Gameboy Advance Clone Superemulator

Aluminum Tuesday writes "During a raging internal debate over whether to fork out for the new Gameboy Advance SP, I came across the Korean GP32, a handheld console that looks superior to the GBA in every way. It's capable of emulating the GBA, Super Nintendo, Commodore 64, etc. plus there's a SCUMMVM engine for Monkey Island games and a Java VM. Seems to have a huge online following. It runs its own OS, and there are programs capable of playing divx/mp3 files, though there's also a Linux port on the way. Not too expensive either. (99UKP / 149USD) That's a UK supplier; they ship worldwide, though I found this more expensive American supplier too. (179USD)" Gotta catch 'em all!

Comments

One thing not mentioned in the submission...

[mattrix2k]

Is it's ability to link with up to 4 other SP32's wirelessly: http://www.gp32news.com/?page=showpage&lang=en&id= 6

specs

[slyguy420]

cpu 32 bit risc cpu
screen 3.5" tft
rom 512 kbyte
media smc(smart media card)
sdram 8mb
communication usb port
sound 16bit stereo sound
4 channel wav mixing
resolution 320 x 240 pixel
power supply 2 batteries aa
display colors 65536 colors

tech specs

[Hubert_Shrump]

Dimension/Weight 147mm X 88mm X 34mm(163g)
Display 3.5" Reflective TFT LCD(65,536 concurrent colors)
Resolution 320 X 240 pixel
CPU 32-bit RISC CPU(ARM9)
RAM 8MB SDRAM
ROM 512K
Sound 44.1Khz 16 bit Stereo Sound / 4 Channel Wav Mixing, 16Poly S/W MIDI Support / Earphone Port / 2 Speakers
External Storage Medium Smart Media Card (SMC)
Wireless Multiplayer Gaming 4-Channel RF Module PC Connection USB Port Connection
Power Supply 2AA batteries (12 hours use time between charges) / DC 3V Adapter
Option Rechargeable Battery
Controls 8-way directional pad (joystick) + Durable 6 key button
MP3 Capability MPEG ( , )
Audio Support Other Add-on Applications
Image Viewer, Text Viewer, Media Player, E-Book Viewer
RF Module 2.4GHz ISM Band

Re:tech specs

[Merlin42]

But remember that the backlight took up the room needed for the headphone jack.

Excuse me?

[Cutriss]

Nowhere in that list does it say "Game Boy Advance" or "GBA". Considering that it lists the Game Boy separately from the Game Boy Color, I think it's a bit presumptuous to say that it supports GBA games just because you see that category there.

So, seeing as how it does not actually support GBA games, I don't find it superior to my GBA, which *does* play GBA games.

Re:Excuse me?

[edrugtrader]

it plays GBA games. i own one.

I'll pass. It really flimsy and stinks.

[Viewsonic]

Everyone I know who has bought one thinks it was a waste of money so far. It sounds great on paper but the unit is very cheaply made, and emulation is sub par. Not to mention it's total piracy. Wonder why Slashdot posted a blatant piracy article?

Re:I'll pass. It really flimsy and stinks.

[Cpt_Kirks]

Have you ever actually seen one? Held one? Played one?

Mine is better built than my son's GBA. The games rock. My son prefers the GP32 to his GBA. He's nine and a hard core gamer, so his opinion matters.

Re:I'll pass. It really flimsy and stinks.

[poot_rootbeer]

On a cartridge game, you do not have the right to make a copy (even a backup.)

bzzzzt.

The sole acceptable purpose for a backup of software is so that the original can be restored if it becomes corrupted.

bzzzzt.

You know, your arguments would be more credible if you were actually familiar with any of the law you're attempting to interpret.

Possible operating system for the device?

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot reported about a graphical operating system for various small systems (Gameboy, Commodore, NES) a while ago, which perhaps could be used on this device as well? It had a TCP/IP stack, web browser, web server, etc: here is the Slashdot article, and here is the OS homepage.

