Kyle Poole - The Story so Far
How long has it been?
A year or so since Kyle Poole owner of Crimson Fire had promised
the world of a GBA emulator on the Zodiac handheld. Since then he had promised to release the emulator at full speed for all those who had paid in advance.
He also made claims that he would go up against Nintendo in a legal pursuit if he had to over the emulator after receiving multiple threats from Nintendo. He posted on his own forum once every few months concerning the progress of project GBAZ, people Obviously got pissed at this.
After months and months of waiting for this perfect hyped up product we found that someone else had taken over Crimson Fire and we still had no word from GBAZ. Wether this was Kyle Poole under a new name or not we did not know. Soon after we saw the first bits of progress as Crimsonfire posted a version of GBAZ under this new management. It did not run very many games and only at 50-60% speed and the software was very restricted, This was a commercial product I remind you.
So after a year of waiting was this worth it?
Hell No!
Was there an alternative? Yes.
Whilst in the meantime a free programmer, Yes thats right free programmer named Yoyofr created a GB/C, Genesis, Snes, Wonder Swan, Neo Geo
emulator by changing modules already created and heavily changing them so that they work well on the Zodiac for the community of Zodiacgamer.com all in return for a Zodiac console donated by the community themselves.
You see the community of ZodiacGamer had put hard earned dollars together and bought 2-3 Zodiacs so that programmers could create
free software that could be used on the Zodiac, One of them had found itself luckily YoyoFr.
His emulator was called LJZ, It stood for Little John Zodiac I believe.
He would update the software sometimes every other day with significant changes done each and every time.
Now the emulator runs at near full speed from what I know and runs the majority of roms, Sure it may not be a GBA emulator but it does emulate just about every other handheld that was on the market and thats enough to
keep you entertained for a long time. This was purely because he felt he would not emulate a handheld thats currently still running on the market from what I believe.
So thats why many of us hope now with the launch of DS he may think about a GBA module to his LJZ. At the same time you do have to remind yourself that the DS is not the follow up to the DS though many do feel so. The successor is named “Evolution” and has already been announced by Nintendo, No doubt this would even be on the market till late 2006.
Anyway rounding up Maybe after this new management at CF and a couple of more months GBAZ will be near perfect, But what about all
those people that paid when it was first announced?
God they must really be straggling themselves right now.
alot have already sold their Zodiacs on to buy PSP’s, After getting bored with software content currently on the Zodiac..
Who can really blame them?
[ Extracted from Sony PSP Takeover ]
SonyBoy
Comments
Yeah that would be great!
But its too late for me,
My zod killed itself so I just gave up on it.
:-/
These GP32 programmers are really experienced.
I would love to get enough money togeather fo a couple of PSP’s.
I know one of them would find itself to programmers such as Yoyo.
But at the moment I dont even have enough for one for myself.
You got one yet Jason?
I thought there already was an emu for the Zodiac that covered GBA. I’ve seen the Genesis one and the NES one. At E3, one of the guys from Zodiacgamer.com was showing it off to me in Tapwave’s booth.
“At the same time you do have to remind yourself that the DS is not the follow up to the DS though many do feel so.”
Still tired from the PSP launch? lol! Just messing with you.
I’ll say a few things about the Zodiac though, with two SD card slots, you can fit a hell of a lot of music if you have a few 1GB or 2GB SD cards laying around. Also, the Zodiac has a real analogue stick with none of that sliding crap. The only real problem with the Zodiac is that it doesn’t have too much in terms of support aside from Activision. They are in talks with EA currently and if those go through like intended, the Zodiac will become a more viable system. There’s also talks with Best Buy. Curcuit City already stocks the Zodiac and an increase in market saturation would do well for the system.
But the Zodiac is not really intended as a portable system. The Zodiac is a PDA, and in a different market than the PSP. People selling their Zodiacs to get a PSP obviously don’t use PDAs or parts of their brain. PDAs are useful for keeping schedules, inventories, writing reviews on the go, and other such things. The PSP doesn’t allow me to work on Word files, or use Louts Smart Suite. This would be like saying: “I’m selling my Sidekick 2 for a PSP!” It’s a bit stupid, because the Sidekick 2 is a PHONE and the PSP is not a phone. The Zodiac is -still- one of the best PDAs out there.
Yeah thats true,
But No there is no other GBA emulator for Zodiac.
Your thinking of a GB/C emulator which there is.
If there was I would have bagged a Zodiac already!
Just lacks Wifi
Leave a comment
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Nice story SB! A GBA emulator is really needed on the Zod. It would make the system a little more complete. Perhaps one of the GP32 programmers will one day find the itch to port their emulator.