Gadgets: A Wiz of an Emulator!
By Jay GarrettSo Gadgeteers – what's new?
By time you read this I'll be at the Latitude Festival either drunk, watching a band or in a ditch – perhaps all three!
Well, preorders for Windows 7 at discount prices zipped away on Wednesday, and the Marketplace Mobile opened up for all 6.x users.
MJ will be back in video-gameland, new news regarding Apple's iPad tablet has surfaced where as Nike have produced perhaps the most gadgety football – ever!
Marvell have managed to squeeze a computer into a plug, Aston Martin has built a bus and DARPA have created robotic hummingbird drones.
If you dig your retro gaming then this next bit is gonna be right up your arcade! Say hi to the GP2X Wiz.
This pocket-sized beauty has probably the widest range of emulators for so many game systems, computer platforms and consoles shoved into such a small space.
The spiffy MAME emulation allows you to run all your favourite arcade game classics, even vector games. Amiga game emulation is rock solid. You can run Atari ST games, Commodore 64, NES, SNES, Gameboy, Gameboy Advance, NeoGeo, Flash Games and more too numerous to mention. Of course you’ll need to find yourself some game roms… but that’s what search engines are for right?
The Wiz can also play video files including MPEG4, Xvid and DIVX. You get a built in e-book reader, calendar, voice recorder and all the usual stuff you'd expect.
You also get 1GB of storage built-in and you can expand on this with the SD (SDHC) card slot.
The high-res touchscreen makes navigation easy and the gaming controls feature a d-pad on the left with buttons/d-pad on the right and two shoulder buttons on the top. It’s plenty good for anything a retro game can dish out.
There's an active development community for the GP2X Wiz and with a respectable ARM9 533MHz Processor overclockable to 800Mhz you’ve got plenty of power to play with if you’re interested in writing your own apps.
Before you slap your hard-earned down for one it’s worth mentioning that the Wiz does not come with any emulator software or game roms pre-installed.
You’ll need to download the freeware emulator for the console or computer system you want to emulate. Then you’ll need to unzip the emulator software, and copy it to an SD card along with some game roms you’ve downloaded.
Remember that you are running emulator software… most games work perfectly, but some may run slow or be glitchy. You may have to configure the controls to work well with the game you want to play.
Think Geek recommend that you check out this site if you’re interested.
This little Wiz will cost you $180
Odd News From Our Partners >>