Re:Emulation and DMCA

[afidel]

ZSNES can run every rom file I've thrown at it. The SNES is pretty old and pretty well understood. Also I doubt they would look the other way if they had a way to stop this as it has no native interface for the GB and GBA carts so most people will play pirated roms.

There are emulators available, BUT

[stratjakt]

they're just simple ports of available open source emulators. just because it runs doesnt mean it runs well, and certainly doesnt mean its playable. Paying for a GP32 for emulation is like those doofuses who keep buying DC, PS2 and XBOX emulators for the PC.

I doubt very highly that GBA emulation works well at all on the GP32. GBA emus are just barely playable on an 800mhz P3. Eventually it'd get better, but even the best emulator is never the same as the real thing.

All in all its a cool little toy, but if you actually want to play the games you'd own both.

Re:Emulation and DMCA

[Com2Kid]

• How well does the emulation work? If there's any emulator for PC that emulates all the SNES games (or whichever kind) in existence, i've yet to hear about it.

Zsnes

and of course the sourceforge page for it.

Ok ok granted there are like three SNES games it does not fully emulate.

So freakin what.

But for portability you REALLY want snes9x

Unfortunately their provider is complaining to them about bandwidth usage, doh!

Luckily you can still download the latest binaries and source from Zophar's Domain

So, yah, the SNES has pretty much been owned by the EMU community. :) With brief periods of mad translation going on (followed by seemingly long fallow periods. . . .) a ton of the Japanese only games have come over to the SNES as well.

• And does it have enough processing power to run the non-native code without any slowdown or such?

I know the minimum requirements for most simpler SNES emulation are about a Pentium II 266mhz with 64 megs of RAM, the FPU seems to be rather important as I have heard of users with far faster K6-2s and K6-3s not being able to run very many games full speed.

Of course platform specific optimizations should take those requirements down even further, and obviously it was a fairly long time ago when I was using those system specs, so all the additional speed encasements that have made their way into both SNES9x and ZSNES may have brought the requirements down a tad bit more.

Reading around a bit seems to indicate that there ARE problems getting the SNES emulation on the GP32 up to full speed, and IIRC the GP32 does not have a dedicated graphics unit, making it unlikely to be able to ever accomplish all the nifty real time effects of the GBA or even the SNES.

Then again, it does have that rather fast main CPU. :) Nintendo tends to love their tricked out dedicated co-processors, the GP32 is more of a general purpose machine (as can be seen by the MP3 players and even video players out for it).

One must also take media costs into account though, Memory Cards are expensive!

Then again, at least with the GP32 you have the CHOICE of being able to play MP3s and everything, with the GBA you end up having to buy third party accessories to get those same types of options.

I am so tied to my desktop now days that (and this is a bit of a surprise given how much I used my original Game Boy and my Game Boy color 'back in the day') I do not even own a 'modern' portable gaming system. ^_^

one other advantage over *any* nintendo product...

[BrazenChippie]

is that they encourge unlicensed 3rd party development, where nintendo does their best to squash independent coders.

http://www.devrs.com/gp32/
http://devkitadv.sou rceforge.net/index.html
http://groups.yahoo.com/g roup/gp32dev/

i'm thinking of picking one up explicitly for this purpose. anyone have any experience coding for one of these?

The article's also wrong about GBA emulation.

[dabootsie]

According to the GP32 Xtreme site linked as source for the emulators, there's no GBA emulator for the GP32. It can currently emulate the Gameboy/Gameboy Color and even the SNES... but not the GBA.

Divx!

[Cpt_Kirks]

not much mention of the Divx player. There are two Divx players, a free one and one you have to pay for: Moviepark. Moviepark is not expensive ($5.80USD) and works much better than the free one. Well worth the money.

Using VirtualDub, videos have good color, good sound and fair to good motion.

The Matrix would be a blur, but most TV shows look good.

