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I've fallen down the emulation rabbit hole. Or perhaps it's emulation hardware?
I was looking for a portable and moderately linux-friendly device to host this project that wasn't a stupid phone ... and I'm probably going to end up just using a busted-ass stupid phone, all the non-Apple dedicated 'tablets' are either huge or crap or both, and I had some familiarity with portable gaming handhelds like the Steamdeck and thought 'oh, how hard could it be to figure out one with decent battery life'?
Surely there must be some market between eWaste web browsers and ItCanPlayCyberPunkForFiveSeconds, even if it's a bit of a weird niche--
Who wants to drink from the firehose!
Okay, emulation has taken off. I'd messed around with SNES or PS1 emulators back when they were all the rage, or the GameCube a decade ago, but I'd kinda gotten the impression the late PS2 era had been a brick wall, with only weird specialty projects like Yuzu as successful exceptions that aimed for the low-hanging fruit and getting absolutely clobbered by lawfare. Hardware wise, I'd seen a million different Raspberry Pi compute stick shells, and just slapped the same code on a RaspPi I already had and considered RetroArch checked.
Nope. Gone are the dime-store-3d-print shells. Forget BCM2711s or RK3399 (... mostly). Even the Bricks built for gameboy-level emulation are running on more specialized and capable processors, and some of the higher-end machines can be comparable to desktop machines I would be pretty comfortable playing 2022 AAA-games on. Sure, Nintendo can cost the software developers or website hosts a pretty penny, but you don't even have to run to skeezy AliExpress offers to get giant deliveries of embarrassingly overt piracy... and maybe some software herpes. The PS3, despite its weirdo architecture, seems like it's actually working okay? And on things like the XBox, Microsoft cares so little about it that you can just rip software straight from an unmodded console, with nothing more specialized than a USB spinning rust drive. Who expected the day when M$ wasn't the bad guy when it came to archiving old games?just don't look at their OS. When you can't play something, it's usually a sign of serious software limits some nutjob is willing to work surprisingly hard to solve, or you're emulating a wii game with a prolonged jerkoff joke as a central game mechanic that doesn't translate well.
Now, there's a lot of sketch here. At the high end, you have fun questions like iffy USB-C-PD implementations and driver hell. More often, expect a ton of hardware that cycles in and out in months if not days, from a manufacturer that's apparently colorblind and depending on Kickstarter churn. Even when everything works out fine, commitment to the LGPL is more in theory than practice, and there's a lot of reason to suspect that the Snapdragon8gen2 chips were 'surplus' from conventional projects -- I dislike Qualcomm's resale policies enough to think that's a plus, but from a support and longevity perspective it's a red flag.
And, yeah, a lot of these come with just piles upon piles of piracy. Ostensibly, you could play native games (many newer devices are fairly fully-featured linux/android, albeit with all the !!fun!! involved since most of the cheaper ones are ARM). Ostensibly, you could just rip games you own or collect, and I'm enough of a
hoardercollector that I've actually been able to do some of that, but in all honesty? They're built for piracy. You know it, I know it, most vendors are pretty unabashed about letting you pick how much piracy you want and know it, the less graymarket vendors having to explicitly warn you that they aren't doing the piracy for you know it.There's an optimistic view that's kinda nice. Yeah, it's a little twisted to be so ruled by nostalgia that you're putting as much processing power into a 2002 handheld game as could run a 2022 AAA one. And if everybody could have just bought a 5 USD rip of great games like Grand Theft Auto 3 or Shadow of the Colossus or Okami and run them on their cell phone, we probably wouldn't have gotten remasters of them. But in turn, there's a ton of other games that will never show up again, or where they are remastered get butchered in the process, or get remastered for a console or environment that itself has a shelf life measured in months. The Baptists-and-Bootleggers of Obsessive Weirdos and Literal Thieves haven't just kept a lot of otherwise abandoned games archived and usually playable (oh boy Games for
gofuckyourselfWindows Live), but they've made a lot of equipment and play options that would otherwise not exist, even if that requires pretty dedicated design and engineering work. If it also means you can get an unlocked Android device that'll accept alternate bootloaders for less than the cost of last generations Nintendo handheld, I'm not gonna complain.So I dunno. I'm still more of a keyboard-and-mouse gamer, but some of the options are looking pretty good when I'm away from my desk or my documentation or my reading list. And even for normal gaming time, I think it might be worth firing up Megaman Legends or Robot Alchemic Drive again.
I constantly see adds for these cute little pocket emulators, but when I see what is obviously the same hardware showing up again and again and again by different companies with sketchy websites, I nope out hard.
But a part of me is very tempted to take something like a MiSTer FPGA system at the high end, or a Retron 5 at the low end, and put them inside a case inspire by old wooden transistor radios. But that is a project for a distant day.
Yeah, a lot of the gameboy- or ds-form factor devices seem like they're extruded from a press somewhere. Miyoo and TrimUI seem like they're at least aimed at enthusiasts, but most of what actually get advertised seem like glorified ewaste aimed more to be good gifts than good things you'd want to buy for yourself.
That project sounds like it'd be a blast, albeit also a pretty sizable challenge. The MiSTer is pretty impressive tech, if probably more dedicated to fidelity than I could recognize. I've heard far more mixed things about the Retrons, although I do appreciate having something more legitimate than 'tots-ripped-yourself' rom-dedicated machines.
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