I feel like the Linux Handhelds made by GPH in the 2000s are a nowadays almost forgotten piece of history, even though they were in some ways the predecessor to today’s Steam Deck. So I wanted to create a bit of an appreciation post for this chapter in Linux Gaming history. Did any of you use a GP2X back in the day as well? For me, it wasn’t just my introduction to Linux gaming, but also game development, as I programmed my first games for it using GLBasic. It was a fantastic machine for emulation as well, got introduced to many old games from the 80s and 90s through it.
Yeah I think I have one of those still around somewhere. I remember when they released it they didn’t release any sources at all, even though it was full of software that required sharing in their license. So the community got together and helped them publish it all. Some of the drivers were still binary blobs, but that was the maker of the chips fault and not GameParks fault.
Once I got one I created a small little side scrolling game engine and a couple of games for it, a couple of other people used my engine to make some games for it as well. To imagine that’s 20 years ago. We had a small little forum of enthusiasts setup and shared code in attachments. It’s all lost to time now, but those were the days.