The Simpsons look great on the GP32!

Some problems I noticed while reasearching...

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to register your gp32 through their sight to activate it and its software. This seems to only effect you if you want to download games, programs, etc from them. I still can't tell if it is possible to back this stuff up incase something happens later.

While there are about six buttons, I can see it being awkward to try to play emulators of systems like the SNES that have 6 buttons plus select and start.

The mp3 playback is limited to 128 kps. The ID3 tags are limited as well, but that isn't quite that much of a problem.

You can't play mp3s while playing games due to the fact that most of the gp32s power is used when playing mp3s.

From what I can tell an offical compiler/devkit costs a lot. At least there are free ones out there.

The games you can buy are usally encripted in one of two ways. An game encrypted on a SMC card to only that card but can be played on any gp32, or one that can only be played on just your GP32.

Even with those problems I still am considering getting one, you can do some fun things with it.

Re:DRM/DMCA/Profit?

[poot_rootbeer]

Great, but I still wonder how long it will last until they get nailed for making a better product than the original :)

It's not a Gameboy though. It's an entirely different platform, one which GB emulation software has been ported to.

As for "better" product, let's drop this and an official Gameboy from 4ft up and see which one still works afterward... :)

DRM in the GBA games will surely be here soon to force only a real GBA handheld can play the games.

The original Gameboy hardware (and possibly later versions too) had bootstrap code that compared a bitmap of the Nintendo(TM) logo in hardware to a bitmap on the cart, and if they weren't identical, the cartridge's code would not be run. So in order to release GB software without breaking the law, developers had to get Nintendo's permission to put their logo into their ROM.

That's as close to the DRM scheme you fear as anything, and it's been around for fifteen years now.

Its still 2 Short

[xenocide2]

They're missing 2 buttons on it. Thats something of a problem for bringing older titles to the GBA. Street figher? Total bitch to do without 6 buttons.

Is Kimchi-man actually made of cabbage?

[rollie_tyler]

Yes. Yes he is.

Setting the record straight, you linux hippies!

[inopia]

I've read a lot of talk about the ethics of emulation and how it affects this system. Imho, this was written by people who just read the article, made some unfounded conclusions and started blabbing about the wrongs of it without really knowing what the hell they where talking about. Fairly standard internet behaviour.

However, a few notes:

- The GP32 is just a korean game system like the GB/C/A, wonderswan, or any other handheld. It doesn't indorse or support piracy in any way. They just released a GP32 SDK for home programmers to program their own stuff on it. I doubt they ever expected it would get the following it did. Saying the GP32 is unethical because of it's emulator scene is about as intelligent as saying the XBOX is an unethical system because you can play mame on it.
- If you're interested in buying a GP32, let me before warn you about the emulation. Not all emulators are as good as you'd wish. The processor is an ARM920T running at variable speed from 20-133mhz. Consider that ALL gp32 emulators are ports from PC emulators, and you might understand why not evey emu is as good as one might wish. In my opinion only two emulators have been thouroughly optimized, and those are GPEngine (pc-engine emu, does about 70% of pc-engine games) and the SNES emu wich is being worked on. As a result some emulators aren't great, but the ones that are really good are the sega master system emu, beforementioned gpengine, gameboy(color), scumm VM (excellent sound!), sarien (it is a bitch to play leisure suit larry without a keyboard:) and the C64 emu. I guess you'll have to try em yourself.
- It has flashable bios, and a homemade bios exists wich is actually better than the original :)
- Why is the system so cheap? Well, the korean gov encourages cooperation between korean tech companies. As a result, the Gp32 is internally almost wholly Samsung. It has an all-in-one solution chip intended for handhelds (arm920t at max 133mhz, lcd controller, mem controller, etc), a samsung 240x320 screen (rotated 90 degrees to make it look like 320x240, but the mem adressing is still 240x320, wich makes for interesting programming:), 8mb samsung memory, and a uses samsung made smart media cards for storage. The games are encrypted using something called secumax (korean too?). The only thing non-korean in there is a philips 4 channel PCM chip. In short, this is so cheap because they didn't really have to develop anything themselves, they just hooked up existing technologies.
- some say the thing is cheaply made. Well, it feels very study, and the 8-way stick (like the ngpc) takes a lot of getting used to. They only bad thing is the screen, wich scratches very easily. You'll have to smooth it out every once in a while.
- Also, emulation is not even the main reason why I'm so happy with my Gp32, since I use it mainly as a media player. It can play MOD/XM/IT/S3M (listnening to old orange mods on the train is great) and even SID. It can play MP3 out of the box via the mp3 player in the bios, and there's a DIVX player that can play divx 4.12 movies (ideal for cartoons like ren and stimpy, duckman, etc). I have two 128mb SMC's wich I bought here in the netherlands for 65 euros each, and I have one filled with punkrock MP3, and the other with movies and programs. I have to commute between my place and my gf's every weekend and I have to spend 1.5 hours in the train. I do have a GBA and a flashwriter but I never use it anymore.
- if you're a programmer gp32 is an ideal platform. The community is small and friendly and helpful, and for over a year now new programs have been coming out every few weeks. There's an add-on to devkitadvance that allows you to get programming with gcc in a matter of minutes. Also, ARM assembler is the best! :)
- linux? They're working on it but I personally I can't see the point. WindowsCE ? They're working on it too but personally I really can't see the point. Quake? They're working on it. I can't wait :)

