JXD M1000 In Action

This vid just cropped up on youtube a couple of days ago and it shows the M1000’s menu UI and a couple of games running. It’s not a particularly insightful demo, but it does show how KOF 98 and Metal Slug X run, and demonstrates the painfully long loading times of some games too. The …

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Booboo Update on Dingux for Gemei A330

I have to admit my heart skipped a beat when I saw the new post on www.dingux.com, but alas my joy was short lived. It seems that despite the initial enthusiasm from ChinaChip, their priorities now lie elsewhere (probably working on the next piece of buggy firmware for another PMP / Tablet or whatever). Whilst …

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The 2011 Mega Drive Portable From Blaze.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past god knows how many years you’ll already know that Sega sold the rights to a lot of its hardware to other manufacturers when it gave up on the games console market. This means that 3rd party companies are now able to manufacture the Mega Drive (Genesis for you yanks) with the original Sega specification (i.e. not an emulation machine and not a reverse engineering attempt either).

Well one company named Blaze (www.blazeeurope.com) have been churning out handheld Mega Drives for a few years now and whilst I’ve always been tempted, the major drawback for me was that you are limited to the games that Blaze decide to preload onto the machine. In other words, you made do with the selection of games it came with and that’s it. Bummer.

Thankfully though, they’ve come to their senses and released a new model for 2011 with full SD card support for your own ROMs.

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Letcool N350JP Gets a Firmware Hack

Russian coder lsd_blottr has made a couple of alterations to the stock firmware of the Letcool N350JP and consequently the device now has correct button mappings in the GBA and SNES emulators. Previously the shoulder buttons were mapped to volume control and to use shoulders in game you had to use face buttons instead. Also in the changelog is that the device now automatically returns to LCD mode once the TV cable is unplugged.

The frontend has also been skinned with new artwork, which personally I think looks rather nice. Here’s the boot screen and the main menu:

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The Gamebox and its Chinese Namesake.

Over on the Open Pandora forums is some talk revolving around a new games console made by a little known company called ‘Envizions’. Whilst they have apparently had a foray into the Open Source console gaming scene a few years ago, I have to admit I’d never heard of them until today. It appears that they are an American firm who’s aim is a release an Android based gaming system that plugs into your television (ie not a handheld). The founder and CEO of the company, Derrick Samuels, asks us for monetary support in the following video. Now, I don’t know about you but if I was CEO of the company I’d certainly try a little harder to stop calling it a Gaybox. Lol.

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Inside the JXD3000, And More Vids

Close ups of the JXD3000 internals have surfaced on some Chinese PMP forums. Though they don’t give much away, speculation on iMP3 is that the SoC is from Guangdong based firm Actions Semiconductors. Actions SoCs were common in budget Chinese MP3 and MP4 players around 3 or 4 years ago, and can still be found in some  players sold today under various brand names.

If rumours are to be believed then this particular chipset can already be found in one other Chinese PMP sporting a rather slick flash UI, the KO TV500. The JXD3000 is currently only available on TaoBao.com, which is a Chinese wholesale and private seller site. It is possible to order from there via a 3rd party such as Zarmark, but it can work out fairly expensive. Give it a few weeks and DX will probably have them anyway.

While we’re here, a few more JXD3000 Playstation vids have shown up on youtube… embedded below for your viewing pleasure.

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