GameGadget handheld

[Ian Price]

If it really is just a Dingoo, they cat's now out of the bag and the GG will die - hardware sales alone won't support it at that price, surely? Why would anyone pay for a software title now from their app store when they can get it and emulators for free via other means?

As for the "Made In The UK" bit - dunno. I never believe that crap anyway. What does it ever mean?

[Gary]

well as I said it runs opendingux, plays dingoo games, so where it leaves Blaze I don't know.

If they really were stupid enough to copy the Dingoo I cant see how they would have got away with it but I have now gone from being disappointed with the console to being reasonably happy. Its a shame they have revoked the developers discount code as for 1 hour you could buy the console after discount for £26!!! But not sure if they have honoured those orders if any were placed.

Oh and im still waiting for the refund for the difference in price

[erico]

I´m not sure they will die.
Only people hardcore into open systems ever know what a dingo is, the majority has no idea.
On the other hand, people who tend to look for such devices usually knows a few.

So I believe it will depend on their marketing.

Should they start selling such for the likes of 50 dollars or less, and have a true app store going, it would be very close to what the Nd proposal is and then I believe it can pick up for good.

I actually see the fact that it is a dingoo as a good thing as that platform has a lot of stuff for it.

Another question, is GLB capable of compiling to a dingo? Would a caanoo/gp2x/wiz compiled program work?

[Gary]

Blaze could save the day by managing to get the device into high street stores where parents of the kids that buy the games for the 3ds, xbox etc will see it on the shelf and think I used to play that and buy one.

The problem is though I cannot see how any of the Grade A retro games can appear on it. Nintendo want everything decent from the back catalogue for the Wii and 3ds, so no GB, Nes or Snes top titles, Sega will want too much for Sonic titles, Rare wont allow any of Ultimates Spectrum games on there. And arcade emulation is a minefield. You will be left with a few MSX, spectrum, amstrad and c64 games but even then there is the issue of kernal roms for the emulators.

So it will be play a few poor titles or look to see how you can get more on there and its nothing more than copying a few files to an SD card, hold down A at boot up and job done

[Kitty Hello]

The Caanoo port *might* run. At least the compiler should do.

[erico]

Their forum pages has been behaving extremely weird and un navegable for the past 3 days.
Is anyone getting this too or is it just me?

EDIT: It works now, it was an ISP issue on my corner.

[Ian Price]

The horror stories about the GG are building -

From Jamma+ forum

theyve pretty much closed their facebook page, their forums are run in a 'nazi' style with one customer being told when asked about what games to expect 'youre barking up the wrong tree - i wont warn you again, if you want to continue to complain please close the door on your way out'.

http://lionguardsolutions.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/buyer-beware-gamegadget.html

[erico]

Yep, I read on their forum.

I have some mixed feelings for the case.
For once, GG is an attempt for a homebrew kind of console, even if it is quite similar to a dingoo.
It is really a tough thing to pull out, we saw on the pandora project some of the perils.
As for the ´store´ it gets even harder, attempting to find who owns the rights for old games can be quite hard.
The legallity for a world wide store is gray, some countries require special permissions to do so.
Also licenses may not permit things to be sold to a few countries.
So it is a lot of work and patience is a must.

The argumentation I get back from people is that it was advertised as an i-pod of retro games, and this people don´t have any patience at all when it comes to content.

Facebook and forum started becoming a mess of trolling so I guess they decided to focus on the forum only, as trolling on facebook can be quite bad.

I think it may be a similar reason pandora has its own boards for quite a while.

I guess the majority of people enjoy throwing gas at fire instead of water.

Now they are complaining about the hard forum rules or that they don´t have freedom of speech there.
...came ooooon, freedom of speech(that is old) is a tale and it dosen´t quite go like that. Everybody has to behave under a set of rules and rules change according to the places but there will always be rules to follow. Anyone´s freedom can not ovelap another one´s so you get rules and moderators to draw that line.

At the end I really don´t know, I guess it all depends on GG´s work.
They already have achieved something, the console, the marketing, but content is also important and to be close to their costumers is even more.

I know it is easy to hint on a soccer game if you are the one watching, not playing.
I hope they overcome such things and that their store would come to be a niche place for us to sell our prods.

[Ian Price]

To be fair to the consumers who actually purchased the unit, they were unfairly sold...

The device should have been delayed until they could at least have sorted out the free games that cam on the machine, even if the shop wasn't ready. Having to register (after a week or so of hair pulling) was a disaster. Sure a week isn't much in the grand scheme of things, but that first week is always important to new devices. They could and should have waited. Nintendo did this with the Wii, DS and 3DS - they stated that certain things would be available, but not necessarily from launch.

