GCW Zero Meets Its Goal, supported games announced
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The resolution is a touch on the light side it has to be said. But in all fairness, where you will succeed with emulating one console perfectly with 1:1 scaling, you will fail on another no matter what resolution is on the screen.
But having said that, 320x240 is the sweet spot for most systems and most of the games on them and handhelds like the GBA etc wont look horrendously small when scaled to 1:1 either
But having said that, 320x240 is the sweet spot for most systems and most of the games on them and handhelds like the GBA etc wont look horrendously small when scaled to 1:1 either
2:1 scaling at double the resolution (and the same size screen) will look the exact same as 1:1 on a half-resolution same-sized screen.
And this device is supposed to correct the mistakes of the earlier ones...
But wouldnt doubling the resolution in theory mean that emulating requires double the power? If thats the difference between emus hitting 60FPS or requiring frameskips then what should be the tradeoff?
If the device was so weak that nearest-neighbor scaling with the GPU caused an emulation hit, then it wouldn't be worth anybody's time nowadays.
320x240 was chosen for cost and complexity issues*, but ultimately it's going to hurt compatibility.
Emulators can scale with a GPU easily, even the PSP is capable of upscaling GBA and SNES games with no loss. When the GCW Zero talks about additional CPU usage it's talking about things that would render at the full resolution in general, like the home screen and menus and such.
Right, so this packs...
- Ingenic JZ4770 1GHz MIPS CPU
- Vivante GC860 (444MHz according to base specs) GPU (OpenGL ES 2.0-Compatible)
- 512 MB DDR2 RAM
- 16 GB Internal Storage
- miniUSB, because proprietary bullshit is nasty
- Mini HDMI, WOOO!
- Accelerometer
- Rumble
- b/g/n WiFi
- Linux out-of-the-box
SOM/SD3...you mean Secret of Mana, and Seiken Densetsu 3?
As far as I've seen in YouTube videos, these games appear to be playing fine, even as double-resolution SNES games.
Here is Secret of Mana (3:15 in)
And here is Seiken Densetsu 3 japanese unpatched (5:04 in)
These appear to be displaying and running normally with no obvious abnormalities, and text displaying properly, unlike say Secret of Mana on SNEmulDS.
Can't see if they're fucked up or not from those videos, gonna' wait for screenshots and such.
At best, it can just render it at the full resolution and then downscale it before output...
At best, it can just render it at the full resolution and then downscale it before output...
Yeah, for exceptions like Secret of Mana, that one Jurassic Park game and a couple of others, I'm sure it can do that.
The chip's 1Ghz processor and 3D capable GPU should handle that no problem.
My concern is even with downscaling, it's likely going to look worse. You can't shove 512px of data into 256px without loss, especially not when pixel fonts are involved.
Meh... probably impossible without the standard Memory Manager (PSP is missing the hardware feature AFAIK).
That is my concern for downscaled games as well. If you downscale with nearest neighbour resampling, you cut off pixels that'll make text hard to read.
If you downscale with some sort sampling like bilinear interpolation, the text can look fuzzy and in general, not so hot.
Still, I don't disagree with the choice to go with a 320x240 screen at all. The device is supposed to be a lower-end solution to the open handhelds scene.
The GP2X Caanoo floundered instead of flourishing, the Dingoo A320 is now considerably dated, and the OpenPandora is considerably expensive for what you might need it to do.
Yeah, it has a 320x240 screen in it. It also apparently will cost around $120-$140 to buy one. For the few games that get excluded as fitting perfectly onto the screen (some SNES, some MAME, some PSX, all N64 would be 1/2 scaled), it fits most everything else perfectly at either 1:1 or minor upscaling (NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, GBA, Neo Geo, many PSX, most all existing OpenDingux and GP2X software).
I definitely think that a future device should support a 640x480 screen though.
Assuming that a GCW Zero successor has a 640x480 screen and an Ingenic JZ4780 inside (the dual-core 1.5Ghz successor to the Ingenic JZ4770 inside the GCW Zero), then it should be easy to just run any previous GCW Zero software in a compatibility mode that upscales it 2x, preferably nearest neighbour.
And then such software can always be re-compiled to make full use of a VGA display as opposed to QVGA.
But that's the future, they have their reasons for picking a QVGA display for right now and I agree with them: an ideal sweetspot for retro emulation, less demand on the processor, and more affordable in mass production.
Yeah the PSP needed a special linux branch due to the lack of hardware memory management, and while it was made, nobody gave a fuck.Hey... now that I think about it... wasn't one of the reasons why the PSP didn't get a proper Linux port with a GUI because it ran on a MIPS processor? At the time, I think only CLinux could be ran on it, I haven't looked into it yet...
...PSP port of the OS, anyone? It has inferior specs, yeah, but it'd be still a cool thing to have on the system.
Meh... probably impossible without the standard Memory Manager (PSP is missing the hardware feature AFAIK).
People probably WOULD give a damn if a GUI was made for it. I mean, there's no reason why it wouldn't work well - the power is there, it's just the Memory Manager that's the issue here, and uCLinux does it via software methods... so...
No, no, no - Apple would just make it "a bit longer" than the previous version - be fair.
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