Dingoo A320 Review and Dingux
Here I take a quick look at the Dingoo a320 and it’s emulators.
Dingoo A320 Review
The Dingoo a320 came out in 2009. It is an emulation device/mp4 player. Not only can this device play video, music, and picture files; but it can emulate video games from the NES, SNES, Genesis, and even some arcade machines. The main highlight of this device is the price, which is as cheap as $83 shipped!
Hardware:
Let’s first talk about the device itself. The Dingoo is small and fairly light. It is much smaller than a PSP or even a DS. There is a downside to this and that is the screen size. The screen is small but not unbearable. The build quality is surprisingly well, for such a cheap device from China. There are four face buttons, start and select, a D-pad, and two shoulder buttons. The four face buttons are mushy, while the shoulder buttons and select/start buttons are extremely clicky. The D-pad is also “mushy” which is comfortable, but not always accurate. This is not good for fighters in which you have to be accurate to pull off certain moves.
Video/Audio Playback:
Like many cheap devices from China, the Dingoo is also advertised as a media player. For music, the Dingo works really well. Since there is a headphone port on the side of the Dingoo, when you have headphones plugged in it still fits well in your pocket. Video playback is decent, but could be better. The LCD itself has a decent contrast and shows colors well, but the low bit-rate required for full speed video playback counteracts this. There are many supported video formats, but there is no information on the proper way to convert. I had to play around with different settings while converting videos to find a proper bit-rate. I found this to be the best:
Container: MP4
Codec: Divx
Video Bit-rate: 1200 kb
Audio: AAC 44Khz 128 Kb
Video still seems to be “blocky” and the audio quality isn’t the best. The small screen doesn’t help this either.
Emulation:
Now for the most important thing, emulation. The built in emulators are not properly optimized for Dingoo’s hardware and processor. The Nes emulator runs perfectly, as expected. The Snes emulator on the other hand is a little slow. Frame skip has to be set high in order to get Snes running properly, which makes the games jumpy and not smooth at all. The Genesis emulator is by far the worst. Games on this emulator are nearly unplayable because of horizontal lines going across any sprites that are moving. With fast games like Sonic, the whole screen would be covered in lines that it would be hard to see what is going on. I have not tested the arcade emulators, but from what I hear they are a tad slow.
Dingux:
Since many of the stock emulators are slow, someone has ported a version of Linux for the Dingoo, called Dingux. You can dual-boot the Linux dashboard and the stock one. The Linux one replaces all the emulators with more optimized ones. The Genesis emulator on Dingux can run Sonic 2 full speed at 60 frames a second with no horizontal lines. The other emulators, including the Snes, also have a decent speed increase.
Conclusion:
The Dingoo is a cheap device, and it shows. The hardware is decent, but the stock software is sub-par. The emulators just don’t run fast enough to make it worth the while. But, if you are willing to install Dingux, then this all changes. The emulators for Dingux are well-supported and fast. There are also PC ports like Doom and Wolfenstein 3d.
It comes down to you really. If you are willing to take a chance and install Dingux on the Dingoo, then it is worth the money. If you don’t want to do any extra work, look into the Gp2x Wiz or Pandora.
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This article was good.
Even it missing somethings, I liked your article very much.
The Genesis emulator has been fixed.