Minimum acceptable standard - GBA emulation?

Since my last post the only news on the Craiginator front is that it is now called Pandora. A truly appalling choice of name - referring to the box from which all the world's troubles were let out except for hope.

Incidentally this is a name that has been used before - we called the first O/S for the Acorn 32016 "Panos" (after the local restaurant) and the Tiny Kernel implementation was called "Pandora". If I remember rightly we got a lot of ribbing for that.

More interesting news in a related field - there's a new processor out that Qualcomm is looking at for telephones, called the SnapDragon which is a low-power 1Ghz dual-core processor. I'm thinking this would make a good gaming/emulation machine. I've recently been playing with a JXD301 and have really enjoyed getting back in to retrogaming (with 90's games being new to me, as my previous foray into retro gaming was around the time of the arcade ripoffs that Acorn produced for the Model-B...) but I have come to the conclusion that to compete in today's market you had better at least have the power to emulate the GBA (which the JXD doesn't although the GP2X barely does, with the help of a dynamic recompiler)

Talking of the JXD, there was a rumor going around that appears to have started with the eponymous Craig, that JXD were discontinuing the machine due to too high production costs (ie too low a profit margin). Turned out to be wrong, and a more accurate description would have been that production was stalled until a cheaper source of components came online. That rumour almost killed the dev scene, in much the same way that the pre-pre-pre-design-pre-production rumours of the Craiginator have seriously slowed down gp2x development.

At this point I'm beginning to wonder if an indie handheld can get enough mass market sales in the year or two lifetime that hardware has nowadays to recoup the cost of developing and building the thing. It would be truly a shame if independent development for the GP2x and JXD systems was to die off while people wait for something which is by no means certain to happen. I know that a lot of developers - myself included - are really looking forward to the Craiginator Pandora, but we have to be a minority. There's no way an indie can land all the titles that keep PSPs and WIIs and NDS's afloat, so it would only sell big as an emulation platform. But as the Chinese have learned with the JXD, it's hard to sell a device mass-market whose utility pretty much depends on bootlegged software. Great market in China, not so great in the UK/US. The Chinese importers can get away with putting roms on the machine when you buy it, but if a UK distributor did that, FAST or whoever polices that stuff nowadays would be on them like <insert your favourite colourful Texan simile here>.

Anyway, bottom line, the JXD301 is already pretty good, so the craiginator has to be better - and not that much more expensive, or the Chinese will throw together a rival in a few months that'll beat it hands down at a third of the price. Unless you're a programmer, the jxd301 is far better value than a GP32 and I'm in two minds still as to where it rates against the GP2x. The form factor and ease of use is very appealing...

Amazon Kindle - paying the Early Adopter Tax

My wife was kind enough to let me play with her new Kindle which Santa bought her for Christmas. Unfortunately her stockings were full so she was forced to open her box early since there was no place to keep it until Christmas :-)

I'm very disappointed to report that the Kindle sucks. BIG TIME. OK, not entirely - the display is fairly nice - it's just the software that sucks. You need a PhD to navigate this thing. Anne downloaded the Wall Street Journal and we spent an hour trying to work out how to get to it. We eventually found a way in by pulling up the search box and searching for the word "Wall"...

That can't be right. There has to be an easier way.

Let's just say that the user interface on this thing owes more to Microsoft than to Apple. No, I'm being unfair to Microsoft there. Even comparing it to a Palm, the Palm would win. Come to think of it the last device I remember with such a bad UI was also an e-book - it was a Sony handheld back in the early days of ebook adventures, when you had a tiny mono lcd display about the size of a "game and watch", and the books were on mini CDs, encoded in SGML. I remember these quite well actually as I did the encoding for several of them for a little e-publishing house in London. Must have been around 84 or 85?

Anyway, back to the Kindle... it's at least 3 major releases away from being usable by mere mortals, and the price has to drop to about 15% of what it is now to even remotely justify it for any crowd other than the 'more money than sense' early adopters. Like us. :-/ (Do the math - if it costs $400, and you save $2 on each book by getting the e-version, you need to read 200 books just to break even. At the rate I'm currently reading books, I'll be about 70 years old by then. I wonder if the Kindle will still be working by then?)

I just wonder what Apple or Google would have done with this hardware...

You know I have a strong suspicion that the software is from the Chinese OEM and hasn't been alpha tested much by Americans or Europeans.

Still, as long as the hardware can be flashed to a new O/S, I guess we'll be OK in the long run.

Now to see if there are any good hacks out there. Maybe I should set up an ebook to html gateway so we're not tied to the Amazon store...

The Competition...

Well, followers of Gamepark and GPH will know that the Gamepark spin-off handhelds pretty much died stillborn; the GPH development has stalled (the F200 was a nice incremental improvement for newcomers but barely worth buying as an upgrade for F100 owners - and the F800 is vaporware... and to be honest, all Gamepark interest has been killed off by the rumors of the Craiginator - which if it were a GPH product would have been commercial suicide to have started talking about it so early, but as a rival product - well, it's just savvy marketing is all :-) ); anyway, the real competition is going to come from the Chinese MP4 players that now all have emulators and cameras built in; and the newer ones have multitouch screens which are going to be interesting once they work their way down to the gaming world. Personally, I have an Optimus PMP2 and a JXD 301 coming for Christmas (according to unauthorized leaks from Mrs Santa) and I'm looking forward to seeing how good they are and maybe also doing a spot of devving on them if it's possible. (Check ryleh's link to the right for current status of the unofficial devkit for the Blackfin which is the chip in the JXD 301)

Talking of Christmas, I've knocked out an old favorite for the Palm Treo 650 (and maybe others Palms/Zodiacs, but that's the only one I've tested it on) but have cleaned up the user interface from the original of this game so that it plays very naturally on the Treo using the stylus. I thought I'ld get a jump on coding for a touchscreen by practising on the Palm. Far too many emulated games in the GP32/GP2X/Palm world fall down by not mapping the inputs to fit the hardware. I don't just mean trivial mapping of keys like in a MAME config file - I mean adapting it properly, so that - for example - a tap on the screen initially is treated as inserting a coin; but after the game is coined up, a second tap is interpreted as pressing start - and once actually playing, screen taps are treated as if they were absolute joystick moves. So the way I've modded this particular game, it really plays as if it was a native Palm app even though it was derived from an arcade version. Intrigued - well, wait for Christmas when I'll be posting the source and binary!

PowerVR SGX

There's a couple of demonstration videos of the PowerVR SGX GPU at the Imagination Technologies site.

• PowerVR_SGX_City_Movie.mpg (zipped)
  
• Water.mpg (zipped)
  

Fairly impressive hardware graphics support for a handheld, although I remember some years ago when I worked at Acorn, we thought that by creating such a fast CPU we wouldn't need external graphics chips any more because we could get the same performance in software for a fraction of the cost. Expectations have risen somewhat since then :-)

What Is The Craiginator???

"The Craiginator" is the unofficial nickname of a next-generation game console being designed by Craig Rothwell aka Craigix in the style of the GP32 and GP2X/F-200.

Craigix, who has been passing on info about the new console to the community over the last year, is also the UK distributor of the Gamepark systems.

This blog will be reporting news on the new console as it happens.