anyway, that was my rambling for today, hope you enjoyed it. /Inopia

Well...

[PeDRoRist]

Actually, the GBA emu is in private beta stage, but it's possible to get your hands on it if you ask nicely on #gp32dev (efnet i think).
Currently, it does run reeeeeeeeeaaaaalllllyyyy slooooooow, but considering it is a straight 2 days port (100% C, no assembler), that is pretty good.

Additionally, there is a list of other emus for GP32:

GB/GBC (2 emus)
GBA (currently in private beta)
Nes (2 emus, both are Infones ports)
SMS / GG (2 emus)
PC Engine/Coregraphx (2 emus, one is near perfect, the other is discontinued)
SNES (2 emus, one discontinued)
MD/Genesis (hasn't been released yet, since there are negociations between GamePark and Sega, and the emu author doesn't want to interfere)
MSX (really nice and complete emu)
NeoGeo Pocket Color (currently in private beta)
Wonderswan (discontinued?)
Zx Spectrum
Commodore Plus4
C64
Arcade (Oldies like Pacman, Space Invaders, and such, plus Mame 0.66 is being ported by rlyeh, author of the excellents fMSX32 and fNES32)

Moreover, several classic games have been ported more or less succesfully to the GP32:

Rick Dangerous
Elite the Newkind
Wolfenstein 3D
Doom
Heretic
Descent
LucasArts' adventure games via ScummVM
Sierra's early adventure games via Sarien AGI interpreter

Read more at gp32emu.com

You should also know that some pretty neat stuff has been developped for this pretty neat handeld:

3 MP3 players (one comes with the console)
3 Divx (4.12) players (one has been discontinued, another on is commercial, the 3 of them are still a bit slow)
an e-book reader
Gif, Jpeg, PNG viewers
Custom GUIs and Firmwares
a Java VM and a Flash player are rumoured
Linux and Windows CE are bieng ported over
Lots of stuff i forgot to mention

And i didn't even talk about commercial nor amateur games.

(I own a GP32, I'm sure you guessed. The only thing i'm not happy with, is that it should be able to connect to the Internet, but yet this feature isn't availiable)

Yes, it emulates the GBA

[fx-man]

but only roms under 4mo, without sound and at 5-10 fps.

actually, the emulator exists only in private version.

have a look here : http://www.gp32news.com/index.php?lang=en&page_rec =40 for some screenshots