The hunt for a Dingoo
Unlike the PSP or DSi which are commercially available everywhere anywhere, the dingoo is more like an underground device (being an emulator!). I've always wanted one but couldnt find any shops that sell them (and i didnt wanna order online for it - i hate waiting hahaha). Tried looking for it in Taiwan (Guangho market in taipei - no luck! couldnt find any!) Luckily one day i stumbled upon one in the notorious sim lim square in singapore. So if there's anyone out there in singapore who wants to buy a Dingoo : go to sim lim square! Its priced at SGD$120 (USD$90?) which is pretty much the same price that you'd pay online - minus the waiting. Watch out tho, that place can sometimes overcharge people if they think you dont know your stuff!
If you dont mind buying online, websites such as amazon
or dealextreme are stocking the dingoo, you can get them for as low as USD$80 (inc shipping), there are also a lot of reputable sellers (with a lot of good feedbacks) in ebay that sells the dingoo with silicon case and pouch included. The dingoo is available in black or white, i chose the white one - although i'd recommend the black one coz the white one gets dirty easily :DOut of the box
Out of the box, the Dingoo is readily playable, depending on where you bought it they might have loaded the 4GB storage with loads of nes/snes/sega roms and some dodgy weird videos/music ready for you to play - In my case i got nothing but their own games - one of them is like a resident evil / silent hill clone thats actually not so bad, it also showcases the dingoo's 3d capability, something like the old PSX i reckon. The dingoo also plays most formats of videos, although i tried loading a 720p avi video with very bad results - very choppy playback! Then again the dingoo is primarily for retro gaming so this is just a nice extra. The MP3 player is also okay, for casual listening its pretty solid, although it would be nice if they support album art like the ipods!
The Native OS
Enter: DINGUX! Linux on Dingoo!
If you really want to, you can even play some old PSone games (without sound at the moment)... Not bad eh?
Dingux is highly customizable, with the limit being how willing you are to tweak it. Of course all this means you gotta do some modding, and flashing the dingoo native OS thru some usb cables and a miniSD card - although not too hard to do it could be quite confusing for the less tech-savvy people. There are lots of tutorials online on how to install dingux on Dingoo, like this one right here. Beware though! If you are afraid of re-flashing things (or dont even know what "firmware" means) the whole technical stuff you have to do could scare you away or (in very small cases - unlikely) you could end up bricking your dingoo! Nothing that a quick google reading wont help though, just be prepared :)
Power in the Community! The Dingoo Paw Clans!
One of the strength in dingoo is that it has a lot of dedicated websites and forums:
Dingoonity - Dingoo website, forum and wiki
Dingoo Web / Sentinel Games - Your one stop shop/noobs guide to everything dingoo! must visit!
Dingoo Digital USA - Unofficial USA based dingoo info site/forum
and many more!! Google is your friend here :)
The Holy Grail of Portable Retro Gaming?
Not quite yet, but pretty close. The whole concept of Dingoo A320 is pretty damn awesome, but currently it still needs some time to be able to perfectly (if ever?) emulate all the consoles it was advertised to emulate. More and more people are doing stuff and updating the Dingoo which makes the Dingoo really cool and progressively better device. Although its still a question whether your Dingoo would really last that long - the build quality is not too bad, but still there are issues. My dingoo came with two not-so-visible stuck pixels which now i just try to live with. The buttons arent too good to play fighting games with - such a shame considering the amount of awesome fighting games you can play on it! Think KOF , Street Fighter, Samurai Showdown, marvel superheroes, all these old classics - on the go!
For now - if you are content with being able to play most of the retro games with some limitations (some consoles are very well emulated well but some arent - they are improving overtime tho) and dont mind doing a bit of homework in tweaking the unit (install dingux, install new apps etc, can be time consuming) then the dingoo is a must-have! If you used to play the retro consoles back in the day you'd probably want a dingoo just for the nostalgic value of replaying all the games that we lost our childhood to (lol).
Pros:
- Awesome retro-gaming goodness - so many games to play so little time! If you ever need to kill time these will overdo it!
- Good battery life, 7 hours+ on a single charge is quite normal
- The nice 2.8inch screen is just the right size for gaming on the go - not too small and pretty enjoyable
- Very large userbase/community, with many dedicated websites and forums solely dedicated on the development of the dingoo-related stuff, the dingoo has a pretty good future ahead!
- Awesome NES,GBA, GBC, CPS1, Game Gear, PCEngine/TG16 (on dingux), Sega megadrive (picodrive, dingux) emulation - almost as good as the real thing! Wow thats a lot of consoles!!
Cons:
- While the D.pad is okay, its not too good for complex fighting game movements, plus shoulder buttons needs to be bigger!
- Video player do not handle very large files too well!
- No two player action in the A320!
- The charger that came in the package looks like it might explode anytime soon (and smelt of burnt plastic! yikes!) - Got an iPod/iPhone usb charger? Use those instead!
- You need to do some technical stuff to get the dingoo up and running with dingux, not exactly hard to do but for some people re-flashing firmwares could be pretty scary!
- SNES emulation needs a little improvement (but very playable with most games), NeoGeo and CPS2 emulation needs to be faster (too much frame skipping in the native os emu)
