I really love accumulating old (and not so old) gaming devices and games. Recently I got two distinguished members of the club of handheld game consoles 😉 . The first one is the well-known Game Boy Color:
A Game Boy in its original package, with some games. Great!
The second one is not so popular, but very interesting: it’s a GP32 BLU (in the photo, with my tablet to compare its sizes 😉 ):
This console was released in 2001, and it was very powerful in that moment: it featured a 133MHz ARM CPU, 10MB of RAM and a screen resolution of 320×240, quite impressive for a handheld device. But the most special feature is the possibility of developing your own programs with the SDK provided by the company and save them to SmartMedia Cards which were used as game cartridges; there were also a few commercial games, but not with an awesome quality. Anyway, their idea for game distribution was also interesting: some games were sold physically in their own cards, but some other were sold digitally via internet, to be downloaded and stored in your own card (obviously by a cheaper price 😛 ). As you can see, they implemented digital distribution long time before the “boom” we live in.
The GP32 wasn’t a huge success, but it was enough popular among hackers for the company to launch another machine, the GP2X, fully based on linux.
By the way, does any of you have a SmartMedia Card? Now I need one of those old relics 😉 .
Hey dude,
I also love the oldy gaming devices. It was so much more magical…
But being born in 85 my first game console was a Master System II 🙂
I still have it (I think) and it still works.
We should join sometime and play a bit in an old system.
BTW, I’ve been very interested in getting a GP2X but they’re still expensive.
Cheers,
I am a lucky owner of a GP32 as well. I bought it (along with a SmartMedia card!) when it was the top-notch handheld console. I spent a lot of time playing emulators, especially the SEGA Mega Drive one, with this console in countless hours of travelling between Pontevedra and Coruña. My first SMC card decided to die some time ago, and I was able of getting a replacement by searching at eBay 🙂
I even built a cross-compiler toolchain and played a bit from the developer side of the device, and I found it reasonably easy to make things for the GP32 — especially compared to other small consoles or the PSX.
Another interesting thing is flashing a non-official firmware which includes GPDrive (this is the one I use), a tool which turns the console into an USB mass storage device, so you can mount and manipulate the contents of the SMC card with any operating system out there including Linux 😀
I hope you will be lucky finding that SMC card!
It looks like there’s a good retro-gaming fanbase around here; we could have a game when the new office is ready 😉 .
Joaquim, I have a Master System too! But I got it only some months ago; I had a NES when I was a child 🙂 .
Adrián, thanks for the link, there’s a lot of ‘food’ for my GP32 there 😀 .