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Quickie: Gamepark Holdings new machine, The GP2x Wiz
Thu, 08 Jan 2009

I've been meaning to do a writeup about the development versions of the Wiz that I've been fiddling with, but alas time has been short (darn those Christmas revelries!) .. but I must say something.

This is not a review, just a quickie.

Suffice to say that the Wiz is the evolution of the mighty GP2x device, hence their keeping of the GP2x monicker in the new device's name. It is not directly compatible with software for the regular GP2x, but thats okay. It is however an improvement on pretty much every aspect of the existing devices. Porting applications targetting the GP2x to the Wiz is pretty easy overall (with the only difficulty being that which we devs added ourselves by going right to the hardware of the previous devices.)

While the GP2x proper is a good size, the Wiz is smaller (which may be a risk to some people) and lighter, and fits well in the hand. Very pocketable and fairly durable, like a GBA Micro (just with no protection for the screen or case shine so keep your keys away.) I've got RSI or something the doctors cannot easily identify in my wrists so weight is something I'm very much aware of nowadays and this is a good fealing unit. The screen is bright and intense (OLED which some worry will dull after a few years, but I doubt by much) and the touchscreen is vastly superior in accuracy to the current F200 model. The CPU is a great deal faster than the current units. The button layout seems good (the original dev unit had a goofy button layout, but they've remedied it as they near actual release day.) It uses an internal battery and charge cable like most gadgets nowadays, not the AA battery approach previous machines used. I don't have final firmware candidates so can't speak for the interface or menus, but they're of little consequence anyway.. you spend most of your time in applications or games, and can replace a lot of the OS anyway with third party Linux distributions (such as Open2x, kudos guys!) Porting is as easy as ever, and the GPH fellows are making an effort to help the developers more than ever.

If you want a open source homebrew friendly platform, then the Wiz is really going to be a great machine when it arrives pretty soon. It ought to be a decent media player as well.

Disclosure: I've been handed both an early and a late model dev unit for the Wiz, but I do try to be fair in my benchmarks and comments. I can back this up. I am spending most of my time right now on Pandora development, but I expect to dive into some Wiz work soon, and I think the machine is targetted to go on sale end of Feb or begin of March.

Aside: _The Wire_ is some of the very best television I've ever seen. I've only just found out about it, as its wrapped up. Just as well because it seems like its 5 seasons are so utterly good as to be life destroying. Don't sit down to catch episode 1 when youi're about to go on a trip or have exams coming or crunch time at work .. you'll be fired. The Wire is _that good_. Buy it on DVD now, and watch out for Omar.

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Gaming: Potion count versus server moves? Can we take the Eye of the Beholder around the water cooler?
Thu, 08 Jan 2009

Doing software development for a living means a lot of planning -- design work for the software, project planning to ensure dependancies come together, module and system integration strategies, testing and variance management, economics to plan the cost of various options and so on. During a recent session we sat around a table with a plethora of budget sheets arrayed before us .. this or that option, bundles of options by timeline, what we really want to push or not, and it occurred to me that all printed sheets with numbers scratched and appended and erased and lines all over linking things together .. just looked like Dungeons and Dragons character sheets, or "SSD" ship description and damage sheets for Starfleet Battles Tabletop games.

It wandered into my head that perhaps all those thousands of hours spent as a kid planning a D&D campaign or designing scenarios for massive fleet to fleet balanced wars might have been useful. You know, balancing an encounter between two 15+ ship fleets including frigates and battlecruisers, drone launchers and fighters, stealthed or agile ships versus dreadnoughts and allowing for effects of a Nebula or asteroid field .. thats nothing to shake a bag of Doritos at. How different is planning to take along so many pack horses laden with healing potions and speed boosters and spell components so you can handle the boss in the third plane, to figuring our the risk in relocating an old server or planning license counts for CPUs for a database?

Sure on the one hand, you could argue all that practice was useful, or on the other you could argue that the types of people who play those sorts of highly technical tabletop games are predisposed to that sort of work. Whatever.

Modern gaming has long left tabletops in the dust (there are some grand stalwart titles, and even a rising popularity in family games like Monopoly and Scrabble), but perhaps they all serve as more than just an idle amusement or passtime challenge.. perhaps all these online spreadsheet games (EVE Online) and time grinders (World of Warcraft) are good training for the toils of living, and possibly even help people in their time management, helping train (or damage) sharp minds.

Yeah yeah, get back to work! God, I'm such a nerd.

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