When Chemists Attack

Ever on the lookout for a new video gaming toy, I imported a new Korean handheld gaming machine (via Lik Sang) – the Gamepark Holdings GP2X. What’s unique about this handheld system? Unlike most systems, the makers of the GP2 want people to poke around inside it and make software for it. Also, the thing runs Linux – meaning that development tools for the console should be cheap and easily accessable.

My GP2X arrived yesterday. So how cool is it? Read on …

In the box

The GP2X comes in a nice, if a little small, cardboard box. Inside the box, you’ll find the GP2X itself, a USB cable for connecting the GP2X to a PC, 2 AA batteries, a plastic screen protector, and a combination Korean/English manual. THe unit itself, surprisingly, does not come with an AC Adapter – which you will probably want to get if you get a GP2X. I ordered an AC adapter, a TV-out cable, and 1GB SD card along with my GP2X.

First impressions

Right off the bat, you know that this is a hacker toy. Like most handhelds, the LCD screen is proteted by thick plastic so it doesn’t get accidentally broken. Unlike most handhelds, you have to put this thick plastic protector over the LCD yourself. This is good and bad. It’s good because if you happen to scratch up the thick plastic, a replacement is cheap to buy and put on the GP2X. (Ask any PSP owner about scratches!). It’s bad because, well, you have to do it yourself and it’s easy to get dust or a fingerprint on the bottom where you don’t want it.

When you first turn the unit on, you’re greeted by a "Loading" screen that takes quite a while (10 seconds or so) to go away. You’re then left in the menu above, which can be navigated with the joystick and B button.

Who thought it was a good idea to use white on yellow for the menus? Did nobody think about using contrasting colors so you could read the menu?

Aside from the poor main menu color scheme (which you can eventually change by downloading skins), navigating the menus isn’t bad. The system even has a test option where you can verify that the screen, joystick, and buttons work correctly (mine did – yay!).

You’ll probably notice that the GP2X display flickers a little bit. This can be adjusted, and it’s not really that noticeable unless you like to stare at the menu screens all day.

What can it do?

The GP2X is billed as a "Personal Entertainment Player", which means that it is designed to play music, movies, and games. Since it comes with none of the above pre-installed. you’ll need to download games and copy music and/or movies to the GP2X before you can have any fun on the system.

Where do you get games? Try out the archive at http://archive.gp2x.de/, where you can download games and emulators that allow you to play games written for other systems on the GP2X. For fans of classic arcade games, there’s a MAME port.

There are also gamss that Linux users will be familair with: The Ur-Quan Masters (Star Control II), Kobo Deluxe, Paradroid, Frozen Bubble, Quake, etc.

Now that you have your games, emulators, music, and movies, you need to get them to the GP2X. This is likely where you will begin running into some of the … rough edges of the GP2X. The USB connection of the GP2X is flaky, and you will probably experience problems if you use the GP2X in high-speed mode. If you’re running Linux and need to transfer files to or from the GP2X, you can force the system to use USB 1.1 (slower, but more reliable) by running this as root before plugging in the GP2X:

rmmod ehci_hcd

This disables high-speed USB and forces the GP2X (and everything else, for that matter) to connect at USB 1.1 speeds. Even then, the GP2X USB connection can be flaky. Your best bet to get stuff to and from the GP2X is to hook an SD card reader to your computer and transfer files to the card using the card reader instead of the GP2X.

Once you’ve got stuff on your GP2X’s SD card, you’re ready to play.

Playing movies

The side of the box advertises that you can play DiVX, XVID, MPEG-4, MP3, and OGG formats. You might think that you could just copy many of your video files to the SD card without re-encoding them like you do on the PSP. Well, if you think that, get ready to see this screen a lot.

Unfortunately, the GP2X doesn’t seem to live up to the side of the box. I wasn’t able to get the GP2X to play the MPEG4 files I use on my PSP. It wouldn’t play WMV files either, or mpg files. What worked for me was to convert my files to XVID with MP3 sound using ffmpeg. Something like this:


ffmpeg -i princeofspace.dvd -s 320x240 -vcodec xvid -acodec mp3 -b 192 -ab 32 -ar 22050 -r 14.985 pos.avi


Success!

