In case you missed it, check here for a run down of what this machine is all about. The shorthand version is that DDU from the Dingoonity forums stumbled accross a Chinese firm working on their own Ingenic handheld, and now they are working together, with input from the Dingoonity community to create a machine …
The new Dingoo Technology handheld, the A380 appears to have shown up at the Chinese webshop www.etronixmart.com for the price of $109.99. The machine is said to run the dual core Ingenic JZ4755 CPU running at 500MHz. This should mean that we have some level of compatibility with the A320 including the use of Dingux, …
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:
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.
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.
Over on the Dingoonity forums markzhu520 (from dingoo.hk) has announced that yet another device is due to be released in time for Christmas. His posts are either deliberately vague or perhaps it’s a less than perfect grasp of the English language, either way details are not forthcoming. No pics, no renders, no specs, nada. So …
Well this is an unlikely and rather surprising turn up for the books. Japanese firm Panasonic (or their newly founded offshoot company ‘Panasonic Cloud Entertainment’) are reportedly working on a new handheld device with the sole purpose of playing MMO games on the go. The machine is said to run on Linux, have a super high resolution screen and a full keyboard as well as gaming controls of some sort.
What happens if you rip a DS Lite in half? Well aside from breaking it, you end up with something resembling the Letcool N350JP. And what a handsome devil it is too.
In the baffling world of Chinese firm Dingoo Digital (or is that Dingoo Technologies? Does anyone care anymore?) nothing is black and white. It seems that both mobs are quite happy firing accusations at one another for breach of copyright and theft of source code at the moment (If you want to trawl the long and confusing drama that is “Who is the real Dingoo team?” then you could start here but I wouldn’t advise it).
What is certain (or as close as you’re going to get) is that the company behind the manufacture of the Dingoo A320 was Gemei, a reputable Chinese electronics company.
18 or so months after the Dingoo A320 landed, and after a lot of leaked photographs, wild speculation, a fake successor and a whole load of hullabaloo over at the dingoonity forums, it finally seems that the real successor is about to land – and this time it comes with some official pics.
Over at the dingoonity forums, one of the staff members from Chinavasion posted to say that they would be taking stock of the new machine “soon”.
Pandora is marketed as the most powerful gaming handheld on the market to date. Although it has full gaming controls, it also boasts a keyboard and runs a full Linux desktop environment meaning it can also be used as a very tiny PC of sorts. Check the specifications out below:
ARM® Cortex™-A8 600Mhz+ CPU running Linux
430-MHz TMS320C64x+™ DSP Core
PowerVR SGX OpenGL 2.0 ES compliant 3D hardware
800×480 4.3″ 16.7 million colours touchscreen LCD
Wifi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth & High Speed USB 2.0 Host
Dual SDHC card slots & SVideo TV output
Dual Analogue and Digital gaming controls
43 button QWERTY and numeric keypad
Around 10+ Hours battery life
The machine was designed by the community at the GP32X forums, and steered in a workable direction by the OpenPandora team. The final result was this; a fully functioning computer that can do everything a computer can do, with full gaming controls and the ability to play graphically impressive games, both natively and emulated. The software is completely Open Source, meaning anyone can take any piece of its huge library of software and modify or improve it as they feel fit. This includes the Operating System!
No, the cup isn’t big – the machine is small 🙂
I am the proud owner of one of these, and I’d like to share with you some of the things I have discovered in the short time I’ve owned it.
