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 reader or e device, is a Mobile computing, mobile electronic device that is designed primarily for the purpose of reading digital e-books and Periodical literature, periodicals. Any device that can display text on ...

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 Northwestern Europe, off the coast of European mainland, the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...

, 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 (Currency symbol, symbol: Pound sign, £; ISO 4217, currency code: GBP) is the currency of the United Kingdom and nine of its associated territories. The pound is the main unit of account, unit of sterling, and the word ''Pound (cu ...

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

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. 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 British company Blaze Entertainment. It focuses on retrogaming with ROM cartridges that each contain a number of emulated games. The Evercade was released on 22 May 2020, and ...

Specifications

Hardware

The Game Gadget made use of a dual core MIPS32 architecture Ingenic 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"

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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

lithium-ion battery A lithium-ion or Li-ion battery is a type of rechargeable battery that uses the reversible intercalation of Li+ ions into electronically conducting solids to store energy. Li-ion batteries are characterized by higher specific energy, energ ...

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 ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

. A free official SDK was available. Officially supported development technologies included SDL, C, C++, Python 2.7,

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, and Lua. Officially licensed

Sega is a Japanese video game company and subsidiary of Sega Sammy Holdings headquartered in Tokyo. It produces several List of best-selling video game franchises, multi-million-selling game franchises for arcade game, arcades and video game cons ...

Mega Drive The Sega Genesis, known as the outside North America, is a 16-bit Fourth generation of video game consoles, fourth generation home video game console developed and sold by Sega. It was Sega's third console and the successor to the Master Sys ...

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 sof ...

. 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 under the lead of Karlheinz Brandenburg. It was designed to greatly reduce the amount ...

, WMA,

APE Apes (collectively Hominoidea ) are a superfamily of Old World simians native to sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia (though they were more widespread in Africa, most of Asia, and Europe in prehistory, and counting humans are found global ...

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 ...

WAV Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE, or WAV due to its filename extension; pronounced or ) is an audio file format standard for storing an audio bitstream on personal computers. The format was developed and published for the first time in 1991 ...

, AC3, MOD, S3M, XM and

RealAudio RealAudio, also spelled 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-fidelit ...

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

GIF The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , ) is a Raster graphics, bitmap Image file formats, image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released ...

, 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 MIPS-based video game consoles Linux-based handheld game consoles