The recent past -- stats and thoughts

On the left of the OHH page you can see a list of the most recent 50 files uploaded. At the time of writing the latest was the PocketSNES update (to v7.2.0) from 16 April -- which, incidentally, makes a substantial difference to speed on my GP2X, although it does always crash on exit, requiring a reboot. The 50th most recent was the FX00 Battery Meter from 30 June last year -- so the software drought since mid-April means that we're almost up to the year mark.

Let's break those figures down a bit. For each complete month in that time (ie July 2010 to March 2011 inclusive) the number of uploads is as follows: 4, 7, 4, 11, 2, 6, 4, 6. I'm not sure you can really infer too much from that sequence, other than that there's never been huge activity during the period. So, how about comparing with the other consoles covered by OHH? The last 50 uploads have taken the following time:

GP32: 1,115 days
GP2X: 347 days
Wiz: 237 days
Caanoo: 90 days
Zodiac: 226 days
Dingoo: 209 days
Pandora: 76 days

Let's be honest, it's not going to surprise any of us that GP2X development has slowed a great deal recently. It's just rather brought home seeing it in stark numerical terms like that. I'm sure there will be more GP2X releases, but there probably won't be very many of them: it'll only be the real enthusiasts who stay interested in the system with so much else available now. So, for the most part we'll have to make do with what we have, and accept that an awful lot of the niggles and bugs that have been advertised as "will be fixed in next release!" won't in fact ever be. That's a major part of the reason I have a "Completeness" score in my game reviews.

Talking of which... thanks for wading through these turgid ramblings. By way of reward, I promise that the next post here will indeed be a game review! I haven't decided what it will be yet, but I have a few candidates in mind. (Incidentally, I will consider requests to review specific games.)

PS: I don't know who you are, but hello to the person who came here via the Wall Street Journal! As it's behind a paywall, I can't see the article you arrived from, but it certainly adds a bit of tone to this place. *grins*

So much still to do...

I've had my GP2X for a couple of months now, and I'm still barely scratching the surface. For example, there are a number of emulators I haven't even downloaded (Atari 7800, Wonderswan, Neo Geo) and quite a few more I've barely tried beyond checking that they work -- even the C64 comes into this category. And, the focus of this blog being native GP2X games, there are hundreds and hundreds of those still to be tested. For all it has its flaws (and you'd have to be in extreme denial to claim otherwise) the GP2X is an extraordinarily lovable little machine.

Amiga emulation with UAE4All: first thoughts

I'm quite impressed with the most recent GP2X version available of UAE4All, which is 0.8.0 beta. It seems to have substantial increases in speed over 0.6.4 (which I also tried), has a better interface, and music in particular is fairly smooth: Turrican's, for example, plays very nicely even at 240 MHz. The one really disappointing thing is the lack of any sort of save-state facility. I don't know how hard it would have been to have included, but it's one of only two things about UAE4All that truly irritates me -- the other being the very poor quality of some of the keytop graphics on the virtual keyboard.

I haven't had time to test UAE4All with more than a small handful of games so far. Turrican, as mentioned, runs fine, and so does Rainbow Island. Lemmings I can't get to go past the intro sequence; not sure why. Finally, The Secret of Monkey Island runs perfectly, music and all... but that really is a game where the lack of a save-state facility ruins it as a serious GP2X experience. If only it had passwords, like... er... Lemmings!

Update: Hmmm... for some reason Head Over Heels won't work with 0.8.0 beta, but will work with the older 0.6.4 version. It's not the greatest conversion around (being rather basic for an Amiga game in sonic terms, for example) but it's a game I enjoy so much that I'm relieved it works under at least one version of UAE4All!

Kirby Kirby eep eep

It's just typical, isn't it? I get a nice, modern(ish) console with a bright colour screen and what do I do? Get completely hooked on a monochrome Game Boy game. To be precise, Kirby's Pinball Land, which I remember from days of old. It's not stunningly original or deviously complex, but it is incredibly addictive. I'm not that good at pinball (I've only just managed to reach the 500,000-point mark) but I still enjoy it hugely. It's a shame nobody wrote a native GP2X pinball game, actually.

Emulation: on not being American

It's interesting sometimes to contrast how American and British (and to some extent European) retrocomputing enthusiasts look at the area of emulation. These days gaming is pretty much global -- PC, PS3 and so on -- but that wasn't nearly so much the case in the old days. We in Britain had a very substantial home computer industry in the early-mid 1980s, after all, and given that and the fact that it was feasible back then for bedroom coders to produce commercial software alone we had much less need to bow to what America or Japan did.

And that word "computer" is important. The Atari 2600 and the NES, for example, weren't nearly the phenomena over here that they were in the US, and a major reason for that is that we had Sinclair, Acorn and Amstrad producing enormous numbers of computers rather than consoles, and those are what the average 12-year-old had at school (in Acorn's case) or at home (in the case of the others). Of the American manufacturers, Commodore did well and Atari (with the 400/800) to an extent, but you rarely saw UK homes with an Apple II, TRS-80 or TI99/4A.

So when you have a console like our very own GP2X, with a strong coding base in Europe, you're likely to get emulators for more of the British machines than you might otherwise do with such a (relatively) small installation base. And that is in fact the case: the relevant section of the OHH archive has good emulators for half a dozen major British micros: the Amstrad CPC, BBC Micro, Dragon, Sam Coupé, Spectrum and ZX80/81. (Okay, the Sam Coupé isn't really major, but still...) I'm not counting the Archimedes emulator as (like so much GP2X stuff) it has never been finished.

I wonder sometimes whether this gives European coders a slight advantage. If you had a NES, all you were likely to do was shove in a cartridge and go. But those of us who had computers expected to do at least a little programming from time to time, even if we mostly had our machines for leisure purposes. Sometimes that hacking was needed just to get a game to run, after all! The 1980s generation of kids was the only one, ever, who learned to program on a mass scale from before they even reached their teens. That's something that's largely missing today, and I think it's a real shame.