Not everything on that command line was necessary – I was just trying to fit a 90 minute episode of MST3K into less than 175 MB of space, all I had left on my SD card. The most important parameters were likely the -vcodec xvid -acodec mp3 parameters.

It would be really nice if the GP2X supported more common video file formats. It’s not as bad as the PSP about video formats, but it is more finicky than I’d like it to be.

Playback of video was as expected. And unlike the PSP, you can play back to a television.

Music

I tried a few MP3 files (no OGG, as my car stereo doesn’t support OGG). Music played back fine over the internal speakers of the unit. Sound was a bit louder from the GP2X than from the PSP, but sound from the internal speakers seemed to be mono instead of stereo. Like the PSP music player, the GP2X’s player seemed fairly basic.

Games

I tried some games on the system, and the experience was about as you’d expect from a handheld. Controls aren’t as good as a laege console, but my only real complaint with control on the GP2X would be that the joystick doesn’t seem responsive enough, making controlling your player in games like The Ur-Quan Masters more difficult than it should be.

The quality of games on the GP2X isn’t up to the offerings of the Nintendo DS or the Sony PSP, but that’s hardly surprising. It’s a new system, and all the games you can download are done essentially by volunteers. With time, the quality of games and emulators should go up. Even now, though, you can pack a fair amount of entertainment onto a 1 GB SD card.

Batteries

Happily, the GP2X can run on two standard AA batteries. Unhappily, it chews through batteries like the TurboExpress or Sega Nomad does. You will want two sets of rechargable batteries and an AC adapter for the GP2X. Either that, or you’ll want an unlimited supply of AA batteries around. Let me put it this way – since yesterday, I’ve burned through three sets of (luckily rechargable) AAs. I figure that at the moment, a standard set of rechargable NiMH batteries will last around 2-3 hours. (And you thought the battery life of the PSP was short!)

When the batteries in the GP2X get low, a warning LED lights up. The GP2X also starts to behave erratically and may crash, so don’t game without fresh batteries!

The GP2X can’t recharge batteries internally. To use rechargable batteries with the GP2X, you need an external charger.

Supposedly, the quick battery drain is because of a firmware bug. We’ll see if a firmware release lengthens battery life when another firmware release comes out.

Simple coolness factor

What other handheld game system out there lets you drop to a shell and run commands?

In summary

If you’re a casual gamer, you’d probably be better off staying away from the GP2X for a while. It’s new, and it’s not really a "put in a game and play it" system like the PSP or Nintendo DS. Plus, it’s got some annoying bugs like the battery problem to work out.

On the other hand, if you want a handheld game system that you can customize and hack on without worrying that the manufacturer will do something sneaky to try and stop you (ahem, Sony PSP), then the GP2X is a must-have. Once the system’s been out a while and the bugs get worked out, it might even become a system that just about anyone would enjoy.

Some of my favorite arcade games from my chlldhood were Major Havoc and Star Wars. Both of these games featured vector graphics, which meant that the lines and curves drawn by the game on the screen were vivid and sharp, withoiut the blockiness that plagued the graphics of many early arcade games.

Even though the Atari 2600 and Intellivision let us kids play arcade games at home, they couldn’t deliver anything as neat looking as the vector games from the arcade. For that, you had to go to the arcade and put in your quarters. Or, if you were very lucky, you could get your parents to buy you a Vectrex, a system from GCE that brought vector graphics home.

My Vectrex

Unlike the other home systems of the time, the Vectrex sported a built-oin monitor and sound system, making it much more like a true arcade system than the Atari or Intellivision offerings. Looking at it, you might even mistake it for a black version of an early Macintosh computer.

Side view of the Vectrex

The Vectrex drew curves that didn’t end up looking blocky, as you can see in this screenshot of Pole Position. Diagonal lines were also sharp.

A curvy road from the Vectrex version of Pole Position. If you look closely enough, you can also see me with the camera.

Graphics on the Vectrex were bright and vibrant, but only came in one color – white.

