#128414 - OOPMan - Fri May 11, 2007 9:03 am
Recently, on another forum, someone wrote:
| Quote: |
With Sony throwing away money at it, you would damn well HOPE it would sell more.
But XXXXX makes a good point. Has there ever been ANY reasonably successful handheld that wasn't made by Nintendo? Even ones backed by Sega, Atari, et al - they couldn't face the challenge. Then you have the uber forgettable Game.Com, N-gage, etc. to contend with.
Let's be honest - something like the Gp2x **SHOULD** be mopping the floor with the DS (can you imagine how cool it would be if GP2x had SERIOUS third party development??) but the handheld market is NOT like the console market - never has been. It isn't about technology. It isn't about POWER or the projection thereof (Sony). Not a single Nintendo handheld has ever been "the most powerful handheld available". Not ONCE. Yet, good ol' arrogant ass Sony felt that if they could put a FULL CONSOLE in your hands (screw the downsides) that they could be competitive and "wipe the floor with Nintendo".
Some people never learn. |
What interested me here was the contention that the GP2X should be mopping the floor with the DS.
At face-value it might appear that this should be so. The GP2X does seem to have more CPU power and a wider-array of out-of-the-box homebrew and so forth.
However, what I'm wondering is whether the GP2X is, in fact, really much more powerful than the DS.
I recall reading a post somewhere a while back stating that the GP2X's MagicEyes chipset was actually a rather low-performance solution, something I found rather interetesting.
It was also interesting to note that, according the GP2X Wiki, the device's Linux-OS only sees one of the two ARM9 CPUs on the MagicEyes board, while ignoring the other, or at least not making it available for usage.
Which got me thinking that, in truth, the DS is probably the more intelligently designed of the two devices, featuring as it does various pockets of fast memory and other performancing enhancing tricks, not to mention being an actual dual-processor system (Something that expands the DS' processing power in a different fashion...)
Anyway, I was interested to hear other peoples thoughts on this, as my own knowledge of the DS's hardware and the GP2X's hardware is a bit limited...
Last edited by OOPMan on Fri May 11, 2007 10:55 am; edited 1 time in total
#128417 - Lick - Fri May 11, 2007 9:50 am
Does GP2X have a touchscreen?
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#128418 - sonic-nkt - Fri May 11, 2007 10:14 am
the best about the ds homebrew is the touchscreen imo.
the gp2x is great, if it had a touchscreen it would kick the ds a** homebrew wise, but since it doesnt, they both have a quite intresting scene and im glad to own both :)
#128419 - kusma - Fri May 11, 2007 10:19 am
I don't think the increased cpu power outweighs the touch-screen and the gpu. The gp2x is more traditional in one sense, and might be easier to develop for though.
#128420 - Diddl - Fri May 11, 2007 10:25 am
A GP2x compared to a NDS is not really "mobile". It is much bigger than a NDSL, more like a fat NDS.
But also the battery/accu solution gives points to Nintendo. Normal batteries or accus are not handy for a mobile device ...
But I agree, the best feature is the touchscreen. This is what it makes to a rival again PSP and GP2x.
#128421 - OOPMan - Fri May 11, 2007 10:40 am
| Lick wrote: |
| Does GP2X have a touchscreen? |
No, it only has a single screen. I'm not really interesting in comparing them in that context though. I'm more interested in the relative difference in the two it comes to overall processing capabilities (Ie, the intersection between theoretical CPU performance and real world performance...)
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#128426 - dualscreenman - Fri May 11, 2007 12:17 pm
The thing is, I never knew the GP2X existed before I started into homebrew a few years ago.
Nintendo's a known name, and they know how to market.
Plus they have games with pokemans.
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#128429 - Sektor - Fri May 11, 2007 12:20 pm
GP2X also lacks built-in wifi. It would be fun to mess around with but I wouldn't buy one.
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#128447 - Lynx - Fri May 11, 2007 3:55 pm
How much does the GP2X cost?
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#128459 - tepples - Fri May 11, 2007 5:41 pm
Parents buying toys in the United States in December generally prefer to buy their toys at big-box retail chains rather than online. DS is sold in big-box retail chains in the United States. So is MAX Media Dock. GP2X is not.
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#128464 - Darkflame - Fri May 11, 2007 6:16 pm
I really,really like my GP2X.
