first of all i owe it to unclejun getting this unit, for he was kind enough to repay the small debt he had with me with this one. Also i promised i would take it open and play with it posting impressions. It was all in all fun and i wish site like dealextreme would send sample around (to me lol) to play open and have fun with Intro A few months ago i got this machine from Dealextreme. it looked somewhat good and had a price you can't complain about. I had no clue about it beside the fake pictures pictures of the producer and a few not so good Youtube videos, so i thought i would open it up, and dig out some informations about it for the users here, and in the hope some more knowledgeable memeber might be interested in hacking this machine that is extremely cheap and reasonably capable. (more on the matter later on the file). the unit with a fake screenshot (mine's not pink >_>) Technical Specifications The machine i'm talking about is this one: http://dx.com/p/4-3-lcd-touch-resis...w-built-in-games-hdmi-fm-tv-out-tf-4gb-108453 It took me quite a bit of searching around to understand the unit is Called KULALA K-803 (802?) and beside the usual informations not much was known about it. So i started digging around the net and i found out some more in dept information and i managed to open and carefully look at the inside of the unit. the actual specifications are as follows: About The Unit The unit itself looks good and it's very light, so light actually that is ballasted on the inside. No i'm not joking, the unit has 2 weights inside with no use beside making it more balanced and heavy looking... As for itself even ballasted it feel lighter than a GBA Sp! The screen is actually good and bright and shows no particular ghosting, the touchscreen is as expected not so good at all. The Audio the unit outputs is surprising loud and good, it's mono, but only because they have soldered in only 1 speaker.. >_> you could solder another one if you would wish to. The unit works as a camera with 1.3mpx and as a videocamera and saves the videos as mp4. The quality of both is not too exciting. Picture taken with fluo light indoor picture taken using one of the creative modes. [video=youtube_share;AelRWo6_6X4]http://youtu.be/AelRWo6_6X4[/video] small video on natural light 640x480px certainly the ability of taking pictures and videos is not the strongest point of the unit, but we can consider it a nice extra, expecially since you can use the unit as a darn cheap webcam (or maybe better say "emergency") for you pc. the funcion pops out when you connect the unit to the pc on the unit screens appears a screen where you can select if play, charge, use as webcam or mount as usb unit. The ability of listening to fm radio is something that i have no clue how to unlock i think i did try it and it worked but it doesn't pops out now The ability to register vocal notes is another little extra. Where the unit actually gets better is as an audio/video player. The unit has a bright screen, is loud and EXTREMELY LOUD in headphones (no cee volume limit i guess ), and plays mostly everything you throw at it with just a few annoyances with some mkvs. The media player features on screen controls that popups when you touch the device and are quite beautifully made albeit a little slow to pop up and allows for ratio corrections, equalization and adding tags and playlists. The device can get out in hdmi 720p althought i haven't tried it so far. I did make some tests with some self made mp4 videos and they look brilliant. Last multimedia feature is the slideshow player, that works properly (no surprise here) The picture gives an idea of the OSD controls, althought they do look different on my unit Kulala 803 as an emulation machine Here goes the bad news. The machine features built in GBA, CPS2, SNES emulation and some flash games. None of the emulated machines runs fullspeed althought the quality vary a bit. The flashgames that are integrated do work decently, as does the GBA and surprisingly the SNES emulator althought the slowdowns are there and unavoidable. Sadly the emulators seems VERY unoptimized and the only options allowed are to turn off sound, anc change display mode from original, stretched and fullscreen. The machine allows you to exit and save state on games. To my very big frustration, this unit seems the only chinese one not featuring a NES emu that would have been certainly fullspeed... Oh well Final thoughts All in all the unit makes up a decent travel media player; its battery ( a 3,7V 1500mAh) lasts confortably over 4 hours on the brightests screen setting (it's locked on the brightest setting lol) and a knowledgeable friend told me that it's a standard cellphone battery so switching it for a bigger one is cheap and easy and would vastly improve its battery life. As a final word it was very funny to take this and tinkering with it. i feel that the unit could really use the hands of a few hackers for it's decently capable, but is so highly unoptimized that hinders and chance of being used as an emulation machine althought i'm sure that nes, sms, GB, GBC, and other 8bit systems (and 16bits ones with some frameskip) could run on it very well. Also it's very cheap and even messing with it for one with the knowledge doesn't put in danger one's economic situation Also its whole OS as the emulators seems unoptimized. Lazy chineses! So this is all i have little to add beside that i hope someone will be able to open the machine and allow for customization of it. oh as a last word i tried to look around with all my mighty google-fu, but no system updates seems to have ever been released. that is all, i'm eager to hear your thoughts or suggestions on the unit's behaviour, hacking or any questions you might have. karsten
thanks to you also for all the people that keep asking, the total disinterest on this topic is why we do not have a "clones and chinese weirdness" forum
Neat review. Too bad the unit is like any other MP4 player on the street in China. You'd think that with all the work that went into Dingoo software, they'd steal the source code and integrate better emulation into newer hardware. <shrugs> I mean, your customers pretty much did all the emulator dev work for you for free, why not?
