Open Source Gaming Handheld Project Wants Your Money

YokimaSun writes to point out a Kickstarter project that may warm the cockles of your heart: "Fans of emulation and homebrew have not had much to cheer about over the years; the recent generation of consoles has pretty much killed off any hacking by constant firmware updates. The days of PSP homebrew have died a death and consoles like the Caanoo, GP2x and even the mighty Openpandora never really lived up to the massive expectation. There is a glimmer of hope from a team of homebrew developers who have developed a new console called the GCW-Zero, a new open source handheld system which uses the OpenDingux Linux OS. The specs are impressive, with a Ingenic JZ4770 1 GHz MIPS processor, Vivante GC860, capable of OpenGL ES 2.0, 3.5 inch LCD with 320x240 pixels; 4:3 aspect ratio, 512 MB DDR2 and 16GB of internal memory which can via external memory card be extended by another 32GB. N64 and PS1 emulation and everything below should be at full speed in time."

Comments

Not impressive

[__aardcx5948]

The specs are impressive, with a Ingenic JZ4770 1 GHz MIPS processor, Vivante GC860, capable of OpenGL ES 2.0, 3.5 inch LCD with 320x240 pixels; 4:3 aspect ratio, 512 MB DDR2 and 16GB of internal memory which can via external memory card be extended by another 32GB. N64 and PS1 emulation and everything below should be at full speed in time."

No, that is not impressive. Super lo-res screen, slower than any phone that is available today. But it's open source, so I suppose that's good.

But what is the point? Learning? Because the thing won't sell, like the previous models didn't do. You can have the best hardware, but if you don't have games for the device it doesn't matter.

I, for one, would rather game on my phone which is faster and has a much higher resolution display, with a bluetooth connected game controller of my choice.

Re:Not impressive

[L4t3r4lu5]

It's super-low res because it's supposed to run legacy games. Your PS1 / N64 output at 320x240 typically, with capability of 640x480 "high resolution" at a push. Furthermore, your phone does more than play games, yet plays games well; The processor isn't dedicated to gameplay on your phone, so a dedicated game console doesn't need as much horsepower. Thirdly, the games are already available; IT RUNS EMULATOR ROMS.

Retro gaming

[MtHuurne]

I'm one of the people working on this console. The point of it is retro gaming: emulation, classic PC games and homebrew and indie games in retro style. Touch screens and physical controls are completely types of input: you cannot play a game designed for physical input well with a touch screen or vice versa.

We've got a light embedded Linux distro on it and with C/C++ applications writing directly into the framebuffer (set up via SDL, usually) you can get very decent performance from these specs. For example, my prototype has 256 MB of memory and 240 MB of that is available for applications. Similarly, the OS footprint on the internal storage is less than 100 MB.

Re:Retro gaming

[MtHuurne]

Not running Android has its advantages too: porting existing C/C++ applications to Android is quite a hassle, while porting to the Zero is often a cross compile followed by customizing the key mapping. Also we have fewer layers between the application and the hardware, resulting in lower latency. Maybe it's technically possible to get low latency on Android, but in practice a lot of devices suffer from input or audio latency.

Re:wtf

[arth1]

Its a MIPS instead of ARM so itll emulate PSP at decent speed.

Don't forget that the PSP has two MIPS CPUs, each with its own floating point processor.
And a 480x272 resolution, which it will be kind of hard to emulate on a 320x240 display.

The list of failed handheld gaming consoles is long. The list of successful open source one is empty. There's no way you're going to build a momentum, unless you are way ahead of the market leaders. And without a momentum, it'll die before it takes off.

Donate money to this, and you'll either get nothing, or another box that goes in the closet/basement/attic. Perhaps you'll get your money back after 20 years if you keep it in mint condition.

Re:Well

[MtHuurne]

I'm "mth" and I'll answer as many of your questions as I can.

The devices are built in China by a factory who have done this sort of thing before. I don't know all the details, but while the yield of the first batch wasn't great, it also wasn't worse than what one would expect from a first production run. Justin has been a reseller of devices like the Dingoo A320 for several years, so he has practical experience in distribution.

Regarding the software, we build the root file system using buildroot with as few customizations as needed. Our SDL is using the Linux framebuffer for graphics and ALSA for audio, no acceleration is implemented but it's not necessary either: pushing pixels at 320x240 or synthesizing stereo audio at 44.1 or 48 kHz can easily be done by the CPU.

We do want to add acceleration for OpenGL ES. We're working to get the proprietary driver from Vivante up and running in our system (this wasn't trivial because we're using uClibc instead of glibc). We're also looking at the open source etna_viv project, but that's in an early stage of development, so it will be a while before it is usable as a full driver replacement. Note that the GPU renders from memory to memory; the framebuffer is handled by the LCD controller and that part is already fully open source, so if you want a fully open kernel you can run SDL applications just fine today.

All sources can be found on github. This includes the kernel, buildroot, the boot loader, the image generation tools and more.

Re:wtf

[Half-pint HAL]

Handheld? Ouya...? Perhaps you would be interested in something called a "smartphone", running the same OS as Ouya... Android....