The Gamer's Quarter

[dessgeega]

i have a gp2x. it is incredible.

gp2x backstory: korean manufacturer gamepark holdings created their first handheld, the gp32, in 2001. it was released along with a small selection of commercial games by third-party developers. while these met with some moderate success, the handheld really saw a rise in popularity when it was cracked and homebrew games started to appear for it, along with ports and emulators. a strong community of developers grew around the handheld, and things were groovy.

gamepark decided that homebrew development was the true strength and draw of their handheld, so the follow-up, the gp2x, would be open-source, running linux, and designed to load and run homebrew software with no patching or cracking. it also has a big, gorgeous backlit screen, six face buttons, and a control stick that is much better than the first machine's (at least if you have a mark II model). and it plays mp3s and videos and ebooks and all that stuff. it even has a few commercial games.

but yeah, the real appeal is the homebrew development. there are a bunch of emulators of many different platforms available. mega drive / genny emulation is beautiful, pc-engine is really good, mame has a lengthy compatibility list, and there's apparently an msx emulator and a super-choppy playstation emulator. you connect an included usb adapter to your computer, a folder pops up and you just dump stuff onto your sd (camera) card. a few button presses take you back to the games menu, where you can run whatever you've just installed.

here's what i've been doing with my gp2x:

playing battle mania 2. holy shit. this game is criminally rare and totally justifies the whole endevour. i was considering buying a mega drive flash cart just to play this game. now i don't have to!

picking up my game of lord monarch. since the cart i bought is possibly lost in international mail. and since sram is cross-compatible between emulators! i've played through half of the third chapter. i might try some dyna brothers 2 later.

soldier blade! this game is pretty rare too. there are some graphical glitches in the title screen and menu, and the vocal samples ("i'll be back!") play kinda garbled, but the game plays about perfectly. and it's fucking soldier blade. the emulator apparently has support for isos, so if i'm feeling crazy later i may take it up a notch to gate of thunder.

battle city. hells yes. this is pretty much the best game on the famicom. the emulator is supposed to run disk system games too, though they don't work at the moment. once they start working, i'm getting all into some otocky.

crossroads 2. i've been searching for a good c64 emulation solution for a while now. portable crossroads 2 has long been a grail of mine. no more! ancipital plays great too. as do, i imagine, any games that require minimal virtual keyboard fiddling.

time pilot and time pilot '84. these play it tate mode even, with the player holding the gp2x on its side like psp star soldier. i havn't quite gotten used to this yet, so i've been playing yoko mode. portable time pilot on the gp2x invalidates like half of the gameboy advance's justification for existance. this one saves high scores, too.

spout. the little doujin freeware game. it's probably the most-played thing on my gp32, because it doesn't require the diagonals that the 32's stick just won't hit. it's the only non-emulated game on my gp2x at the moment.

if someone had ported crawl i'd never need to touch another console. there's an actually pretty-good-looking nethack port, but dammit i want crawl.

are there any other games worth playing at the moment? someone supposedly ported aleph one (marathon!), which is pretty crazy amazing. beats of rage might be on it too, but i'm not a big bare knuckle fan.

the gp2x supports tv-out, which is fucking incredible, but the cable they gave me was ridiculously short and incompatible with my television. where exactly do i find a tv-out cable?

there's supposedly support for usb joysticks too, which is double incredible. gp2x hooked up to my tv with a saturn pad plugged in would probably be the best emulation station i could ask for.

oh, and the dongle that came with the ac adapter wouldn't fit in any of my wacky american sockets, so i took the plug from my ps2 and plugged it into the adapter. this should work and not make my gp2x explode or anything, right?
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[Nana Komatsu]

[dessgeega]

well, i've had it plugged in a while and nothing's caught fire yet, so it should be alright, right?

the tv-out is apparently s-video, so i should need an s-video to composite converter? i'll take a pic later anyway, though.
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[Nana Komatsu]

I suppose so. It's still potentially not providing the right voltage to the GP2X (or too much) and I would recommend getting a real replacement.

And you can get an S-video to composite converter although be careful because they can be needlessly expensive (like most video cables).

[dessgeega]

huge image.

left to right: playstation 2 adapter (japanese), gp2x adapter (korean), plug which came with ps2 but fits in both adapters, gp2x video-out cable.

help me nana komatsu, you're my only hope.
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[Nana Komatsu]

[dessgeega]

i'm actually using the gp2x brick with the plug from the ps2, which i just told you, but thread clarity. you told me it was cool in the school, so hooray!

any idea about the video-out?
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[Nana Komatsu]

Something like this should work.

[dessgeega]

[Perseus]

How's the SNES emulation on this thing?

[dessgeega]

apparently not very good? i havn't tried it since i don't really need it. here's a video, though.
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[dessgeega]

so my s-video converter arrived, and i was able to try the video-out.

it's not perfect - a few lines are lost when the screen is scrunched to fit the television. dithered patterns flicker a bit. but it's a pretty cost-effective way to play battle mania 2 on my tv. i needed to use this program to get my mame and famicom emulators to look right. pce emulators don't look right, which is unacceptable. and the bottom of the screen in frodo is cut off, which is unfortunate.

on the other hand, i was gratified to discover that the control stick feels much more natural when you hold the gp2x like a controller and look at a tv. i'd been having trouble playing shooters that demand delicate movements on the handheld - i earned "a minus" shooter rank for the first time ever on battle mania 2. (stage five is amazing, by the way.)

the controls are good enough that i can play the gp2x port of noiz2sa just fine. incidentally, this port is much better than the unplayable gp32 version. a lot of gp32 software was disappointing in that it seemed as though people ported things just to prove it could be done, with little regard for playability. the gp2x's homebrew library is much better in this regard. i might even have to check out that marathon (aleph one) port later.
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[dessgeega]

so this thing has an obnoxiously short battery life. and those are normal, electrochemical batteries. maybe the ds and sp have spoiled me, but i can't keep going out and buying new batteries. (the gp32 also runs on standard batteries, but it makes them last forever, probably because it's not back-lit.)

but they manufacture rechargable batteries that can be used in place of normal batteries, right? at least, that's what i've heard. someone give me the skinny, because i think those would pair well with my gp2x.
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[duomo]

Yeah, there's plenty of NiMH rechargeable batteries that can be used in place of standard alkaline batteries. Try to get ones with as high a mAh count as possible, though, so that you can get the most life out of them (probably around 2600 mAh).

[dessgeega]

so these batteries were assembled by hyperintelligent rats?

i just discovered there's an st emulator on this thing, which means - brace yourselves - handheld llamatron. there's no support for a second joystick, so you have to play single-button locking fire mode, which is a shame when the gp2x has enough face buttons for eight-way fire. most of the sounds don't work either, and the ones that do are garbled, but i find the _512 version runs a lot better in this regard. these issues aside, it's still handheld llamatron!
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[Nana Komatsu]