Because there has been a lot of questions about the Gamepark Holdings Wiz's dpad, I decided to make a video of the "T-Mode" button test. During the test, I tried to push down the entire dpad, but it will only ever register one direction at any time. I also did a bunch of circles to show how it tracks the transitions. The conversion to YouTube doesn't show it perfectly, but from what I could tell, it seemed to track fairly precisely.
Some folks may remember that the GP2X had a joystick that could be clicked down, and they may be interested to know whether or not the Wiz has this feature. There didn't seem to be any way to press the "center" button on the dpad. This, in my opinion, is the way it should be (for a dpad as opposed to a thumb-stick).
I finally fully charged my battery and the battery indicator shows it at 100%. I had mentioned in a previous post that the "bettery" indicator may be off a bit, but now it seems fine after a full charge cycle.
I also took some footage of a bunch of the built-in GP2X Wiz games. This test unit doesn't seem to have all the built-in games that are advertised to be included. I assume that some weren't ready to be included on the pre-release units. Check here if you want to see the official list of built-in Wiz games that should be included.
I'll leave you with some footage of various games being played under MAME (the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator).
Posts
8 comments:
I really want to buy one of these, but I have a question. Does the Wiz support 16 bit games like mortal kombat
Well, I'd have to say YES, but that's a bit of a tricky subject. The Wiz, itself, doesn't play the games (like Mortal Kombat) natively.
I mean, I doubt that anyone will release an official Mortal Kombat game on the Wiz.
There will be (and already are) people that release emulators that run natively on the Wiz. Those emulators would allow you to emulate old games. In fact, there is a version of MAME that runs on the Wiz already. I'm pretty sure that the arcade version of Mortal Kombat would run just fine on it.
I'm curious to see the speed of this device when running emulation apps when compared to this device: http://en.akibablog.net/archives/2009/02/50807689.html
Thanks for the reports Flavor.
The controls appear to be OK.
Now my only major concern is the diagonal tearing issue. WarmFluffy said that GPH has a fix in the works. Once that is confirmed by some reputable devs to work, then the Wiz will be solid.
I'm soooooo close to ordering one now. Very close.
-Prophet
Have they already released the Firmware source code ? Do they plan to do so at least ?
DJGeki: I'm assuming that when more people get the Wiz, there will be speed tests with hard numbers to back them up.
For now, though, we can speculate. Here are some of my thoughts.
I haven't played with the Dingoo (A320), so this is mostly based on what I've read here and there. You were talking about performance, but let's compare some of the other features first.
Dingoo has an LCD, whereas the Wiz has an OLED screen. I've heard that the Dingoo's viewing angle is really bad. Though, I'm not sure how much that matters with a small handheld.
Dingoo already has a bunch of emulators running on it. The problem, as I've heard, is that they are not well optimized for the system. A lot of the homebrew created for handhelds is optimized for ARM architectures, and the Dingoo is a MIPS machine.
Anything that ran well on the GP2X (or even had slight slowdowns) should run well on the Wiz with minimal porting effort. I expect to see all the major GP2X emulators ported to the Wiz in a short time.
Once people start to code more for the Wiz, I think you'll see much more from it. Simple (almost just a recompile) ports will come out at first, but when people understand how to use the Wiz's 3D acceleration and whatnot, I think there will be people pushing the hardware.
The Dingoo seems pretty straight-forward, so I don't expect there to be a lot of interesting new development for it.
So, it is what it is. I see the Dingoo as a cool (somewhat inexpensive) emulation machine. I see the Wiz as the next interesting step for the handheld homebrew/open-source community (and a cool emulation machine).
Man, maybe that should have been a whole new blog entry, it got so long.
Oh, and I haven't heard much about a new firmware, yet. I think we need to wait until the firmware is finalized, and then we can bug GPH about it. I do believe that GPH is going to be better about firmware releases this time around, though. Since this is a Linux-based machine, they would be well served to embrace the Linux kernel community as much as possible. I think they will make regular source releases and game-development SDK releases once the machine has officially launched.
Keep in mind that the Dingoo has issues with the buttons. If you're holding down B, the Y button won't register.
I'm not sure I'll last until my Wiz gets shipped. :)
Post a Comment