The Game Gadget is an open source gaming handheld that supports music and video playback, open game development, and some

e-reader An e-reader, also called an e-book reader or e-book device, is a mobile electronic device that is designed primarily for the purpose of reading digital e-books and periodicals. Any device that can display text on a screen may act as an e-read ...

features.

History

Development

Initial development of the system occurred in the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

, and open source software was used to lower development costs. Production occurred outside the United Kingdom. The system had an initial release date of March 30, 2012.

Release

It was released on April 5, 2012, The initial launch price of the system was to be £99.99 British pounds, though this price quickly dropped to a cost of £59.99

British pounds Sterling (abbreviation: stg; Other spelling styles, such as STG and Stg, are also seen. ISO code: GBP) is the currency of the United Kingdom and nine of its associated territories. The pound ( sign: £) is the main unit of sterling, and t ...

with those who paid the earlier price receiving a refund for £40. On launch the system's online activation system was incomplete, leading to issues. Following release, the system was transferred from Blaze to

Xploder Xploder is a brand of game cheats and multimedia devices for games consoles, similar to Action Replay. Xploder products have been released for Dreamcast, PS2, PlayStation, PSP, Xbox, GameCube, Nintendo 64, Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, PC and o ...

. By October 2012 20,000 Game Gadget units were sold worldwide. A Game Gadget 1.1, Game Gadget Pocket and Game Gadget 2.0 was planned. The Game Gadget was eventually succeeded by the better received

Evercade The Evercade is a handheld game console developed and manufactured by UK company Blaze Entertainment. It focuses on retrogaming with ROM cartridges that each contain a number of emulated games. Development began in 2018, and the console was relea ...

Specifications

Hardware

The Game Gadget made use of a dual core

MIPS32 MIPS (Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipelined Stages) is a family of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architectures (ISA)Price, Charles (September 1995). ''MIPS IV Instruction Set'' (Revision 3.2), MIPS Technologies, ...

architecture

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JZ4750 CPU, which was clocked at 433 Mhz. The system sported 64 megabytes of RAM. Storage consisted of 2 GB of internal flash, and a SD/SDHC for removable storage. There is no 3D acceleration hardware. The primary display was a 3.5" LCD with a 320x240 resolution and 16-bit color, though the system also supported TV-out. Additional outputs included stereo speakers, a headphone jack, and a micro USB port. Inputs included a D-Pad, 2 shoulder buttons, 4 face buttons, Start & Select buttons. A

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powered the system for approximately 8 hours. The system was relatively portable, though not particularly

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, measuring and weighed about . It was only available in one colour, white.

Software

The Game Gadget ran an operating system based on

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

. A free official SDK was available. Officially supported development technologies included SDL, C,

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, Python 2.7,

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, and

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. Officially licensed

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games were run with a version of the PicoDrive

emulator In computing, an emulator is Computer hardware, hardware or software that enables one computer system (called the ''host'') to behave like another computer system (called the ''guest''). An emulator typically enables the host system to run so ...

. The system could run

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protected software in a locked down mode, or community software in a "Sandbox" mode. An online store was used for digital distribution. The system supported stereo playback of a number of audio codecs including

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

, WMA,

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FLAC FLAC (; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software p ...

WAV Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE, or WAV due to its filename extension; pronounced "wave") is an audio file format standard, developed by IBM and Microsoft, for storing an audio bitstream on PCs. It is the main format used on Microsoft Wind ...

, AC3,

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S3M ''S3M'' (Scream Tracker 3 Module) is a module file format, the successor to the STM format used by the original Scream Tracker. Both formats are based on the original MOD format used on the Amiga computer. The S3M format has many differences com ...

, XM and

RealAudio RealAudio, or also spelled as Real Audio is a proprietary audio format developed by RealNetworks and first released in April 1995. It uses a variety of audio codecs, ranging from low-bitrate formats that can be used over dialup modems, to high-fid ...

. The system included a voice and radio recording application that supported MP3 and WAV formats. The system included a photo viewer that supports

JPG JPEG ( ) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image ...

, BMP,

GIF The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , see pronunciation) is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released on 15 June 1987. ...

, PNG file formats. An included text reader application supported TXT file formats in English and Chinese, as well as English text to speech. Further functions of the text reader include bookmarking, auto browsing, font sizing, and it can open while music is playing. Two official firmware versions, V1.00 and v1.01, were released.

External links

GameGadget Official Website (English, Archived)

References

{{Handheld game consoles Seventh-generation video game consoles Open hardware electronic devices Handheld game consoles MIPS-based video game consoles Linux-based video game consoles