Console Review: GP2X - Page 4

The entire OS is skinnable, with many skins available. It is also quite easy to craft your own, if you are into that sort of thing.

The "main menu" of the GP2X is broken down into eight sections: Video, Game, Music, Photo, E-Book, Explorer, Utility, and Settings. The Game and Utility entries are how you access games and applications, respectively, on the handheld. Explorer is a well-built file explorer with move, copy, and delete functions.

In Settings, you will find a Test Mode, battery gauge, and info screen. This is also where you go to change LCD settings, and connect the GP2X to USB or your TV.

The E-Book reader is rudimentary and about the weakest piece to the otherwise great user interface. Text files are shown with white text on a black background. The text wraps, sort of, when too wide for the screen.

With version 1.4 firmware, you can change the speed of the CPU for watching video files. The GP2X supports DivX 3.x, 4.x, 5.x, XviD, OGM as AVI files. A max resolution of 720x480 and frame rate of 30 fps is supported. It also supports high bit rates, 2500Kbps for video, and 384Kbps for audio. This video player also supports .srt subtitle files, and displays them very well. More formats and codecs may be supported in the near future.

The music player also has a lot of features. It supports, OGG, and MP3 at 20Hz to 20KHz. It supports 16 bit audio at 8 to 48KHz. One of the nice things about OGG files is that it sounds better at lower bit rates than MP3. Though OGG is not that widely used, it is nice to see the support. The music player has 11 EQ presets from Dance, Pop, Rock, Metal, and more.

The photo viewer, just like the music player, has a nice interface overplay with a lot of options. You can zoom in to 400% and out to 13%, rotate, and fit to frame. Using the L and R buttons, you can skip through images in a folder. Image formats supported are JPG, BMP, PCX, GIF, and PNG. The GP2X handled well when processing large JPG files.

All the above is great, but the games is where this thing shines. There are emulators for just about every retro game system out there including Amiga, MS-DOS, MAME, NES, SNES, Genesis, NeoGeo CD, and many more. Now all you need to do is hunt down the ROM files, and you are set.

Article Author: Ken Edwards

Ken Edwards is the Gaming Editor at Blogcritics, and calls Breaking Windows home. Ken works part time for Student Publications at BGSU as the Webmaster and System Administrator. He is also a freelance web developer.

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