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Which should I choose - I'm thinking of buying of these babis for developement + gaming. The GBA Famicon has the largest set of available games, whilst the GBA is cheaper than the Famicon ed. GP32 is new and fresh alas no games but better hardware specs :)

I have both, the GBA and the GP32. The GBA dose have a fuckin' large game library, but you need a flash linker and all that stuff to develop on it.

The GP32 is a handheld for the so-called 'freaks' only, I bet no one of the mainstream videogame kids like it too much. With the GP32 you have free development kits, a PC linker, bigger screen, better specs, and for the games: Yes, there are a few out there, but also remember the SNES / NES / C64 / GB(C) / GBA / Spectrum / Atari 2600 / ScummVM / ... emulators and their games. If you see it that way, you have thousand of new games, plus the homebrewn games.

Browse a bit here... http://www.gp32x.com/gp32download.php ...if you're unsure what stuff there's out for the GP32.

pikachu mini!

Havent tryed any but the GBA, but it's sure a fin little machine for lowlevel development fun

The GBA and GP32 don't have that much in common. The GBA is purely a gaming device (for which you don't need a flashlinker to develop for btw, you can use an emulator of course) whereas the GP32 feels more like a PDA (it's a multimedia handheld).
You should buy the one that suits you best, remember that the GBA has only very little working ram, so it requires quite a bit of hacking to make demos for. The GP32 on the other hand has too much ram and mhz in my opinion :)

In case you choose GBA / GBA Famicon: stay away from the #gbadev channel. Most people there are little kids who don't know how to program but think they're ready to make games (ask Inopia hehe). They may call theirselves the gba-scene, but their average level is far below what the demoscene does on the gameboy advance (matt current, unique, moonhazards, and may I say Bahnhof?)

I think you can roughly compare the GBA with an Amiga and the GP32 with a pentium.

Eh.. Ahehehaha.. :)

<ironic> Alright. Hehe. </ironic>

well ROUGHLY you can compare a hamster to a landmine, since you can step on both :D

A GBA is more like a SNES on crack.

Why the hazing, the GP32/Pentium comparison is not far off... and the Amiga/GBA is not that bad either, even though a GBA is at least twice as fast as a Amiga 500, probably more like 4 times - but it might compare to a faster amiga.

And yeah, #gbadev is full of wannabe game programmers. There is no real gba-demoscene which is a pity, but regardless it's a fun platform to code on.

GP32 is more painful since there is no good emulators (allthough Firefly has done an awesome job getting his emu as far as it has) and it's hard to debug - but there's certanly a lot of potential there.

Errr... the SNES emulator on GP32 runs even better than the one for Dreamcast (and it got much more power), almost every game runs with 90 - 100% speed? Also the C64, NES, Master System and many more emulators and ScummVM runs very good, I wonder why you say there aren't good emulators out there?

Ah, and by the way, this one is interesting and objective:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GP32

And here also the comparison of the FLU and BLU unit of the GP32...

GBA and GP32 is much the same, the GBA is more hardcore because it's rather slow. It has a 16.8mhz ARM7TDMI, wich doesn't have cache or writeback, and there's only 402k memory (not counting the 1k I/O area) wich is divided into several areas with different timing characteristics. Only 32k of that memory is connected via an actual fullspeed 32bit databus. On the good side, the GBA has a cool graphics chip with all kinds of neat tricks. However, you get bored with it after a while.

The gp32 is much, much more powerful, the cpu core is an ARM920T, and goes up to 133mhz (some machines seem to go higher, up to 166). There's data and code cache, and a writeback buffer, wich is great to optimize for. There's no gpu, but there's a 320x240 lfb (8 or 16bit).

The GBA has GBA games, the GP32 has emulators. The nes, gb(c), sms, c64 (frodo) and atari emulators are all perfect, the snes emu is kinda slow atm, and the megadrive emu is nearing perfection. GBA emulation is nonexistent. A major plus for the gp32 is that it uses smart media cards wich go up to 128mb. You can play xvid/divx movies, play mp3/ogg/wma/mod/xm/sid etc files, look at pictures of naked women etc. If you take the usb cable with you on the road you can even use it as a USB stick.

The development scene on GP32 is really cool. There's some really talented people and the atmosphere on #gp32dev (efnet) is nice. I like it better than the GBA scene, but then again there are more democoders on GBA. GP32 demoscene is virtually nonexistent :)

You can always hold out for nintendo DS, PSP or get a zodiac. Personally I'd wait for the DS to come out this fall. Pretty soon we'll have backup stuff for that :)

if you also need your new "baby" for developing and games... go for a gp32. it has a cheap storage media, there is a free development kit and a couple of other third party devkits like "Mirko's SDK". I have a GP32 since 2 years and I am very happy with it :-) In fact I use it 1000x more than a GBA. GBA for gaming is crap anyway... who want's to pay 40 euro for a crappy game?

kojote: there's always the option to stay away from crappy games and only buy good ones.

I must advertise here a little ;v) Our Chrysler demo (originally for AGA Amigas) was ported to GP32 today.
http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=12391

Concerning gaming, GP32 seems to only have a handful of good native games, but then there are loads of games available through emulation. On the other hand GBA has lots of commercial games widely available, most of them poor but with quite a few gems still. Alas the emulation on GBA is limited at the moment, even if the latest Pogoshell include basic NES and classic GB emulators.

Regarding development, GBA audience is much bigger than GP32, first because there has been a lot more GBA sold, and also because there are very accurate GBA emulators on PC.

I have had a lot of fun coding GBA. I have never tried GP32, but GP32 seems like it's a little more "boring", even though you will deffinetly be able to use it for more. GBAX.com has a 64 mbit linker for around £20, and a 128 mbit linker for £30 (around £13 of postage to Denmark, that is). That's not too shabby for a good start.

If you plan on coming to Scene Event, I'll gladly show you some GBA stuff/help you setting up a good enviroment/etc....

Excause my smile, but why do you claim that the GP32 is borning if you only tried out the GBA yet?

I mean... isn't the scene something like reach new goals, board new systems and even support hardware which no one was interested before?

"Isn't the sceen about.."

I'm getting tired of that.

'Scene' that is..

It would be more hardcore fun to code for GBA (because of less speed), but I might buy a GP32 for developing because I get what I need for developing in one package. Nintendo is stubborn and I have to pay some more to the pirates for a cartidge.

I just hope someone starts creating more prods for the GP32, so I'll have another good reason to buy it :) There are only six prods on the GP32 here on pouet, should be more.
Also, GamePark is a poor company so I kinda feel sorry for them and have to buy a GP32 :)

I just hope someone starts creating more prods for the GP32, so I'll have another good reason to buy it :) There are only six prods on the GP32 here on pouet, should be more.
Also, GamePark is a poor company so I kinda feel sorry for them and have to buy a GP32 :)

hey, are there any trackers/music programs for the gp32? then it would become very interesting for me :)

Yes there are quite a few, but unfortuntely I don't have an overview of them.

Here you can find at least a few media player: http://207.44.176.77/~admin28/gp32emu/applications.htm and http://www.gp32x.com/gp32download.php?do_what=selectfolder&id=28

Especially interestin is CHN's SID player: http://chn.roarvgm.com/#gp32