Someone finally got their hands on one of these. Comes with 60 games built in including an assortment of SNK and CPS1/2 The user has reported that they can get .avi .mov and GBA games playing from the Micro SD card and nothing else. The weird GBA port is for other multi-game packs that will probably be released. Connecting the units USB port to windows results in a device connection error/not recognized. Performance is rated at fairly decent with only a few frames being dropped on Neo Geo games however there is no access to game settings or dip switches. If the system can load .GBA files from the Micro-SD I reckon there must be a way to get it to play other rom images. The USB connection error is interesting too. I'm still tempted to get one of these but I'm hoping more information comes along soon.
Bah. Another let down IMHO. Emulation speed is wrong for most games, you can't enter BIOS settings to make configuration changes, your locked into using their own "special" cartridge format... I'd say this is about on par with other hand held MP4 players except in those cases you can swap the games out yourself.
I'm going to give it a bit of time. There may be a way to access the internal flash, one PC kicking back a USB connection error means nothing, some of my laptops do that with USB mice. It's very hard to tell how the emulation speed is from video's and it runs NG and GBA games at what looks like a very comfortable speed. Might not be spot on but it could be good for a bit of fun. If someone can get other roms onto it I think it could be a neat little machine, video output looks quite good for composite. It'll probably handle MD and SFC games quite well. 2GB of flash storage would be plenty to store a list of your fave 16bit classics for a quick blast without fooling around with PC emulators or digging out the consoles themselves. The reviewer doesn't seem like he/she has that much experience with this kind of stuff. There are a million things he/she hasn't tried yet...holding buttons on boot, connecting it to another system/windows format/mac, renaming other systems roms to .GBA (might work!). It probably is just another cheap MP4 piece of crap but I'd be so happy if that weren't the case. Info here: http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=108550.0
Not to be a cynic again, but it won't be. It'll be the shittiest cheap composite DAC they could lay their hands on. I wouldn't hold out for software upgrades either. No surprises that the emulation is poor, it's based on the same crappy ARM clone CPUs as all the rest of the Chinese gaming devices these days. The USB socket will be host on the device and obviously host on the PC so it won't work if you plug those together, I'd guess that's the issue discussed on that thread.
I'm sure it will be playable, but given what I saw (I'm quite experienced with some of the games he played) the speed was totally off. You can tell the timing is off because the pitch of everything being played is at the wrong octave. It's like all emulation is being over-clocked or something. Really sad considering that otherwise it looks good.
I'm an ex AES collector so I too can tell the difference, I just like the idea of a modern dedicated emulating console without any hacks or front ends. Of course I could just set up an Xbox or a mini pc or jailbreak some device etc but for £30 this just seemed like a nice idea. AES and GBA might require overclocking but MD and SFC might be okay. At best it'll probably be like one of those plug and play tv clones with shit sound on acid with a lot of storage space. Anyway the guy who has it has admitted he hasn't got a clue what he's doing. So it's back to the waiting game. I'll be keeping a close eye on it.
I got mine a few days ago. I was quite happy it comes with an EU plug but i got disappointed by the boxed US plug. Anyway, yesterday, it became a real EU plug, by magic of dremel. Here are some pics of the internals (bad pics, bad lightning, blah) I just want to show here this is not the usual chinese quality. The design is differente, quite good. The board is clean. Gamebox tags are everywhere, on the wallplug, the board, the box, the controller. They put a huge heatsink+vent, that's disapointing. This box really looks like hacker friendly, i like it.
That is surprisingly a nice looking board for the Chinese to produce. I guess the learning curve for reverse engineering hardware is finally being conquered.
Looking at http://en.ingenic.cn/product.aspx?ID=62, it shouldn't be hard to get Linux on this as good old Ingenic have already done the hard work. Also, it is probably possible to flash it through the micro-USB port by shorting the correct "BOOTSEL" pin, see this user manual. The official specs mention 128M SDRAM, which is probably in Mbits so is only 16Mbytes, a bit of a limitation considering the Dingoo has 32. I might get one and have a go myself, £30 + free shipping (from DealExtreme) isn't too bad at all, even if I only use it for its original purpose.
Woah, why would you assume 16mbyte of RAM? 128MB of RAM doesn't cost much these days and I think it wouldn't be unusual for it to have it. Plus 16MB would be terrible, and 128MB is like the bare minimum for emulating some systems like NeoGeo. Unless you have a medium to use as a swap file.
I'm sorry, I was wrong about the memory. Looking at disassembly pictures, it has 4x 32Mbyte (256Mbit) memory chips = 128Mbytes of RAM - 4 times more than the Dingoo . Here are the specs, from what I have seen CPU: Ingenic JZ4755, 2x 400MHz* RAM: 128MByte Flash: 2Gbyte External Storage: Micro-SD Cartridge: GBA-based (?) Video Out: Composite External Interfaces: Proprietary serial (for joysticks), Micro-USB (not correctly implemented) *It is listed as 2x 500MHz on the GameBox website and on DealExtreme, though the chip's clock speed is 400MHz acording to Ingenic. Maybe it is overclocked, explaining the fan and heatsink. However, Chinese manufacturers are known to lie.
I just finished playing included metroid zm (gba) and I must say i'm disappointed: the original metroid in option menu, after finishing the game doesn't work!
Sorry to bump an old thread, but today I picked up the GBA version of the Gamebox, which as far as I can tell is virtually the same exact thing as the set-top box. I've yet to find a way to access the menu to check the bios version for a comparison but I'd bet anything it's virtually the same hardware. I tried to read up on GBA clones before purchasing one to determine which would be the best. A lot of uninformed reviewers mention the slowdown being virtually unapparent on a lot of games. Unless you've just ever played a GBA system you will notice frameskipping on every single game, with many titles just flat-out not working. You will notice the weird resolution issue on GBA games if you've used the original system. I mainly wanted one for a nice backlit screen (which this one has) but the compatibility really isn't even comparable. On top of that, the actual GBA cartridge compatibility is really poor. No compatibility with carts that save, pirate carts don't work; hell the cart slot is pretty much useless. I won't derail this thread into talking about the portable version of this hardware, but if anyone would like more info about the system I can post it.