Dead meat in Vectrex Star Trek

I didn’t take a picture of it, but to get color in a vectrex game, you placed a colored overlay on top of the screen, much like some of the early arcde games and handheld games did. The overlays were removable, but I figure a lot of people didn’t bother with the overlays when they played the Vectrex. The overlays dimmed the screen and tended to get scratched in storage.

I saw the Vectrex for the first time in my hometown mall’s toy store in 1983 and immediately wanted one. My parents didn’t pay much attention to that want, probably because the Vectrex was expensive and I already had an Atari 2600. Fair enough, I suppose – but I did get my own Vectrex in 1997, along with a multi-cart that contained all but one of the original Vectrex games. I’ve also managed to scrape together some of the original Vextrex games with boxes, instructions, and overlays. It only took fourteen years from when I first saw the system on display!

Here, almost ten years after that, I still have my Vectrex. As you can see, it still works – despite being over twenty years old! The volume knob is a bit touchy, but the buttons and controls work well, and it’s still fun! I wonder what my children will think of the Vectrex …

I’m on spring break for the week, so I’m trying to get away from academic things for a few days. On that note, here are some musings about really important stuff – video games!

I picked up a Sony Playstation Portable (PSP) this past December when my wife and I were visiting Las Vegas. It’s quite a neat little machine, sporting a beautiful (and relatively large, for a handheld gaming system) solor screen, built-in stereo speakers, a USB port, wireless connectivity with a built-in web browser, etc. Oh yeah, and it also plays video games. This post will give my impressions of the PSP after having had it for a few months.

General impressions

The PSP seems to be a fairly well-built device. Admittedly, I have not dropped my PSP on the concrete yet or deliberately mistreated it, but it doesn’t break when carried in a jeans pocket, for instance. It can also do a lot of things, as I hinted to above. I think the main problem with the PSP, though, is that it may be a “Jack of all trades”, but like the saying, it is a master of none of them.

Gaming

Ironically, gaming is probably the PSP’s weakest point – unless you have a PSP with revision 2.00 or earlier firmware. If all you have are Sony-provided games, you will probably be looking for something to do with your PSP. There just aren’t many good PSP games out there. I mainly play RPGs / action RPGs / old school games on my main consoles. On the PSP, you have the choice of a few RPGs, but none of them could even remotely be considered must-buy games. PoPoLoCrois, for instance, is a passable – if a bit tedious – RPG experience, but doesn’t do a whole lot that RPGs from the Genesis/SNES era couldn’t do. There’s really nothing on the PSP that could compare to, say, Star Ocean: The Second Story or Grandia on the original Playstation.

The graphics and sound in the games that the PSP has are very nice. Untold Legends: Brotherhood of the Blade, for instance, has very impressive graphics. And truth be told, it’s a pretty good time-waster if you’re on a long trip and not doing the driving yourself. But it’s not really any better (or substantially different) than the host of other hack-and-slash games available on every modern console.

UMD discs are also a bit of a pain. The PSP, unlike every other handheld currently out there, runs its games from a little DVD-like disc called a “UMD”. This presumably makes games a lot cheaper to produce (though you won’t see that reflected in game prices), but adds the twin problems of disc read errors and loading times to handheld gaming. One thing you really don’t expect from a handheld is to have to wait for a game to load. The whole point, in fact, of the handheld is instant gaming. Gaming wherever and whenever you want it, and the PSP misses that boat a little. On the plus side, picking up a game where you left off is almost instantaneous, provided you don’t run out of battery between when you put your PSP to sleep and when you wake it up again. I’ll have to admit that I did experience some glitches here with Untold Legends locking up after trying to continue a game in progress.

The PSP is also equipped with a memory stick duo slot, which makes saving games a breeze and ideally would let you run games from the memory stick so that you don’t have to carry around a pocketful of UMDs. Unfortunately, no Sony-made games appear to support playing from the memory stick. If you want to play games from the memory stick, you’ll have to stick with “homebrew” games and/or emulators and hope your PSP’s firmware is old enough to run them.

The controls of the PSP also leave something to be desired. The D-pad of the PSP is difficult to perform diagonals on, making control in some games imprecise. (I’ve tried several PSPs, and it doesn’t seem to be just mine.) When available, the analog thumbstick works a lot better than the d-pad, but it seemed sluggish on games like Bosconian in the PSP’s Namco classics collection. The other buttons, though, work well enough.

