I feel like the Linux Handhelds made by GPH in the 2000s are a nowadays almost forgotten piece of history, even though they were in some ways the predecessor to today’s Steam Deck. So I wanted to create a bit of an appreciation post for this chapter in Linux Gaming history. Did any of you use a GP2X back in the day as well? For me, it wasn’t just my introduction to Linux gaming, but also game development, as I programmed my first games for it using GLBasic. It was a fantastic machine for emulation as well, got introduced to many old games from the 80s and 90s through it.
Yeah I think I have one of those still around somewhere. I remember when they released it they didn’t release any sources at all, even though it was full of software that required sharing in their license. So the community got together and helped them publish it all. Some of the drivers were still binary blobs, but that was the maker of the chips fault and not GameParks fault.
Once I got one I created a small little side scrolling game engine and a couple of games for it, a couple of other people used my engine to make some games for it as well. To imagine that’s 20 years ago. We had a small little forum of enthusiasts setup and shared code in attachments. It’s all lost to time now, but those were the days.
One trip to my trusty room of boxes full of old shit and I found it!
Along with its official carrier case and TV out cable in original packaging. The screen protector has seen better days tho.
And it still works just fine:
Nice! Never had the F100. Always wondered how that “Analog stick” (that I think was really just a DPad?) controlled.
Yeah the “Analog stick” is just a DPad, it doesn’t have pots or anything like that, just binary buttons. And I have to say, it’s terrible. It feels bad, it pushes your thumb upwards with a really awkward angle. For some reason it’s really hard shiny plastic and the edge stands up so it digs into your flesh. It’s concave instead of convex like modern sticks are (and even sticks back then were really). Doing fast inputs is impossible since you need to move it quite far before it responds and diagonals don’t work very well at all.
So it sucks, but it just adds to the charm as far as I’m concerned.
I had the same, but modded it to the Nokia Engage d-pad, because it was indeed terrible.
The reason they went with this design was that the GP32 had a similar stick and it was great. No idea what went wrong with the one in the GP2X though.