GP32 Development Page
The GP32 is a great little handheld console, which offered far more interest for me than a Gameboy Advance. Capable of playing MP3s (which as it turned out was rather badly) and running various emulators that simulated machines including the C64, Spectrum, Atari 2600, PCEngine and MSX, it even had a ScummVM port for games such as The Secret of Monkey Island. To top it off, development looked pretty easy due to the lack of custom chips and a freely downloadable SDK.
Of course there is always a snag, and this turned out to be the difficulty debugging on the thing, bugs in the official SDK, poor developers documentation and a relatively small community. However things in the last few months of 2003 began to look up, with new faces on the scene adding to the work of some great coders like Mr Spiv and DarkFader already active.
And my own development, postponed for 6 months after breaking my laptop on which I did my GP32 work, was kicked back into action thanks to a new lappy, support from a few nice people, and the need to get a decent MP3 player working so I could listen to talking books at night.
Yes But What Exactly Really is a GP32?
Created by Korean company GamePark, the GP32 is a handheld console using an ARM920T 32bit RISC chip, clock speed selectable through software from between 33Mhz to 133Mhz, with some units capable of 156Mhz and beyond, but may damage hardware. Graphics come courtesy of a 320x240 TFT screen 3.8" wide, supporting 64k colours, sounds via a 16bit PCM, four channel stereo soundchip, and all of this supported by 8MB of SDRAM.
It uses SMC cards up to 128MB, although bigger when they turn up in any great numbers may also be possible, has an interface which support a wireless link addon, and via a bit of hacking the odd mobile phone keyboard, plus a USB interface for transfering data to and from the unit.
Originally shipped without a backlight, GamePark eventually modified the unit and provided one with a switch at the back to give you the choice of using it or not. If you look closely at the hole made in the back of the case, it is a tad DIY imho but the end result is still very good none-the-less.
What you get with this thing is an MP3 player, and the software for transferring data back and forth, and that is about it. The rest you need to find on your own, a few links are provided at the bottom of this page to help you.
My Projects
- GpMad MP3 page for WIP and downloads
- Gp32 Space Invaders page for downloads
External GP32 Links
Alas many of these links are now broken :( If you know of where these pages may have been moved to, or archived, I'm very happy for you.
Useful Files and Documents
- Mr Spiv's custom multi-firmware and code examples
- FireFly's robust and stable replacement GP32 USB driver
- Mithris' GDB stub for debugging on the GP32
- Rattboi's GDB debugging kit for Win32
- Ishani's GP32 Generator for ADS and his USB library
- Mirko's SDK replacement
News and Community Sites
Fun Stuff