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GP2X: A Brief Interview for GP2x.letters zine
Thu, 10 Nov 2005

I've done a tonne of interviews over the years - mostly for my Palm OS software of course, but a fair amount for little gaming magazines or the like. Release an emulator or homebrew game and be popular for a day or two. (Fame, riches.. not here!) Sadly, it only occurred to me late to actually keep copies of interviews around so I don't have most of them on file, but one of these days I'll try and dig up the ones I do have and hoist them up. After all, is not a blog for organizing bits of text? :)

Below is the email-interview (can you call it that?) for a little to-be-zine about the very soon to be released GP2x mobile gaming console. I spewed it out quick before heading into the office, so I'm sure its full of typos.. what can you do :)

Who are you?

Damned if I know ;) Some Canuck* who has too much retro-electronics in his basement, from arcade cabinets to mountains of Atari gear. Folks might recognize my main website/blog that houses most of my shareware and freeware projects (GP32 and soon GP2x of course, Palm OS, Pocket PC, Sony PSP, Windows, Mac OSX, Linux and the BSDs) - http://www.codejedi.com

* Canuck: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canuck - it doesn't mean "jackass" as some would suggest ;)

How long have you been doing this? (developing)

Too long, or not long enough, depending on how much support mail I've answered that day ;) I'm 33 (sigh) these days, and have been coding since I was a wee tot on the Commodore Vic-20 and theres-abouts; I sold my first shareware around 1988 or so for the Atari ST, and have been professionally coding for various platforms since the early 1990s (and oddly enough, still coding on the Atari ST once in awhile.)

What is your favourite game of all time?

Ouch, thats a tough one of course, so I'll give a few; for retro I'd have to say Dungeon Master (Atari ST) amd Wizardry 7 (DOS) off the top of my head (unforgettible to me), though how do you factor in Civilization since it was around back in the day and still today? (Civ I through Civ IV rule my world, alongside Alpha Centauri.) More modern I'd say Wizardry 8 (PC) and Halflife 2 come to mind as true favourites. Theres a lot in-between of course.

What are you working on for the GP2X?

Another long list; Atari ST is of course my pet project, so there will be CaSTaway/gp2x right up front, trhough I expect to also bundle in STonX and Hatari under the same hood.. and perhaps my own Atari ST emulator. (Its a non-graphical TOS-only emu thats for running ST text applications like BBSes ;) I'm also working on a Retrocade port - MAME wasn't the first nor fastest arcade emu around so on small devices Retrocade coudl fill a nice tasty niche. I may brig along my XCade for old times sake, but with MAME and Retrocade around its not as necessary. I've done a preliminary port of Descent as well, so when I get a device we'll see how that goes. For new projects, I built a new tile-brick puzzler engine (Manticore*) for gp2x that I've just released on other platforms (Pocket PC, Palm OS, Windows, Linux) for testing sake (while waiting for the gp2x, might as well release it ;) I've got a musician and artist on board so hopefully Manticore will start to look and sound sharper ;) Lets see.. what else - if no one tackles other Atari 8 bit machines (Atari 800, 2600 etc) then maybe I'll just turn CaSTaway into a big fat Atari-Everything emulator, who knows? So off the top of my head, its CaSTaway, Manticore, Retrocade and Descent on my plate right now.

* Manticore is http://www.codejedi.com/manticore

What do you want to see most on the GP2X?

Well, Quake 3 is too much to ask, so I'm looking for a good pollished long lived emulation and retro and homebrew platform; the Sony PSP is a pretty sweet machine, but with Sony out to kill homebrew at every stop its just not a viable platform despite its mass appeal. (Mass appeal you say? Yes - we want the masses to rememebr they too can _create_!) Remember when we were all kids and BASIC and Logo were around for homebrewing? Thats what I want to see.. simple but reasonably powerful platforms for peopel to screw with and create things. The XGameStation and other projects are doing very cool things, and I love to see people homebrewing on retro machines (see Atari Age for actually buying new Atari 2600 games!), but I expect the gp2x to fill the homebrew niche for many of us. Mobiles are inherently cool, and with Unix/Linux being built by developers its always been very dev friendly - so the gp2x will get some wider audience due to the Linux influence, and its coded with SDL (cross platform and easy to use) so we've really got a shot.

Hell, I've always been big on community involvement - the GP32 community built up quite an amazing Atari ST games database for CaSTaway.. a project which has proven useful to other ST emulators as well. Although my Zot scripting system failed to appeal, the whole modding scene could grow more and more on the gp2x.. Fenix shoudl come along, and I expect the OrR's of the world will keep making new levels for everything, and peopel will forever make new characters for SmashGP variants.. and don't lets get into BoR Mods. With the gp2x I expect we'll see some Quake mods or engine derivations, so coudl be good times.

Aside from loftier goals, I of course just want a good Atari ST platform ;) Sure, a good fast SNES emulator would be nice since I missed a lot of the SNES and Genesis years. We already know Reesy will bring DrMD along for Genesis. So I'm pretty well covered. (OKay, bring it on - ST, Amiga, SNES, Genesis, Commies (C64, Vic20, etc), Atari 8bitters, Neo Geo, TG16, PC XT, etc etc.. we want it all in our hand.)

So as always, my interests are mostly in development; to me, the fun is in building the game, not playing. Yes, I know, I need to slow down and play sometime ;)

No Linux or no coffee?

I don't care for coffee; food should be hot, and drinks should be cold. Its all cola for me, baby.

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