Dingoo A320 review

[saberman]

Below is my review of the Dingoo open handheld if anyone is thinking of buying one. I note there’s another thread asking about this so will post a link from that to this thread too.

I’ve had a Dingoo for over a week now and have to say I’ve have something of a love hate relationship with it. It started with initial frustration and developed into a deep love. I’ve spent a lot of time with the tiny thing and have to say while it is far from perfect its good points definitely shine through.

I ordered it from www.gbax.com a site I would recommend to anyone I’ve bought a few things from there over the years and I’ve always had good service.

I’ll start with my initial frustration. When my Dingoo initially arrived I eagerly unpacked it and gazed in wonder at the tiny thing in front of me. It looked perfectly formed, it was tiny but felt light yet solid in exactly the say way a PSP light doesn’t. I unpacked the USB cable and power adaptor hunted around for my universal plug adaptor and started it charging.

My first frustration was with how long the thing took to charge. It took forever. ‘OK, well it is supposed to have a long battery life’ I thought so it must take a while to charge. Once it was fully charged I turned it on.

As many other online reviews will tell you the menu system looks like the one on the PSP. I don’t have a PS3 so can’t compare it to that. I tried a few of the preloaded emulator demos and videos and reasonably impressed.

I then took the USB cable and attached it to my laptop. This is when the frustration started. The Dingoo shows a USB connection icon I looked at my PC screen after some waiting it told me there was an error with my device. ‘OK’ I thought ‘perhaps I have to load a driver’. No disk in the box so I turned to the English manual. No information about connecting it to a PC there.
At this point I discovered a unique feature of the Dingoo. If the USB connection fails you have to reset it. That requires pushing a small button through a small hole in the side. I recommend an un-bended paper clip. I had to reset my Dingoo a lot in the first day or so.

I searched online and found that I needed some driver and to put it into USB mode ... but that was to run the unbricking tool. I also found I needed a USBSTOR.SYS driver which after some searching I managed to download. My PC already has the USBSTORE.SYS driver, version 6.<something or other> The one that works with the Dingoo is version 5.1.2600.<something or other>.

This driver lives in “C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers” . ‘I’ll just copy one other the other’ I though. Nope Microsoft in its wisdom won’t let you do that ... even if you have admin rights there’s something with more rights called the “System”. ‘Fine I’ll use the system to install the older version. No again Microsoft in its wisdom won’t let you do that. ‘OK I’ll use the system to uninstall the whole thing and then install the older version. Nope I couldn’t do that either.

So I have what looks like a great little open hand held with no way of getting date onto it. ‘Well I know it takes a mini SD card I’ll buy one of those and put data on that.’ So off I went to my local Curries to buy one. What I didn’t realise was that mini SD cards aren’t easy to come by. They appear to have died out. After a bit of searching, 2 hours, I find and universal 2 GB, SD, mini SD, micro SD combination set in an independent camera shop. They actually sold it to me cheep as no one wanted it.

So I put some of the games and emulators I’d downloaded onto it. Manic miner, both the spectrum emulators and a 2600 emulator. For some reason none of them worked. This wasn’t going very well. I’d had the thing 10 hours and I’d not been able to play anything on it. Worst of all the one thing I want to play on any device I own is spectrum games and neither of the 2 emulators I downloaded had worked.

‘Well the thing has so pre built in emulators I know work, I’ve run up the demos’ I thought. So I copied some NES, GBA and SNES games to my memory stick and started to play. That’s when I fell in love. All I can say is that the Dingoo is one of the best games playing pieces of hardware I’ve ever owned. It had the best D-pad of any handheld I’ve ever tried including my GBA original, GBA SP, PSP fat, PSP slim GP32, GP2X and any mobile phone. The buttons are very responsive and have that ‘feedback feel’ you normally only get with a full sized controller.

In short the hardware is terrific. As an example consider this: I have big hands. I worried this would be a problem playing on the Dingoo buy it was much less of a problem than anything else I’ve ever tried. Given how small it is that’s pretty amazing. The control it gives you is just excellent so you don;t end up straining your hands to play the games.

You’ll find lots of online reviews that tell you that the NES and GBA emulation is terrific and they are right. They’ll also tell you the SNES is lacking and makes the games unplayable. I don’t agree. Since I got the my Dingoo I have played Super Metroid all the way through. I’ve only done that previously on the original hardware and a PC emulation with a nice big chunky game pad. I’ve tried and failed on my PSP fat and GP2X. The reason for those failures was that I couldn’t get the right control out of the hardware in particular the D-pads.

The SNES emulation does require a bit of frame skip tweaking depending on which game you want to play. I’d advise keeping away from the auto setting and setting it to what you feel best. While I’m on the subject of emulators other online reviews will tell you the mega drive emulation is bad – they are right.

I’ve now found a friend who has Windows XP that I can connect my Dingoo too. I’ve actually put my games onto the internal memory and use the SD card for music and videos. There are online reviews of those functions and the others I haven’t mentioned and I’d say I agree with what I’ve read. That is they are OK but not the best in the world.

