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!