The lack of support comes from;
a) Being from an minor company without marketing push.
b) Not being secure for commercial products. Payback is the ONLY commercial game I even know for the system. (and it does look superb...high dynamic range on a portable,very nice work Apax!).
| Quote: |
| However, what I'm wondering is whether the GP2X is, in fact, really much more powerful than the DS. |
Yes, it is.
Vastly more.
You can see this in all sorts of home brew for it.
(the GP2X has DOS and PS1 emulators, for instance. Someone even got Windows on it, if you wait 16 minutes to boot :p )
In terms of manufacturing costs, the DS probably is more smartly designed for "best for price" performance.
But, overall, end result, GP2X is quite a powerful beast in comparison.
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#128489 - Sweater Fish Deluxe - Fri May 11, 2007 10:56 pm
I think the GP2X is definitely more powerful than the DS, but probably not as much as the raw specs indicate. Possibly not as much as the speed improvement seen in emulators compared across the two systems would indicate, either, since like kusma said, the GP2X sounds like it's a bit more "traditional" to develop for (at least for coders used to computers and modern consoles).
As for the other differences between the two systems, I agree that the two screens, WiFi and especially the touchscreen on the DS are big bonuses. But the GP2X has some real advantages of its own like TV-out and USB host as well as just the ability to use SD cards without any flash cart or anything.
Last year, I knew I was going to buy one of these two systems, but I had a very hard time deciding which. If the GP2X had a touchscreen, I wouldn't have given the DS a second thought. Or on the other hand, if the DS had TV-out, I would have chosen it without much difficulty. The commercial games (DS as well as GBA) on the DS probably helped me make my decision, but not as much as you'd think. Battery life was also an issue, the DS gets about twice the life to a charge.
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#128494 - Sunray - Fri May 11, 2007 11:11 pm
GP2X has no 3D acceleration either.
#128513 - Dood77 - Sat May 12, 2007 4:54 am
What about those somewhat extra CPU things? Like FPU and MMU and stuff, does the GP2X have those?
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#128516 - tepples - Sat May 12, 2007 5:18 am
Wikipedia:GP2X states that the GP2X system runs Linux, not uCLinux. Therefore, the system more than likely has an MMU.
I don't see anything about an FPU on GP2X CPU.
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#128532 - MiL0 - Sat May 12, 2007 1:01 pm
I have both and love them fairly equally.
tepples: the link you provided regarding the gp2x cpu clearly states that one of the cpu's has an MMU whilst the ARM940T co-processor does not. I'm no technical expert but from reading the threads on the gp32x.com forums it seems that this was a pretty bad design mistake and is one of the main reasons why the 2nd processor is hard to use properly.
Having said that, the gp2x has very nice emulation of MAME, CPS2, GBA, Amiga, SNES, Genesis and many others. Some 2D ps1 games are running at very respectable framerates (25fps+) and this, along with GBA emulation are improving on a almost weekly basis. So yes, I think that the gp2x is more powerful than the DS.
For me, the nice thing about the gp2x is it homebrew friendliness, the new BOB expansion and the community spirit (similar to the DS scene, MUCH better than the PSP scene!).
Different strokes and all that, but really the DS and the GP2X complement each other very well. If you can afford it, get both! (I'm still waiting for the PSP to come down in price.)
Last edited by MiL0 on Fri May 18, 2007 11:05 am; edited 1 time in total
#128646 - Darkflame - Sun May 13, 2007 8:20 pm
Once nice thing about the GP2X is video playing of Divx files works without any conversion needed at all.
Not that I use either portable for movie watching much. (overrated feature)
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#128705 - OOPMan - Mon May 14, 2007 11:28 am
| MiL0 wrote: |
I have both and love them fairly.
tepples: the link you provided regarding the gp2x cpu clearly states that one of the cpu's has an MMU whilst the ARM940T co-processor does not. I'm no technical expert but from reading the threads on the gp32x.com forums it seems that this was a pretty bad design mistake and is one of the main reasons why the 2nd processor is hard to use properly. |
Okay, this was the kind of thing I was more interested in hearing opinions on :-)
Not so much interested in the Touchscreen vs. Non-TS and so forth...
Pretty much what I can see would appear to indicate that the GP2X, hardware-wise under the hood, is the MagicEyes MMSP2 chipset, a chipset designed primarily with video decoding in mind.