Honestly, if gaming is your only reason to buy a handheld, buy a Nintendo DS or a Gameboy Advance. The game library for either of those systems simply blows away what you’ll find on the PSP. In addition, the systems and games are cheaper.

If you’re an older gamer, though, you might find the form factor of the PSP to be better – with its bigger screen and easier-to-hit controls.

Music

If you’re wondering what to do with sll that memory stick space since Sony doesn’t seem to want to let you stick games on there, you can load the PSP up with MP3 music. The PSP is a passable MP3 player, although if you are expecting a well-thought out interface with lots of features, you will be disappointed. There are almost no features for organizing music. Basically, you just dump tracks onto the PSP (it’s seen by your computer as an external USB drive where you can crag and drop files) and play them.

A plus with using the PSP as a music player is that it has internal speakers. True, they are fairly weak speakers, but you can use the PSP without headphones.

Movies

Another way to use your memory stick space is for movies. True, you can buy movies specifically for the PSP on UMD discs, but why would you want to buy movies for the PSP when they are more expensive than DVDs and not watchable on your television?

That’s right. The PSP has no TV output, so forget watching PSP movies on your television. (Yes, there are a couple of low-quality and expensive options for adding TV-out to the PSP, but why bother?)

More bad news: Sony didn’t make it extremely easy for you to move video to the PSP, since it only supports a very limited range of resolutions and video encoding methods.

The good news is that software makers have come to the rescue. There are packages available for Windows that can convert video to the required PSP format for you without much fuss. Under Linux, the package ffmpeg can convert video from most any other format you have (DVD, for instance) to PSP format. Depending on what quality you want, you can get anywhere from a single movie to 6+ hours of video onto a 1GB memory stick. (If anyone is interested, I could post a “HOWTO” for getting video onto the PSP using a Linux machine.)

This is probably what I use my PSP the most for – a portable movie player. You can carry several movies on the memory stick, so you’ll have something to watch on the go.

Web browsing

With the version 2.00 firmware, Sony has put a usable web browser in the PSP – making it a simple, easily carried web browsing appliance. The browser worke well and supports Javascript, but you won’t be able to access things like streaming video, since the PSP doesn’t support many video formats. Neither Flash nor Java is supported, rendering some sites unusable. On the plus side, the screen is very easy to read on the PSP, and most pages that don’t require Flash or Java are rendered well.

Very large pages won’t fit into the PSP’s memory, triggering the PSP to complain about the size of the page and then display only part of it. Ebay’s search pages do that, as do some other pages with lots og images.

Still, I was able to check e-mail anf surf the web from inside one o the malls in Vegas on the PSP. Neat.

Book reading

Since the PSP functions as a web browser, you mught also expect to be able to read e-books on it. Sony apparently didn’t think of this possibility, but it can be done. You have a few options:

1. Use a homebrew book reader, which requires you to be running an older version of the PSP firmware.
2. If the book is in text file format, open it with the web browser. This will only work reliably if the e-book is very short due to the PSP’s memory limitations.
3. Write a script to convert the e-book to split HTML pages, which you can then read on the PSP without the memory errors. This is what I’ve done. If you want the script (a short python script for Linux – might run on Windows too if you have Python), let me know and I’ll post it.

With the HTML files, you can use the PSP as a passable book reader. Using the large font makes the text very easy to read. It’s too bad Sony didn’t provide some book-reading software with the PSP.

Images

If you have a Sony camera that takes pictures to a memory stick duo, you can use the PSP to view the pictures. Alternatively, you can copy pictures from your computer to the PSP and view them on the PSP. This feature isn’t all that useful to me, but then again I don’t have a Sony camera.

Conclusions

My overall impressions? The PSP is a very cool device. Unfortunately, Sony has gone out of their way to limit the device so that many people won’t really use it for much of anything. The game library is too small, and most other functions of the PSP are limited. If you’re a gadget freak like me, pick one up used. If you want to play games, get a Nintendo handheld instead.