The
GP32 is a
handheld console created by a
Korean company called
GamePark. It was released in
2001, and is currently distributed in
Korea and
Japan, although there are some
importers, such as
Liksang.com, who will ship the console to other countries. Having been in development for a number of years, and its existence announced in
2000, the final design of the console was unveiled at
KAMEX 2001, a Korean
trade show. The console currently retails at about $160 USD.
The GP32 is an
impressive piece of kit.
Technically superior to the
Game Boy Advance, it has a number of
unique features that make it particularly
special. The first of these is GP32's
media format. While most handhelds use
cartridges, the GP32 uses a more accessable, and openly available format -
SmartMedia (
SMC). This choice of format has quite a few benefits.
SmartMedia cards come in a variety of sizes, and are also compatible with any system that has a
SmartMedia flash card reader. This is where the GP32's next novel feature comes into play. There is
USB connectivity between the console and a PC. This allows you to
download and
upload files to and from the GP32, onto the flash card inserted in the system.
One of the first benefits of these features is the GP32's ability to play
MP3 files using its built in
MP3 player software. It can pump out your tunes either through headphones, or using its twin
stereo speakers, situated on either side of the front of the console. As well as
MP3 capability, you can also
download games and other
software to use on the
console.
The GP32 doesn't need cables to link up consoles either - it uses
RF connection to
wirelessly
network consoles to allow
multiplayer gaming. RF capability comes in the form of an 'RF Module', which has a 10m range, and allows four groups of four people to link up. As well as this, you can also hook up a
mobile phone to the system, to allow the potential for
online gaming, and
Internet access. The GP32 also features one of the best
LCD screens since the
NeoGeo Pocket Color, and also has a stick-like
D-pad, that puts the
GBA's spongy buttons to shame.
All of these awesome features can't compare to one massive benefit of the GP32 platform. GamePark have created the system to allow for easy
development of software. Through their GP32 Development website (http://www.gameparkdev.co.kr/), you can download
SDKs, and development
documentation, and begin to
create your own games and demos! In the short period of time that the GP32 has been available,
talented people have working hard creating their own stuff (mostly
clones of
Tetris and what not), and some have even ported some excellent titles such as
Doom,
Heretic and
Wolfenstein to the console, which really show what this handheld is potentially capable of. There is even a
Spectrum emulator available. Official professional development hardware from GamePark comes in the form of
EPI's
JEENI devkit.
First-party titles released by GamePark are of varying
quality, although they all seem to suffer from
frame-rate problems (which don't seem to occur in software created by
amateurs, strangely enough). Highlights include the
beautiful, but Korean language-laden
RPG,
Astonishia Story R, the interesting but shallow
beat'em-up Little Wizard and the
Worms-like game,
Rally Pop. Mentionable forthcoming titles include
Street Fighter Zero 3 and
Rockman (known as
Street Fighter Alpha 3 and
Megaman in the West) from
Capcom, and
King of Fighters by
SNK/
Azure.
An emulator called
GeePee32 is available. And an interesting fact: The GP32 outsold the
Xbox during March (the Xbox's launch month) in
Japan by about 50,000 units, selling about 240,000 units in total.
Full specs:
Screen: 320x240 3.8"
TFT Reflective
LCD, 64k colours.
Sound hardware: 16bit
PCM, four channel mixing,
MP3 support,
Midi/
Wave stereo (128 melody instruments and 500 percussion instruments, according to
Edge), two
speakers, earphone jack.
Processor:
32bit ARM920T processor (
CPU speed selectable: ~67MHz is standard, up to 130MHz when running from internal cache only seems possible), 16
kbytes Instruction cache, 16kbytes Data cache,
RTOS, 8
Mbyte SDRAM, 512kbytes
Flash ROM.
Interfaces:
SMC,
IIC-bus,
USB.
Dimensions: 157
mm wide, 71mm high, 28mm thick (6.2 x 2.9 x 1.1 inches).
Power: 2
AA batteries should last 12 hours.
Chipset:
Samsung S3c2400x01-eer0 CPU, Samsung LPC3600 LCD
timing controller,
Hynix HY57V641620HG 8mbyte (16bit wide) SDRAM,
Atmel AT49BV040-90VC 512k byte (8bit wide)
BIOS flash, Samsung S524LB0X91 32kbit IIC-bus
EEPROM,
Phillips UDA1330A stereo filter IIS-bus
DAC, 74HC14, LM324, Samsung LTS350Q1
LCD Display.
Sources of information:
GamePark's website: http://www.gamepark.co.kr/ | http://www.gp32.com
Jeff Frohwein's Devrs site: http://www.devrs.com/gp32/
Liksang: http://www.liksang.com
My wonderful friend Steve, who owns one of these cool systems: http://www.softnfuzzy.freeserve.co.uk
Edge Magazine: www.edge-online.com