This kinda led to my own opinion that, for many applications, it's not really that much more powerful than a DS in terms of raw HW power because it lacks some of the nice things the DS has (Small patches of fast memory, high configurable VRAM, 3d accelerator and so forth...)
The ultimate question I'm getting at is:
In terms of hardware design, which is the better system?
The GP2X appears to have more "raw" power than DS, but the DS seems to be more intelligently designed on closer examination...
On the subject of video, I really really wish ActImagine was open source :-) Then we wouldn't have to muck about with DPG and so forth ;-)
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#128872 - quadomatic - Wed May 16, 2007 5:39 am
I was seriously considering buying a GP2X, simply because it's linux based, it has a video player that most likely kicks the crap out of Moonshell (not because moonshell is bad or anything, but because I'm sure video looks better on the GP2X compared to DS Phat's screens, plus encoding DPG can get messy, while GP2X supports DivX...I think), and it had such good emulation. There was word that PSX was being worked on!
But, aside from that, it really doesn't look as though GP2X has much going for it as far as homebrew is concerned, so it just seemed like a waste of money. I would probably pick up a PSP before GP2X, and with a God of War game on its way to PSP, that might not be such a bad idea...
#128949 - Darkflame - Thu May 17, 2007 12:11 am
Yes, Divx just works fine without conversion, support upto PAL resolutions anyway.
| Quote: |
The ultimate question I'm getting at is:
In terms of hardware design, which is the better system? |
As I said, the GP2X.
Look at the emulators, Look at the end results of what people have got running.
They have a working PS1 emulator, perfect Snes, Megadrive emulators.
They have Dos box, and even windows booting (yeah, not practicaly, but just a demo).
eg, the ps1 emu;
http://www.gp2x.de/cgi-bin/cfiles.cgi?0,0,0,0,5,1839
imo;
| Quote: |
In terms of manufacturing costs, the DS probably is more smartly designed for "best for price" performance.
But, overall, end result, GP2X is quite a powerful beast in comparison. |
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#128959 - quadomatic - Thu May 17, 2007 3:10 am
GP2X is almost surely more powerful than the DS, so in that aspect the hardware is better. But, in my opinion, the way the DS is designed leaves more room for different types of applications and more homebrew.
SNES emulation will be perfected for the DS soon. I think the only reason other systems like the Genesis aren't emulated well yet is because of lack of interest.
I'd certainly like a Neo Geo emulator for the DS. For me at least, a Neo Geo emulator is HUGE.
#128979 - OOPMan - Thu May 17, 2007 10:10 am
Erm, I recall hearing that the "working" PS1 emulator is not exactly Ab-Fab, if you know what I mean...
Emulating a device with 3d acceleration on a syystem that only provides 2d acceleration is not usually very pretty.
So...Is that a viable PS1 emu, or just a barely usable one?
As Quado pointed out, SNES emu on the DS has come a ways (snemul 0.5b seems to run Chrono Trigger at full speed with only minor graphical glitches)...
To be honest, emulators are not really a proof for me, as it's possible to pretty much emulate any system on another, just at reduced speeds...
Rather, look at it this way. It is possible to write Games and other Software for both systems natively. Which one has the upper hand?
In terms of video, the Act Imagine codec (Yes, I know, it's commercial) provides amazing video quality at a good speed on the DS (30fps for 256x192).
Sound-wise, moonshell is pretty much perfect for most usages, as far as I can tell...
I somehow doubt DosBox on the GP2X is majorly useful either, given that it has trouble running certain things nicely on a 1.8ghz P4 Celery Stick.
In the case of WIndows 95 on the GP2X, it was running atop the Bochs emulator and took more than six minutes to boot.
What I'm saying from this. From a hardware design angle, it looks like the GP2X is basically just a MagicEyes SOC designed primarily with video playback in mind. Of course it's good at that, because that's what it's designed for. Other things can be done with it, but in terms of actual processing power, is it really that much more powerful than the DS?
I wonder, because the power of a computing device is never as simple as 66mhz > 33 mhz, but is highly dependant on the overall system architecture design. And while a the GP2X's CPU is theoretically more powerful, I wonder how fast it is in reality. Are the memory transfer rates on the dvice any good? What kind of caches does it have? And so forth...
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#129041 - MiL0 - Fri May 18, 2007 10:53 am
OOPMan - okay, so perhaps homebrew and emulators aren't a good indication of a handhelds true speed (something I disagree with). Let's compare commercial games then. The gp2x doesn't exactly have all that many games for it but I would honestly love to see the DS run something like Payback at the same speed and quality as the gp2x.
