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Dingoo Digital, as you should know by now, are the original and genuine Dingoo brand-owners, product and manufacturing. This shouldn’t come as news to anyone, but Dingoo Digital are not dead, though we haven’t heard much from them lately.

Read their e-mail after the break, it contains some information about two new games consoles from Dingoo Digital!

Here are some excerpts from our e-mail conversation (cleaned up for Engrish, footnotes at the end).

Q: Are you planning a new console? If so, what improvements will it have over the A320?
A: Yes, an enhanced version – the Dingoo A320E is coming out soon. It will not use  the Jz4755 CPU, but will rather use the China Chip CC1800, which is capable of playing of 1080p movies. The A330 is coming out soon aswell, with super functions, but I can’t talk about that.

Q: Can you confirm that the Dingoo Technology A330 is a counterfeit product? We all know that you (Dingoo Digital), are the original and genuine sellers.
A: Yes, the “Dingoo Technology A330″ is a counterfeit product.

Q: Do you have any comments on the company split, and have you taken legal action against “Dingoo Technology”?
A: In fact, there are only 2 salesmen left on our team. They* asked the other team to hack our firmware, in order to produce a fake Dingoo**.
The Dingoo group still has more than 200 people, none of R&D*** members have left the Dingoo team.
The Dingoo group includes 4 companies, all of  which are under one boss:
Dingoo Games – In charge of 3D games development
Chinachip – In charge of  CPU development
Gemei – In charge of producting****
Dingoo Digital – In charge of marketing

# Note: This section seems to be copy-pasted, as I found a near exact section of text here. My money is on the fact that they recieve many e-mails about this subject, and thus have to standarize their answers.

* Dingoo Technology
** Dingoo Technology A330
*** Research and Development
**** I’m guessing they mean producing here, i.e. writes the firmware etc.

Well, well, well! What does this mean for the average Dingoo consumer? I’m guessing the A320E will be somewhat similar to the Gemei HD8800 in regards to performance, since they use the same processor (The CC1800, which I can’t hardly find any information on online). Since the clockspeed, architecture and other hardware in this new iteration of the Dingoo is unknown and may be drastically different from the A320, porting a Dingux build to it might prove troublesome, without booboos and other hardware engineers’ expertise.

This may be detrimental to Dingoo Digitals future. If there’s not enough of an improvement from the A320, and the hardware is all exotic and unknown, no one is going to try to get a Linux kernel booted on it, and it won’t enjoy the same success as the Dingoo Digital A320 has done so far.

There is also some information on the Gemei HD880 here, but it unfortunately doesn’t have much information the technical aspects of the new processor.

Along with the e-mail, there were three pictures attached, two of which were proof of their trademark registration of the terms “Dingoo” and pinyin “Ding Guo”, and the third was the lovely office-shot featured earlier in the article.

Here’s to hoping it’s a MIPS(el) processor, like the one we’re used to!

According to the person who ported SDL to the Wii, SDL will automatically scale video modes that are less than the Wii output resolution (640×480). This means (in practice), that all the applications I’ve written for the Dingoo and the NanoNote will only require a remapping of keys and a recompile in order to be playable on the Wii. I should get the devkit for PowerPC CPUs running on my computer, but I can’t be assed yet, as it hasn’t arrived.

I’ve grown quite fond of my BlueCube ports for Dingoo and NanoNote, so I think the first application released from me unto the Wii scene will be BlueCube4W.

The Wii resolution of 640×480 really opens up a big world of possibilities in regards to porting. Almost every SDL game I’ve tried for computers runs at 640×480, and provided the authors write portable code, should be trivial to compile for the PPC platform, no need for that pesky downscaling you need for playing those games on the Dingoo/NanoNote. I need a header file containing the SDL KeyCodes for the Wiimote/GC/Classic controller buttons, though, though if I can’t find one, I’ll just pop my keyCodes application in there and write my own.

Like father, like son!

A mini-person with a mini-computer!

Screenshot of BlueCube4D. Image grabbed with fbgrab.

As per usual procedure, get it from my Google Code project.

Dingux package here.
Ben NanoNote package here.

Dingoonity release threads here and here.

Source code is as always included!

Screenshot of StartWatch for NanoNote. Image captured with fbgrab.

Download Countdown here.
Download StartWatch here.

Source, as always, is included, though with these releases, makefiles are not.

I used this line to compile (compiled with Dingux toolchain):
mipsel-linux-uclibc-gcc main.c -lSDLmain -lSDL -lSDL_ttf -o binaryname

Copy the binary files and the font font.ttf to /usr/bin if you want to run these applications without having to change your working directory into where they are stored each time you wish to use them.

If you find any bugs or have any feature requests, let me know, either via comments or via the Google Code issue tracker.

Screenshot of BlueCube4D. Image grabbed with fbgrab.

It should be released very soon, and when it’s available, you’ll find it on my Google Code page, as usual. I’ll make a post for the release when it’s done.

AFAIK, there’s no tetris clone for Dingux yet. That’s all going to change now!