than any homebrews! Why is that? see my first point...

http://www.gbax.com/drmgp2x.html details the DRM in the GP2X. And plus, I'd imagine it somewhat tricky to implement on a Linux-based platform.

The PSP and this rather lame exploit which only lets you run up to 64kb which to those who dont know isnt enough to run 99% of homebrew and emulators, yes it creates news but its not going anywhere, thank god the new Portable Linux Console that embraces Open Source Coding has arrived, Emulation and Homebrew with out stupid little exploits, yes im talking about the GP2X http://www.gbax.com/main.pl Once it arrives we can say hello to the future of amatuer coding.

Yeah after seeing the Slashdot about the GP2X last week http://www.gbax.com/main.pl i want one of them, no need for any bloody exploits :)

iPods are NOT cool anymore if every Tom, Dick and Harriette has one... you want coolness??/ get yourself one of these babies... while they're only listening to music, you can be watching movies... playing games, reading a book or listening to music as well...

You're right in pointing out the white version does indeed have the wrong logo on it, which is strange because the black version has the correct logo. I'm guessing it's a slip-up at the manufactures. Maybe they'll offer a discount on the effected stock.

EXT out port which allows you to do many things including using the gp32 for wireless multiplayer or connecting a mini keyboard

I don't understand, this device will never make it into your local store anyway. At under £100 it avoids import tax anyway. So ordering it should be the same as ordering anything on the net, but if you are really were unsure about ordering from abroad you can already pre-order them from your local reseller, mine is at http://www.gbax.com/.

GP32 Mini Keyboard Works with Computer Emulators, GPapps and Linux.

Looked at the GP32? I don't know how large it is in the world, but it has/had decent hardware and a homebrew scene. Console done right.
GP32 xtreme got news.
GBAX sells it.
Emuholic got emus.
GP32 devrs got the tools.

I want solid state computing... zero moving parts. No fans, and a flash-based "hard drive". I don't care about noise, I care about having something that sucks very little juice and will essentially never break down.

I'm happy right now with my GamePark32... open ARM architecture, variable speed up to 166MHz. Great homebrew community. It can play 320x176 24fps DivX/XVid (if you know your way around encoding), has emulators for everything up to an SNES, and even has a port of Linux. (You can get a keyboard for it) Runs on SmartMedia cards and 2 AA's.

Give me one of these new AMD units, and a device that runs off CompactFlash (SmartMedia is limited to 128MB) and I'd be set.

... because the GP32 can do all the same things, and more. There's been ported a lot of games to it, and the ScummVM is also available. You can play MPEGs. MP3s. Mmm. Why buy an inferior product at a higher price?

You can order from here. I'm not affiliated with the store in any way, I'm a very, very happy customer.

this and oh my God do I want one! Next pay cheque please!

Or for a handheld c64 get a GP32 and download gpFrodo.

Back-lit GP32 Back-lit GP32 in action.

The lack of buttons sucks (especially for SNES emulation - the GBA gets around this though), but other than that this is a neat unit, especially considering all the dev tools available for it. Fast processor (much faster than GBA anyhow), beautiful large screen, more memory, better sound, USB port, re-writeable content storage, wireless option, and now backlit... At the price, I'm not sure what there's not to like :-)

paulb

Back-lit GP32 Back-lit GP32 in action.

The lack of buttons sucks (especially for SNES emulation - the GBA gets around this though), but other than that this is a neat unit, especially considering all the dev tools available for it. Fast processor (much faster than GBA anyhow), beautiful large screen, more memory, better sound, USB port, re-writeable content storage, wireless option, and now backlit... At the price, I'm not sure what there's not to like :-)

paulb