I think my summary is that this is a great little piece of kit. I think the problems I’ve described will be fixed over time hopefully soon with firmware updates. If you are considering buying one of these then I’d say check what version of the USBSTORE.SYS driver you have first and look online for a mini SD card. If you have the right version of the driver and can locate a mini SD then go for it. Even if you can’t find the mini SD I’d consider it.

This is a great little device let down by a few frustrating flaws. I really do love mine and I look forward to the point in the future where I can play Speccy games on it.

[miner2049er]

Nice review. I know a few people are looking at the Dingoo.

[meu2]

That was an interesting review. It sounds like the Dingoo is in a similar place to the GP2X when it launched, albeit more solidly built. It’s nice to hear of an emulation device with a really good Dpad. I’m really surprised that the unit uses mini SD, as that form factor was pretty much discontinued as soon as it arrived. Is it compatible with micro SDHC cards via a mini SD shell?

Super Metroid seems to be one of the easier SNES games to emulate, it even runs on the GBA, so I’m not sure if it’s a true indication of the systems capabilities. Please let us know how things work if you install Dingux.

[saberman]

Is it compatible with micro SDHC cards via a mini SD shell?

Yes that's effectively what I'm using but not a SDHC card. From what I've read it does support SDHC.

Super Metroid seems to be one of the easier SNES games to emulate, it even runs on the GBA, so I’m not sure if it’s a true indication of the systems capabilities.

You might be right but it is one of my favorite games so one I always play. I would say it didn't emulate that well on the PSP with Snex9x I had to tweak it a lot to get it working on that. Some of the details and even Samus herself would often disappear on the PSP and I found the Dingoo much better.

I've also played “Zombies ate my Neighbors” again one of my favorites. That emulated fine but I’ve found that easy to emulate on other systems. I’m actually not a Mario fan so haven’t tried Super Mario World. That’s what is what most of the online reviews concentrate on. If you want to suggest some other games then I’ll give them a try?

Please let us know how things work if you install Dingux.

Will do but I’m not going to rush to install that as there is a lot of talk online of people bricking their Dingoos and don’t want to risk it while I’m still getting so much out of it as it is. I’m actually going to Beijing in a couple of weeks so if I can pick one or two up there cheap I might risk one of them.

One final thing to add is that the charger that came with it appears to be stopped working :-|. It doesn’t appear to charge from a USB cable attached to a PC either. However my mobile phone charger is a USB charger and that works fine.
Also firmware battery indicator never appears to show the device as full. I.e. I charge it and the charging screen shows it is full and has stopped charging but when you switch to the menu it only has 1 or 2 of the 3 battry bars showing. I still get about 7 hours of play from it though so I’m not worried. That was the case before the supplied charger stopped working so I don’t think is related.

Again the whole package is far from perfect but I still think the thing is worth it. As you point out having a decent D-pad is worth a lot.

[Leathco]

Can I make a plug here?

I reviewed this handheld over on YouTube. It's a massive review, I think all the videos I did total equal about 45 minutes. I cover both stock firmware and Dingux (its been about a year so the Dingux version is prolly way outdated in my review now).

Only prob with this handheld is that its FRAGILE! My screen broke after it fell from my coffee table, and it was even in a case!

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=labXIu64z3E

[miner2049er]

Can I make a plug here?

Put it in the Listener Media threads then you could link to it from here.

[Leathco]

I got a thread for my stuff over in listener media, just wanted to add a link to this thread cause I thought it was relevant.

[saberman]

Can I make a plug here?

I reviewed this handheld over on YouTube. It's a massive review, I think all the videos I did total equal about 45 minutes. I cover both stock firmware and Dingux (its been about a year so the Dingux version is prolly way outdated in my review now).

Only prob with this handheld is that its FRAGILE! My screen broke after it fell from my coffee table, and it was even in a case!

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=labXIu64z3E

I’ll have to check out your review. To be honest I’d encourage anyone to check out reviews other than mine before being swayed either way so your link is perfect .

I’m interested in your comment about it being fragile I’ve dropped my onto my tiled kitchen floor and it was fine. I guess I might have just been lucky.

[Leathco]

I dunno, either yours is hardier than mine or I got unlucky. I couldn't beleive a fall from a coffee table (maybe a foot and a half off the ground) to a carpeted surface, with it in a case no less, caused the LCD to crack.

[saberman]

Can I make a plug here?

I reviewed this handheld over on YouTube. It's a massive review, I think all the videos I did total equal about 45 minutes. I cover both stock firmware and Dingux (its been about a year so the Dingux version is prolly way outdated in my review now).

Only prob with this handheld is that its FRAGILE! My screen broke after it fell from my coffee table, and it was even in a case!

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=labXIu64z3E

Excellent review Leathco I think you might have me sold on Dingux . I agree with you that playing games is what the Dingoo is all about. I tried to concentrate on my experiences of getting mine working and some of the problems I’d encountered. The idea being to help anyone else purchasing a Dingoo avoid the same issues. I’d say your YouTube review give a much more detailed review of actually playing the games so thing they complement each other well.

Any tips you have on installing Dingux would be good, did you encounter any issues?

It looks like we are the only two people on the forums to own one. I’d be interested to hear anyone else’s experiences.

Did you get another after your screen broke or have you given up on the Dingoo?