Continuing with my GP2X posts, I finally got MAME working on it. There actually wasn’t anything to it, you just have to use version 0.34 MAME ROMS. There is a tool called clrmame that is supposed to help you convert your ROMs down to 0.34 but I couldn’t get it to work. I ended up having to download the 0.34 ROMs via bittorrent.

So how does it play? It’s great! All the classics (Pacman, Time Pilot, Arkanoid, Frogger, Galaga, Joust, etc.) play flawlessly. It can also play Neo Geo games, but I haven’t tried those yet since I still have only a 128MB SD Card (1GB on the way).

The coolest thing (to me anyway) is that you can press both shoulder buttons and it will rotate the screen so that vertical games like Pacman will take up the whole screen and you play the game by holding the GP2X sideways. So cool. I’ve been playing a lot of Time Pilot this way.

Here’s a great video that shows the GP2X playing MAME (and shows it switching the orientation too) it also shows it playing some movies and even outputting the movie and games to a big-screen tv:

tags: geek, gaming, games, gp2x, mame, portable, pacman, arcade

Here is my current list of the best games I have found so far that run natively on the GP2X (in alphabetical order):

• Beat2X – DDR for your GP2X
• Formido – kill the cockroaches!
• Kobo Deluxe – A nicely done Bosconian remake
• Super Methane Brothers – a really well-done game similar to Snow Bros
• New Super Pang – a remake of Buster Bros
• Noiz – a trippy shooter
• Spout – a really cool (and hard) game – hard to describe
• Tailtale – match tiles – anime influence
• Tilematch – match tiles to clear the board
• Vektar – a cool space shoot-em-up

All games can be found in the Freeware Games Archive.

Beats of Rage is supposed to be good too, but the .PAK file you have to use is 60MB and I don’t have the space for it on my 128MB SD card. I’ll try it once I get my 1GB/2GB card.

tags: gp2x homebrew linux game games gaming videogames

Now I have installed the excellent Sega Genesis emulator DrMDx. Super easy to use and loads ROMs from within zips too. I now have Sonic Spinball, Vectorman, NBA Jam TE, NBA Live 95, NHL 94, and a few more Genesis games on my GP2X. All games play at 100% speed. Too cool.

I also tried the NES emulator fishyNES. It doesn’t play all games at 100% speed, but it has an easy way to drop frames to make it playable. I tried Punchout, SMB2, and Legend of Kage. All are playable but I never really like the NES games in general.

Here are some pictures

gp2x, gaming, retro, nes, sega, genesis, megadrive, games, console, portable, emulate, emulator, emulators

My birthday was Sunday and I splurged and got myself a GP2X. What is it? It’s a portable game system (like a PSP or Nintendo DS) that is linux-based, fully supports homebrew games/applications, plays divx movies, MP3s, Oggs, etc. etc.

I’ve only had it for 3 days now, but I am SOOOOO impressed and happy with it. For the record, I’ve never owned a portable game system aside from those Mattel hand-held football/basketball/baseball games, so I can’t really compare it to any past systems.
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