The GP2X Caanoo, more commonly known as Caanoo, stylized CAANOO, is an open source,

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, w ...

-based

handheld video game console A handheld game console, or simply handheld console, is a small, portable self-contained video game console with a built-in screen, game controls and speakers. Handheld game consoles are smaller than home video game consoles and contain the cons ...

and portable media player developed by the

South Korea South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), is a country in East Asia, constituting the southern part of the Korean Peninsula and sharing a land border with North Korea. Its western border is formed by the Yellow Sea, while its eas ...

n company

GamePark Holdings GPH, formerly known as GamePark Holdings, was a South Korean company responsible for creating the GP2X that was founded by former employees of the game maker GamePark in 2005. History Several years after the release of the GP32, its maker GamePar ...

. It was released on August 16, 2010 in South Korea and were also sold throughout

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a subcontinent of Eurasia and it is located entirel ...

. It is the successor to the

GP2X Wiz The GP2X Wiz is a handheld game console and portable media player developed by South Korean company GamePark Holdings running a Linux kernel-based embedded operating system. It was released on May 12, 2009, and was also the first console from bot ...

, and was showcased at the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2010. The device's launch price was about

US$ The United States dollar (symbol: $; code: USD; also abbreviated US$ or U.S. Dollar, to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies; referred to as the dollar, U.S. dollar, American dollar, or colloquially buck) is the official ...

150, which didn't reach any retail stores in North America. The Caanoo is not a direct competitor of handheld consoles like Nintendo DS or PlayStation Portable, but rather an alternative open source device. Because of that, any software that is compatible can be run without the need of creating custom firmware or other homebrew applications. This is the last open-source gaming device by GamePark Holdings, as they ceased production and development of gaming hardware to focus solely on software.

Hardware

Specifications

* SoC (System on a Chip): MagicEyes Pollux VR3520F * CPU: ARM926EJ 533 MHz embedded on SoC (architecture version ARMv5TEJ) * GPU: 3D hardware engine embedded on SoC (

OpenGL ES OpenGL for Embedded Systems (OpenGL ES or GLES) is a subset of the OpenGL computer graphics rendering application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D computer graphics such as those used by video games, typically hardware-accele ...

1.1 support) * 3D performance: 133M Texel/s and 1,33M Polygon/s * main RAM: 128 Mbytes DDR SDRAM 133 MHz (peak memory bandwidth: 533 Mbytes/s) * video buffer: about 16 Mbytes of main RAM are reserved for the video/texture information * Operating System:

based * Flash memory: None (128 Mbytes reserved to the OS) * Connection to PC: USB 2.0 High Speed through EXT Port * USB Host: USB 1.1 standard socket * Supports SD / SDHC memory cards (up to 32 Gigabytes) *

Accelerometer An accelerometer is a tool that measures proper acceleration. Proper acceleration is the acceleration (the rate of change of velocity) of a body in its own instantaneous rest frame; this is different from coordinate acceleration, which is acc ...

* Vibration Motor * High precision analog stick * Display: 3.5 inch

OLED An organic light-emitting diode (OLED or organic LED), also known as organic electroluminescent (organic EL) diode, is a light-emitting diode (LED) in which the emissive electroluminescent layer is a film of organic compound that emits light i ...

320×240 pixel (resistive touchscreen) * Stereo audio DAC: Wolfson Microelectronics WM1800 * Embedded Microphone and stereo Loudspeakers * Power: Internal 1850mAh Lithium Polymer Battery (approx. 5/6 hours game/video playback) * Dimensions : * Weight : * WiFi via adapter (USB dongle – Purchased separately) * Colors: Black/Blue, White NB: the CPU embedded on Pollux has a good tolerance to overclocking (until 750 MHz the system shouldn't have problems, just a shorter battery autonomy.) Not all CPU/SoC are created equal and these results are theoretical. Some may not be able to push much past stock frequency. Overclocking will vary between each Caanoo.

Games/Applications

The Caanoo had only four commercial retail games: ::*''Asura Cross'' ::*''Propis'' ::*''Rhythmos'' ::*''Wiz Party'' The Caanoo can run several applications that emulate consoles or computer systems, such as DrPocketSnes for the Super NES, GnGEO for the Neo-Geo, Hu-Go for the PC Engine, PCSX ReArmed for original PlayStation games, MAME4all for arcade games and Picodrive for the Mega Drive/Genesis and its add-ons, as well as freeware homebrew games/applications. These applications are created by the community itself and not by the manufacturers. Most, if not all of this software can be found a
OpenHandhelds
a community-driven website. Gamepark Holdings also had a website focused on downloadable content named FunGP. It sold commercial Caanoo and Wiz games, as well as some retro Arcade games. It has since ceased operations. Caanoo is not compatible with software built for previous GPH devices (such as the

) without an application to allow it to do so. A compatibility layer named Ginge allows for most software to be compatible, and most applications have already been ported.

Multimedia capability

The Caanoo is a video player, an audio player, photo viewer and E-Book reader.

Video

* Container files: AVI * Video formats: DivX,

XviD Xvid (formerly "XviD") is a video codec library following the MPEG-4 video coding standard, specifically MPEG-4 Part 2 Advanced Simple Profile (ASP). It uses ASP features such as b-frames, global and quarter pixel motion compensation, lumi mas ...

MPEG4 MPEG-4 is a group of international standards for the compression of digital audio and visual data, multimedia systems, and file storage formats. It was originally introduced in late 1998 as a group of audio and video coding formats and related ...

* Audio formats:

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 ...

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 ...

* Maximum Resolution: 640×480 pixel * Maximum Frame Rate: 30 frame/s * Maximum Video Bitrate: 2500kbit/s * Maximum Audio Bitrate: 384kbit/s * Captions: SMI

Audio

* Audio formats:

Ogg Vorbis Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder (codec) for lossy audio compression. Vorbis is most commonly used in conjun ...

* Channels: Stereo * Frequency Range: 20 Hz - 20 kHz * Power output: ? * Sample Resolution/Rate: 16bit/8–48 kHz, in 8bit/22 kHz

Photos

* Supports JPG, PNG, GIF,

Bitmap In computing, a bitmap is a mapping from some domain (for example, a range of integers) to bits. It is also called a bit array or bitmap index. As a noun, the term "bitmap" is very often used to refer to a particular bitmapping application: t ...

File Formats

E-Books

* Supports txt files, it can also read pdf format through various apps.

External TV output

The SoC Pollux embeds (besides to the primary LCD controller) an NTSC/PAL encoder with internal DAC to manage an external analog video signal (

CVBS Composite video is an analog video signal format that carries standard-definition video (typically at 525 lines or 625 lines) as a single channel. Video information is encoded on one channel, unlike the higher-quality S-Video (two channels ...

output: 720×480 or 720×576 pixel interlaced, respectively 60/50 Hz vertical sync and 15 kHz horizontal sync).

References

External links

Official Gamepark Holdings Homepage

GP32x Community Website

News on Caanoo exclusive game projects (in English)

NewsWeeZ Caanoo News and Files (in English)

PDRoms Caanoo News and Files (in English)

Caanoo File Archive

Spanish homebrew videogames community (GP32Spain)

GbaRL.it Caanoo Review (in Italian)

{{Seventh generation game consoles ARM-based video game consoles Seventh-generation video game consoles Linux-based video game consoles Products introduced in 2010 Handheld game consoles