skeezix
Internal Development
As an exercise, lets keep Pandora and Pyra off the table*; if you just want to have an easily pocketable (ie: small), and relatively inexpensive (ie: okay to carry around in a pocket all the time, or to a beach, or tossed into your backpack, etc) mobile console for retro gaming.. whats hot these days?
ie: I actually like the caanoo more than it deserves; the gp2x variations where awesome at the time, but just don't hold up (especially the touchscreen edition with the dodgey "d-pad"); the gp32 itself is still fun, but mine eat SMCs like no tomorrow, so I just don't touch 'em anymore. Etc etc. I've stuck r-pi's into Lynx's old shells for fun and all that (too big, too rare to carry around all the time, etc).
For myself, I tend to carry around one of my Wiz machines still; its small, and relatively disposable, and yet.. its just powerful enough to do the job; the OLED screen (if its hasn't consumed itself yet), is still holding up pretty well; theres a number of design flaws in them, depending which incarnation you had (those beta units were atrocious!), but nothing so severe as the old Tapwave's, which had all kinds of soldering issues...
(and if I want really disposable, as in, easily replaced because I'm going to a high risk worksite or somewhere with higher chance of theft, then I take a PSP; I've still got the modded battery, that you just stick into a PSP and it lets you reflash the FW; a CFW PSP is, even after all these lojng years, still a really good piece of kit; great native game library, decent PSX support from Sony proper, and a huge hellpile of indie and emus; again, cross compiling was a real pita, and I've long since stopped supporting my own ports and code on the platform, it still makes a good book reader of sortsd, a decent video player, and all that. And dirt cheap!)
So, for me, I carry around a Pandora in that bulky case ED was selling for awhile; but when not that, I carry around a Wiz. But the software is old and cranky and reasonably hard to come by, and I got sick of cross compiling junk to it, like everyone else, looong ago.
So... what do people use _today_? Or do we all still dust off our old units and use them.. a kind of meta-retro; retro on new-retro?
jeff
edit: (and yes, I'm dodging things like the GPD Win; I'll wait for a Pyra, since I've seen the GPD is a pricey bastard; but I'm deliberately trying to look for a dumber/cheaper option, like the old Wiz/Caanoo sort of form factors, but with the expected chipset increase.)
edit: (and avoiding 3d printing a typical retro-pie type solution; looking for something purpose built; I've built my own handhelds, and also the r-pis are amazing for some things.. I'm not a fan of the boot time or performance even for all emus, especially when you're on the tiniest of the r-pi's..)
edit: (if you're curious about zikzak, which is unlikely, but still, I'm rambling from sleepdep .. I never did bother to make a handheld version of it, but it would not have been hard; I just was more interested in building VGA and HDMI, than an LCD controller; the stm32 I used for GPU actually has an LCD controller built in, you see, so it'd be easy. But right now I'm working on FPGA generating HDMI .. much more amusing.)
* yes, of course, I still carry around various Pandoras; still has a hawt sound system, and its way too personal to stop using
(yes, I still lurk; I just don't have free time from 7:30am to 11:30 pm)
ie: I actually like the caanoo more than it deserves; the gp2x variations where awesome at the time, but just don't hold up (especially the touchscreen edition with the dodgey "d-pad"); the gp32 itself is still fun, but mine eat SMCs like no tomorrow, so I just don't touch 'em anymore. Etc etc. I've stuck r-pi's into Lynx's old shells for fun and all that (too big, too rare to carry around all the time, etc).
For myself, I tend to carry around one of my Wiz machines still; its small, and relatively disposable, and yet.. its just powerful enough to do the job; the OLED screen (if its hasn't consumed itself yet), is still holding up pretty well; theres a number of design flaws in them, depending which incarnation you had (those beta units were atrocious!), but nothing so severe as the old Tapwave's, which had all kinds of soldering issues...
(and if I want really disposable, as in, easily replaced because I'm going to a high risk worksite or somewhere with higher chance of theft, then I take a PSP; I've still got the modded battery, that you just stick into a PSP and it lets you reflash the FW; a CFW PSP is, even after all these lojng years, still a really good piece of kit; great native game library, decent PSX support from Sony proper, and a huge hellpile of indie and emus; again, cross compiling was a real pita, and I've long since stopped supporting my own ports and code on the platform, it still makes a good book reader of sortsd, a decent video player, and all that. And dirt cheap!)
So, for me, I carry around a Pandora in that bulky case ED was selling for awhile; but when not that, I carry around a Wiz. But the software is old and cranky and reasonably hard to come by, and I got sick of cross compiling junk to it, like everyone else, looong ago.
So... what do people use _today_? Or do we all still dust off our old units and use them.. a kind of meta-retro; retro on new-retro?
jeff
edit: (and yes, I'm dodging things like the GPD Win; I'll wait for a Pyra, since I've seen the GPD is a pricey bastard; but I'm deliberately trying to look for a dumber/cheaper option, like the old Wiz/Caanoo sort of form factors, but with the expected chipset increase.)
edit: (and avoiding 3d printing a typical retro-pie type solution; looking for something purpose built; I've built my own handhelds, and also the r-pis are amazing for some things.. I'm not a fan of the boot time or performance even for all emus, especially when you're on the tiniest of the r-pi's..)
edit: (if you're curious about zikzak, which is unlikely, but still, I'm rambling from sleepdep .. I never did bother to make a handheld version of it, but it would not have been hard; I just was more interested in building VGA and HDMI, than an LCD controller; the stm32 I used for GPU actually has an LCD controller built in, you see, so it'd be easy. But right now I'm working on FPGA generating HDMI .. much more amusing.)
* yes, of course, I still carry around various Pandoras; still has a hawt sound system, and its way too personal to stop using
(yes, I still lurk; I just don't have free time from 7:30am to 11:30 pm
)
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