That actually happened with the NeoGeo X, it's running dingux, even contains a lot of other emulators on the flash. Also all units on this site http://www.willgoo.com/dingoo-handhelds-c-66-page1.html are clones made by Dingoo Technology, Gemei/Dingoo Digital switched to ARM and didn't want to go open source. Also keep an eye out for the GCW Zero, sporting a 1 GHz MIPS CPU and Dingux, made by people out of the community, should be cool. Prototypes are out. :love-struck: http://boards.dingoonity.org/gcw-zero/gcw-zero/ http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gcw/1795282016?token=56ffdb8d http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=OYo0ygKUKTY Also, guess who sold Dingoos in Europe: http://dingoo-scene.blogspot.de/2009/12/blaze-europe-selling-dingoos.html
Hi my friend, i'm italian as you And please i apologize for my not very perfect english. i'm a happy customer of a clone of this. I've bought a CALAI MP5 Player for a bounch of dollars. Very very few dollars. 8 gb real, touchscreen, and many others things. I's arrived at the end of january, after month in custom and various problems from past years. But this... is another story. Lol. Interesting is that it mount same hardware of your (ATJ2279b on mobo zx-8280p-9b2b v2.2). More interesting is that both, my and your, are clone of KO W5000 (a mighty korean console based on action chip). I've studied a bit so after various expedients, i flashed CALAI / KULALA with european firmware of KO W5000 (after some modify with tools), and so my first success it's this (don't worry about chinese, i've fixed in english, italian and so): Not happy of this (angry birds it's only a theme, not complete game) i tried with recent beta FW of his bro KO W6000, allowing many language and calibrating something) and now my console read completely PS1 game (.img), and MAME rom of CPS1/CPS2 and SNK romset. GBA preinstalled i've removed, and obviously i can choose now browsing what i want to play for Super Famicom/SNES and GBA rom. One problem is that now i must use a battery 1700 mah as for hardware ko w6000 specifications. Because big snk games and PS1 iso sucks more energies! 3d gaming is accurate and not so crappy, see intro http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fm3wx9JDHPI (i put link, because i can attache 1 only video) and in gaming If you want, i can explain to you (in italian preferred) my discovered and how to. At this moment i don't reach to play .NES / .GB - .GBC / .SMD rom, but i hope a day :loyal: Enjoy!
very interesting news from you! feel free to contact me on PM and we'll chat about this little weird machine... I'm astonished that it can try to run psx games and yeah nes/GB/GBC and similar would be a more realistic target and would make the machine far more interesting
might have found something that might be of help: this should be the compiler used to make the machine's software? also is this an emulator-related boot? also found in the sfc.drv file (i guess the emulator for snes itself) the row Frameskip : %d Frameskip : AUTO graphic init faile!%s %d would setting a value here actually enforce it in the emulator? Also what does %d stands for?
Necronomicon, can you post more information about your firmware update? Where did you get the files? Do you have instructions? I also have the same machine and want to update it to this latest firmware and play some PSX on it, even if the speed is not very much acceptable
I have received K-803 lookalike console. In India it is called Mitashi Smarty Touch. This seems to have advanced firmware and can play some (not all) PSX games as well. But the FM Radio is not working in it. Any idea, if some one faced a problem like this? Also how to access the internal memory of these consoles? How can we analyse the boot sequence/ info?
I have also seen gaming portables like that one on your local shops. Sometimes even going as low as $30. It has similar performance such as you described even the NES emulator not even running on full speed and certain versions supporting MAME and PS1 ROMS as well. I would be enticed to own one if some people can make custom booting on this system and make some of the emulators run fullspeed, but currently for it's performance it's not enough merit for me for a purchase.
