The GP2X handheld gaming emulator gets a little more mainstream this week as a product now available from ThinkGeek.com.
If you’ve not heard of the GP2X, it’s basically about the size of a Gameboy Micro, features 1GB of storage expandable via SD cards, and is open-source. You load emulation software onto it followed by ROM after ROM of old-timey games.
You can do a bunch of other stuff with the GP2X, too — music, movies, etc. — but the big draw is the amount of emulators available: Arcade, GameBoy Advance, Genesis, NeoGeo, NES, TurboGrafx, PlayStation, Sega Master System/Game Gear, Vectrex, DOS, and more. There’s a pretty active community for the device as well.
Retails for $180 plus shipping.
GP2X Wiz MAME/Amiga/Console Emulator [ThinkGeek.com]
Wait, whats this?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/GP2X_01.JPG
and where can you get one?
That’s the original GP2X, the F100. Next came the F200, which added a (sort of) real d-pad, touch screen, and came in white. It was discontinued last year to make way for the new GP2X Wiz (the subject of this blog post). You might find old F100s or F200s on ebay, but the Wiz is really the best thing to get. It actually fits in your pocket, doesn’t run on AA batteries, and has an OLED screen.
The community is based here if you want to know more: http://www.gp32x.com/board
I should never have sold my F200.
Has anyone here actually played any vector graphic MAME games on this device? I’ve played them on my computer which has far more processing power than this little guy and those games are still a bit memory intensive.
Maybe I am asking a bit much for this device to play Cruisin’ USA?
I’ve had a GP2X F100/MK2 (2 models prior to this one) since about May of 2006. I still have it and love it.
The model I have maxes out at around 280 Mhz, where the new model cruises at over 400Mhz and can be overclocked to 800Mhz. The new one has 3D hardware in it too. In theory that should let it do a decent emulation of a Playstation 1 and Nintendo SNES once the software is able to take advantage of the 3D hardware.
I have tons of Amiga, C64, Atari 2600, Intellivision, Arcade games, and a lot of other stuff on it and it does a really good job of emulating older systems. In addition to that, there are some pretty decent original games written for it too, as well as a fair amount of stuff ported to it as well (Xcom and others).
I’ve thought about picking up the Wiz to replace my F100, but I already have an order in for a Pandora which should do an even better job of emulation (and a lot of other things) if they ever get the thing done.