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I have the last round of new hotness the GPX handheld console... It sits in it's packaging looks brand new and does nothing. It's a bitch to program for because the SDK was crap and there was almost no releases for it except for a couple of emulators.

That is an out-and-out lie. The GP2X File Archive contains hundreds of homebrew games and emulators, along with other applications. I myself have used the SDK, and it is very simple provided you know SDL. The major advantage of it is that the SDK is free and open-source; the device runs Linux so cross-compiling is very easy.

Do some research before making ridiculous claims.

GP32 (gamepark - a handheld game console) was hacked.

lol what? The GP32 and its successor, the GP2X, are designed to run homebrew, emulators etc with 100% raw hardware access out of the box. That's pretty much the entire point of them, given the scarcity of commercial titles.

Let us first look at the specs - 240mhz dual core CPU (can be overclocked in software), 64M of RAM and 64M of NAND, 320*240 backlit LCD with custom graphics hardware and TV out. The specs are very good for the price, the TV out feature is especially nice. For comparison it is about four times as powerful as the Nintendo DS. It costs $189 / £124.99 and is available now.

It can play games, it can watch movies, it can play music and it can pretend to be other games systems. That last bit is what attracts most people and scares some people.

See the thing is, that unlike the PSP and DS anyone can develop software and games for the GP2X - there are no restrictions and no special licences or hardware required. If you have a GP2X you can make programs for it. This results in a fantastic sort of organised chaos of software with the most popular programs being game ports and emulators - so you can run other systems games on the GP2X such as Quake, Doom, MAME, Duke Nukem, Megadrive, NeoGeo, SNES etc...

I've got an EDSAC in my pocket.

oh, i dunno .. for sure, the GP2X, a linux handheld console, has thousands, and thousands of games you can play on it. it truly is a massive collection, more than you would think, and not just TuxRacer or fortune, yo .. we're talking the sum total of a rather rapidly growing list of emu's, from EDSAC to Atari to Nintendo to the Arcades, and on into the 32-bit console territories..

the GP2X has, very definitely and in flying colors, one thing the DS doesn't have: audience-participation in the development process. the open source games realm is, truly, blossoming.. there have lately been quite a few interesting games popping up on the strictly-linux-only scene, not to mention a rather large porting effort is well under way and doesn't seem to be losing any kind of steam .. and all, relatively, easily accessible to anyone, not just nintendo-licensees..

i honestly can think of one DS game i 'must have' in my kit (elektroplankton), whereas on the gp2x, i've got, literally, 20gigs worth of SD cards, crammed to the gills with stuff .. admittedly, there are a lot of emu's on there, so thats not 'strictly linux only games', but when you've got ("Sega", "Nintendo", "Gameboy", "Atari", "MAME") on-board, the fact its a linux box is only a bonus.. powermanga is a great bash, the newly ported clonk planet 2x very fun for the train rides, vektar a worthy contender (though i'm going to port MaesltromSDL myself sooner or later, if someone else hasn't already done it), and there are just too many great things to do in the GP2X emu scene for me to even list ..

Why would you want to jump through the hoops to get DS homebrew working when you can get a faster handheld designed specifically for homebrew, the GP2X? 200MHz CPU with 200MHz second core, 64MB of RAM, SD slot takes up to 4GB of storage, runs Linux. What more could you want?
"A touchscreen" you say? Just get a PDA. Any idiot can develop WinCE applciations, and anyone with half a brain can install Linux on it to run craploads of OSS games and apps.

The link that SHOULD be included in every future GP2X news item is Here. An avid member of the GP2X community has written an amazing review of pretty much everything the GP2X can do at present with the included software, many homebrew applications, and various linux applications. It covers native games[1], homebrew linux games, emulators running many consoles up to the SNES/PSX era, and media applications. It includes pictures and screenshots of the unit doing its various things. Also included is a *VIDEO* of the unit in action, showing just how well it emulates various systems at present[2] and runs various ported games (ultima 7 and duke nukem 3d are shown. not shown is a nice working Quake 1 port).

Read the review. Watch the video. Then buy a GP2X since you will be convinced. I ordered mine yesterday and plan to use it primarily as a media player[3] but also as a gaming console via emulators and native games.

[1] - Commercial developers are porting GBA and other similar-requirement games directly to the GP2X, they boot directly into the game software with no OS. Check out screenshots and videos of Payback for the GBA and then imagine the same game at 2x the resolution with 4xAA and network support.

[2] - Most available emulators are ports of existing emulators written for x86 Linux. This means they need new emulation cores written in ARM asm to run well, and they need massive changes to utilize the GP2X's dual core ARM architecture.

[3] - The GP2X can decode divx, among other codecs. It can output to a TV at 720p HD, an amazing feature for a handheld media player, or just display at QVGA on the internal lcd. I have a 4GB SD card to fill with movies to watch on the go, and plan to put a 400GB external USB hard drive under the seat in my car to house my movie/mp3 collection to play through this device.

Get a GP2X. A handheld console that looks kinda like a fat PSP, is based on a MagicEyes System-On-a-Chip that includes two 250MHz ARM cores (among other things like a usb host, frame processor, etc), runs Linux, and emulates just about every pre-PSX console at or near full speed*.

* - NES, Atari, GB(C), SMS, etc all run GREAT. SNES emulator requires 1-2 frameskip so far. PSX emulator requires more. All are improving very quickly as the emulation cores are tuned to the architecture, and neither of the Big Two make heavy use of the second core yet.

Please stop posting to this board about GPL. Dignsys will post up the sources to the new firmware version 1.3.0 next week on http://source.gp2x.de./ They intend to release it once the binaries to said firmware have been released.

Dignsys, developer of firmware for Gamepark Holdings has agreed to post up the source code for the newest (so far, unreleased) firmware 1.3.0 on http://source.gp2x.de/ next week. Their only problem was bandwidth, and a GP2X reseller was kind enough to offer them free FTP. Now you can all go home happy.

He's wrong about one thing, too.

After two minutes searching, I found the link to the file archives, in which there is gp2x Embedded Linux Source. I'm downloading now, so it may be the case I eat my words, but it looks like the peeps behind the kernel have released the source.

http://archive.gp2x.de/cgi-bin/cfiles.cgi?0,0,0,0, 46,934

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http://www.doyoulikemyface.com/

LATFW/

http://archive.gp2x.de/cgi-bin/cfiles.cgi?0,0,0,0, 46,934

i can see plenty of reasons why this is a puff piece, designed to distract from the truth ...

the game industry is full of posers, tho' ..