I'm not saying that launching something like this is easy or cheap, but they dropped the ball before day 1 and the poor consumer has been left holding the shattered remnants. Blaze should take the fall and state openly that they fecked up. Accept the criticism and apologize and offer users a reward for their loyalty and patience.

At the end of the day, the machine and it's shop did have potential - perhaps that now it's seen as an open console (seeing as they didn't fix the holes early enough), their fate is sealed. They could turn it around, but not with the lack of professionalism they've shown so far.

There is plenty of freedom of speech - not necessarily on the GG forums, but the internet cannot be silenced. If GG/Blaze had put their hands up, then much of the heat would have dissipated. I'm no longer sure that's possible. The machine may still sell well as an open-source console, but the likelihood of an app store to beat the likes of Apple's is but a pipe dream. It can't possibly happen now with this device.

Negative publicity of the sort shown above is not good publicity. Whoever said there's no such thin as bad publicity wasn't looking at it through the eyes of potential purchasers of a product!

[MrTAToad]

It does sound as they are trying to come down hard on any criticism (valid or not), which is not going to help them...

[erico]

Yep, I agree they erred a lot.
And also that their way of working with costumers is currently bad.
I mean, the forum was created and left for flies till a couple days ago, heck, they should have taken their forum as a direct contact/transparent vehicle with costumers from the very very first day, if not even before.

It is really a messy situation going on.

They won´t be able to silence the internet I agree, but maybe it is an attempt to keep those with a head up around instead of those unsatisfied? People can always go for a refund instead of the rock-throwing attitude.

I really don´t know, but it sure makes for an interesting experience/situation for a good discussion.
I´m still not sure about how I feel to it (as if have the right to judge anything in this world ), but I sure don´t like their attitude as much as I don´t like the people´s attitude around. For example one of the raged moderators there placed a sticky topic flaming everything on it and quite pushing people to do the same, come on, just go for a refund, I mean, it is not your company and they are not paying you as an advisor or consultant, if you don´t like it, take it back and learn. I fell this guy´s attitude is as bad as the current level of censor going on.

On another hand, there seems to be another attempt at a retrohandheld going on and it is said the guy behind it is a quite respectable chap. There is a post on our boards here:
http://www.glbasic.com/forum/index.php?topic=8120.0

hehe with an already post of mine which is bit on the wall kind of opinion. You know, all this Nd and GG things really gets me skeptical on the open handheld theme...

You get a longer conversations about it on the panda boards here:
http://boards.openpandora.org/index.php?/topic/8175-gcw-zero-prototype-teaser-video/

[Gary]

Well as you may know I *had* one of these consoles, I say had as I have returned it for a refund as they are just not delivering on their promises.

I sent a lengthy but nicely worded to their MD who, by his own words, always replies to emails, saying what I felt was good, what was bad and how to improve the console and the dev process, I heard nothing.

There was then the blatant lies on the FaceBook page, new update coming tomorrow then a post saying it had been delayed, then a list of new games was coming, that never showed. The new items in the store were all freeware with no emulated games being added except for the ones that Blaze already had licences for for their other consoles. All the freeware seems to be stuff that others had written and got running in the sandbox so they did nothing new themselves.

Mame has been ported but no information about how to use it was given and more importantly any requests for the source code were met with silence so therefore it is not a legal port of MAME.

They send Alan Sugar a tweet asking how they could licence Amstrad and Spectrum ZX (yes thats what they called it) games. A quick search on World of Spectrum would have given them email addresses of hundreds of ex developers and answer their questions.

Then there is the abusive message on the forum from GameGadget to someone asking a fairly civil question and then the drastic removal of posts to try to hide the damage done.

They shut down the facebook page but then seem to have abandoned the forums as well. Xploder seem to be handling everything now.

I would advise anyone thinking of getting one to get a Dingoo instead, they are cheaper and you dont have to boot it in sandbox to be able to do anything.

The product is a great idea but they have seriously messed it up by rushing the console out before it was ready, 2 weeks of not even being able to activate the console was a joke.

The amount of bad press that the GameGadget has got on the various gaming sites has already killed it in my view, they cannot recover from this and should just abandon the project

[Ian Price]

It's a real shame, but they really weren't ready to enter the (already pretty crowded, but still growing) consumer market. They had some good ideas, but just couldn't implement them. I'm pretty sure they won't be missed and that any gap in the market will be filled pretty quickly.

[erico]

Really sad...

Some people stated ´company crew´ giving 5 stars on amazon review to try counter act the already going low grades.
The forums there are now full of useless gaming news posts. Last time checked about 168...

[erico]

Hey it seems they are back cleaning up the mess.

http://forum.gamegadget.net/showthread.php/1584-New-PR-team-taking-over-the-Game-Gadget/page3

How many people around here still have one?