I personally prefer the DS for commercial games but for homebrew and emulators the gp2x is imo miles ahead. Yes, the psx emulator doesn't run full speed and probably never will but for 2d games and simple 3d games it is more than adequate. It's also being constantly worked on by a very active and hard working group of homebrewers (check the gp2x.com forums). Put it this way, if I want to emulate CPS2, Amiga, SNES, Genesis or MAME there's really only one handheld choice. And yes, despite the psp being more powerful, I'd still rather use a gp2x because the psp's screen doesn't lend itself very well to older systems - you get horrible scaling or a TINY window.
Having said all that, I play on my DS more than any other system I've ever owned. The DS has such a great software library - I honestly wouldn't mind if devs stopped writing games for it as long as I can keep Mario Kart, Advance Wars and Brain Academy heh :]
#129097 - Exophase - Fri May 18, 2007 9:18 pm
| OOPMan wrote: |
| To be honest, emulators are not really a proof for me, as it's possible to pretty much emulate any system on another, just at reduced speeds... |
Not if you don't have enough RAM. That's one thing GP2X has far more of than Nintendo DS.
Sure, SNES emulators run well on DS, but at a price. Since the video rendering is shoehorned to fit the GBA hardware it'll never achieve full accuracy. Combine that with the the cropped resolution and you end up with things that will always keep the emulators from being true to the originals. Of course, these SNES emulators are fortunate in that they have escaped the problem that has plagued every other handheld SNES emulator, having a software renderer which is not intensely optimized.
On the contrary, the reason why Genesis emulation on DS is so slow is precisely because it uses software rendering (someone tell me if there's significantly more to it than this, I would expect that it's using the highly optimized ARM versions of the 68k, z80, and FM synth emulation). It's not really that surprising that they are, I don't see how you can get the hardware to render to 320x240 then scale it down (even with screen capturing). For 256x224 displays people can accept the cropping but once you throw out 64 pixels of resolution per scanline you're bound to feel like something's missing.
You might be able to do fullspeed Genesis on DS, but I wouldn't hold my breath for an emulator. GP2X, on the other hand, had that nailed ages ago.
| OOPMan wrote: |
| I wonder, because the power of a computing device is never as simple as 66mhz > 33 mhz, but is highly dependant on the overall system architecture design. And while a the GP2X's CPU is theoretically more powerful, I wonder how fast it is in reality. Are the memory transfer rates on the dvice any good? What kind of caches does it have? And so forth... |
It's almost simple as 200MHz > 66MHz because both platforms have ARM9 CPUs. It's not quite that straightforward but in terms of raw CPU ability the two are pretty similar. On the other hand, GP2X implements ARMv4 and DS ARMv5 (I don't remember which ARMv5 exactly). The actual difference between the two instruction sets probably doesn't matter most of the time. And yes, GP2X has a full MMU, so if anyone ever really bothers it can be utilized to optimize emulation.
You can't really say GP2X has a weaker second CPU just because it can't be used by Linux. It's not as if most of you are using Linux on DS, hell, you're not even officially sanctioned to develop for it in the first place. It doesn't mean you don't use both CPUs, and it doesn't mean you can't on GP2X. Yes, the second CPU on GP2X is crippled by not having an MMU (which actually doesn't really matter) and less cache (which does matter a lot) but it's the same clock speed as the main one, unlike DS's second CPU. And the DS's second CPU has no cache, doesn't it? Although I'm sure that local memory it has makes up for that.
The memory is clocked at 100MHz, and it's SDRAM (so whatever stock. Does anyone know what the wait states rates to the DS's memory are like? If the memory is anything like it was on GBA then they'd be 4x the waitstates for the main CPU, 2x for the secondary CPU. I imagine they improved at least something there. GP2X has 16KB of instruction and data cache each on its ARM920T, 4 each on its ARM940T. So the main CPU has more instruction cache than DS, but it doesn't have any TCM, which overall makes the DS more favorable.
There's all this talk about the MagicEyes chipset being "just for video decoding" but I'm pretty sure it had a more general outlook than that and actually whatever it was developed for is pretty irrelevant. Video decoding isn't wuss work anyway.
