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...