Gamepark Holdings Officially Announces the WIZ Handheld

Croakyvoice writes "Gamepark Holdings, the makers of the GP2X Console, have today announced the successor, which is called the WIZ. The new GBA Micro-sized console features a touchscreen, Linux OS, an Arm9 533MHZ 3D processor with 64MB of ram and will have commercial games on sale at launch in October. Best of all for fans of homebrew and emulation on the GP2X, all that needs to be done is recompiling of sourcecode."

Comments

Obligatory

[bigtallmofo]

...I heard that nobody beats it!

Additional Info

[eldavojohn]

From what specifics I could find on it, they are planning on supporting Flash 7.0 and I think this means one could play swfs on it (of which I know several addictive games online).

As for other support, I'm kind of disappointed that they went far enough to support Lyrics (Lyc) files but they only support TXT for their E-Books. I would be nice to see Plucker supported by default so that all the Project Gutenberg books would be readily accessible in something better than just plain text. But, I suppose that's just a matter of recompiling for the targeted architecture. I wonder if proprietary e-Book formats will ever be supported on devices like this? That's probably just wishful thinking--why would Amazon divert sales of the Kindle to something like this?

emulation

[flynt]

Can someone write an emulator so that we can we WIZ on our Wiis?

The Pandora

[ledow]

Although the Wiz is the "official" successor, the successor in spirit (and with a much more open development process, and much more likely to actually get up-to-date source code published - the GP2X firmware versions aren't always open-sourced properly) is the Pandora... www.openpandora.org - which is due out at roughly the same time as the Wiz.

Most of the developers for the GP2X are actually putting their weight behind the Pandora first - I know, I'm a GP2X software porter of things like Simon Tatham's (of PuTTY fame) Portable Puzzle Collection... (Blatant advert: http://www.ledow.org.uk/gp2x/ for that particular one). This is mainly because GPH are notorious for poor information and stock-status. Most countries had trouble importing the GP2X before it was EOL'd anyway, and you don't get anything useful out of the company at all.

Forget the Wiz, open the box....

Re:The Pandora

[LotsOfPhil]

Pandora specs:
* ARM® Cortex(TM)-A8 600Mhz+ CPU running Linux
* 430-MHz TMS320C64x+(TM) DSP Core
* PowerVR SGX OpenGL 2.0 ES compliant 3D hardware
* 800x480 4.3" 16.7 million colours touchscreen LCD
* Wifi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth & High Speed USB 2.0 Host
* Dual SDHC card slots & SVideo TV output
* Dual Analogue and Digital gaming controls
* 43 button QWERTY and numeric keypad
* Around 10+ Hours battery life

Re:The Pandora

[atomicthumbs]

The hardware designer, MWeston, has stated that by turning off the CPU and main RAM and screen and almost everything else, they'll be able to get 100 hours. The music will be played by the DSP, using the chip's built-in 64KB of scratch memory as RAM.

I can't afford one

[sm62704]

I went to the site, and there was no listed price. "Son, if you have to ask what it costs, you can't afford one". Too bad, It looks like something I would really like.

Maybe the lack of a price on the "buy it now" button was an oversight; if so, they need to get their heads out of their asses. Very few of us are Bill gates or Larry Ellison; we can't buy things we don't know the price of.

A lame website makes me think they must have a lame product as well. Be careful with your sites, folks! A good site will sell a bad product, but you can't even sell a good product on a bad site.

A hand held disappointment?

[spun]

Must... resist.. penis joke... Damn it! too late.