#129099 - dantheman - Fri May 18, 2007 9:34 pm
| Exophase wrote: |
| On the contrary, the reason why Genesis emulation on DS is so slow is precisely because it uses software rendering (someone tell me if there's significantly more to it than this, I would expect that it's using the highly optimized ARM versions of the 68k, z80, and FM synth emulation). |
My guess is that you're correct considering that frameskip makes a large difference, meaning that a significant portion of the CPU time is spent rendering the screen, indicating that a software renderer is used. With the SNES emulators for the DS, because the hardware itself is used, screen rendering takes up only about 5% of the CPU time, if that, so frameskip would have very little advantage. Some good programs that highlight this difference would be NES DS vs NesterDS, the former using the DS's 2D hardware and the latter using a software renderer.
| Quote: |
| I don't see how you can get the hardware to render to 320x240 then scale it down (even with screen capturing). For 256x224 displays people can accept the cropping but once you throw out 64 pixels of resolution per scanline you're bound to feel like something's missing. |
Forgive me if I'm incorrect or misunderstood your post, but isn't this what PocketNES, NES DS, Snezziboy, and SnezziDS do? They use the 2D hardware to render the screen and then strip out a calculated number of lines (say, one out of every four, for example) to scale the screen down to fit the resolution of the DS/GBA, though I think the NES ones actually use a combination of cropping and scaling. Or were you simply referring to the poor aesthetics of doing such scaling on an image that's originally at a large 320x240 resolution? Again, I think I'm misunderstanding your post, so I apologize if I have.
#129137 - tepples - Sat May 19, 2007 4:03 pm
| dantheman wrote: |
| Exophase wrote: | | I don't see how you can get the hardware to render to 320x240 then scale it down (even with screen capturing). For 256x224 displays people can accept the cropping but once you throw out 64 pixels of resolution per scanline you're bound to feel like something's missing. |
Forgive me if I'm incorrect or misunderstood your post, but isn't this what PocketNES, NES DS, Snezziboy, and SnezziDS do? |
Scaling 256-wide to 256-wide can be done with a text background and HDMA. Scaling 320-wide to 256-wide needs a rot/scale background, and with the Genesis VDP's priority-per-tile, there just aren't enough layers to go around. And yes, dropping pixels in both directions screws up the aesthetics.
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#129148 - Exophase - Sat May 19, 2007 5:47 pm
| tepples wrote: |
| dantheman wrote: | | Exophase wrote: | | I don't see how you can get the hardware to render to 320x240 then scale it down (even with screen capturing). For 256x224 displays people can accept the cropping but once you throw out 64 pixels of resolution per scanline you're bound to feel like something's missing. |
Forgive me if I'm incorrect or misunderstood your post, but isn't this what PocketNES, NES DS, Snezziboy, and SnezziDS do? |
Scaling 256-wide to 256-wide can be done with a text background and HDMA. Scaling 320-wide to 256-wide needs a rot/scale background, and with the Genesis VDP's priority-per-tile, there just aren't enough layers to go around. And yes, dropping pixels in both directions screws up the aesthetics. |
Yeah, I really didn't think that through at all, of course you can use the affine transformation to have it render more than the width of the screen as tiles that way. On GBA/DS you only get two, so I can see why that would be too limiting for Genesis. On NES/SNES for GBA I imagine the horizontal pixels are cropped, since there weren't that many of them anyway.
Too bad DS didn't add more of those affine layers, huh? Giving text layers instead.. 4 affine layers would be good for Genesis. I guess the thing doesn't really have the clocks per pixel to do it.
Maybe a hybrid solution using the 3D layer could help?
#147974 - MiL0 - Mon Dec 31, 2007 11:46 am
If anyone's interested - I'm selling my GP2X... see sig below (or http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=320201854030 if you have sig's disabled)
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#147978 - pas - Mon Dec 31, 2007 12:34 pm
[quote="Darkflame"]I really,really like my GP2X.
b) Not being secure for commercial products. Payback is the ONLY commercial game I even know for the system. (and it does look superb...high dynamic range on a portable,very nice work Apax!).
[quote]
ITS APEX DESIGN !
But anyway, what do you want ? Processing Power and availability only over onine shops
versus
easily availability, easy usage (heck, even lil childrens can use it !), a Touchscreen and portability guess who'd win ?
The GP2x seems only interesting for homebrew... btw I recall that a GP with Touchscreen came out btw...