Visit any computer shop and the console games you’ll see on sale are just for the PSP and Nintendo consoles. Yet there is a stylish and powerful games console costing just £125.00 that runs Linux out of the box and has loads of free software available. You don’t need to hack it to run your own software like you do with the Sony PSP. Most manufacturers lose money on the hardware and make it with software so they don’t want you messing with it.

GP2X is at heart a games machine. It has two 200mhz CPU’s with 64meg of RAM, custom graphics hardware and decoding chips and takes SD cards.The display is 320 x 240 pixels which is slightly better than my old Commodore 64. By comparison the more expoensive PSP has a resolution of 480 x 272, and the Nintendo DS display is 256 x192. Films though can be viewed at resolutions up to 720 x 480 through the built in custom hardware and if you plug the GP2X into a TV or monitor you get a whopping 1048 x 720 display.

I’ve been burnt by buying a game console before. Remember the ill fated Gizmondo which had $100 million spent on promoting it and had very little software available. Well the GP2X has outsold it without any budget for promotion. The firm behind GP2X have already sold an earlier console the GP32 and have been around for at least five years.

The biggest difference is the sheer volume of free software available now for the GP2X and their open attitude to development. GP2X have taken the Nokia path, giving away software development kits to encouraging game development rather than the Nintendo/Sony/Gizmondo way where only ‘approved’ devleopment companies can produce games for it. Even if you don’t want to learn game programming, as a games console there are so many games available now- for instance over 1,100 alone with MAME, SNES games with a SNES emulator and ports of Doom, Quake 1 and 2, Duke3d, Neogeo, Hexen and many more.

The link takes you to a detailed review of the software available and you can see many of the games listed in a 11Mb WMV video download.

Link

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