Handheld Gaming in 2024 - No. I'm not buying a Steam Deck.

Product Placement said:
People are saying Switch 2 will be shown sometimes in March, if true I would until then, and try to grab a Switch light for cheap.

A Switch flash card called the MIG Switch has also been announced, even if you don't plan to pirate games, I would still look into seeing how much that opens up emulation.
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I saw this article which was negative because homebrew hasn't been shown yet. I think it comes down to Mig Switch not being available yet and trying to stay under the radar:

The Mig Switch seems to be missing the one killer feature that could make it more than a tool for piracy

I don't remember how far in advance Nintendo shows things off, but rumors are pointing to a September 2024 release, compared to March 2017 for Switch 1.

Stalphos Johnson said:
It looks pretty cool. I'm not wild about the price, but it beats GPD's prices.
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Ayaneo spams out a lot of handhelds and mini PCs. It's likely that they are up to suspiciously Chinese behavior with return policies and firmware updates, but I haven't looked into it. The concept looks great though.
 
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The Mass Shooter Ron Soye said:
I don't remember how far in advance Nintendo shows things off, but rumors are pointing to a September 2024 release, compared to March 2017 for Switch 1.
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Rumours are shown in March, and out in September like you said. But between those two dates could see a Switch Light price drop to get rid of stock or second hand market going down in price with people trying to sell their before the new toy is out.
 
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I heard the Vita is incredibly easy to jailbreak and essentially play any game for it for free so I've been kicking around the idea of getting one of those.
 
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I've been following the cheap android devices for so long its embarrassing. Finally picked one... it was a hit and good one to get. But, past the first few weeks can't be bothered to load anything onto it or play anything.

Only thing my old ass can get it up for is barely working MAME, NES and PCengine and all you need is a potato with a 2 button controller. Don't feel like loading a million things onto it, tweaking it endlessly, updating it, chaing the keymaps around (again), changing OS etc. wtf was I thinking. Fingers crossed on an R4 card for the Switch lite I got and put 10 whole hours on. Any potential homebrew is going to be massive.
 
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A way to make this universally useful would be a sort of mix between AreaCopy and AlwaysOnTop, where you can duplicate and magnify a portion of the top screen.

PC games don't always fit small screens, in a good scenario you would have e.g. the game on top and the bottom screen would be a copy of the minimap or character status, zoomed in. Bonus point if it's fully seamless pinch and drag but I doubt software staff for Chinese hardware vendors can pull if off.
 
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I just watched RGC's video on the Ayaneo Flip DS. To my surprise he did do exactly what I theorized wih AlwaysOnTop OnTopReplica: duplicate a part of the top screen on the bottom screen, and enlarge it.

I still think it should be a default feature of the built-in software; but from an end user perspective, it's something you want to be able to do, and you can.
 
I'm a retard who managed to brick his old Vita during the YAMT section (and also fucked up the little battery plug holder but that's a fiddly little fuck so it's understandable) so I went for the new Retroid 2S as the chinkshit spreadsheet places it in the sweet spot of "Cheap and plays up to Dreamcast".
I'll take it for a spin and report back.

One fun game that works with shitty phone touch controls is Mario's Picross on gameboy. That shit is like crack to me and is perfect for dipping in for 5 minutes at a time.
 
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Mega Black said:
I heard the Vita is incredibly easy to jailbreak and essentially play any game for it for free so I've been kicking around the idea of getting one of those.
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I'm a mong and have no time to read, or follow, autistic instructions on how to hack shit.
That said, it took me all of an hour from picking up my PS Vita to having it hacked, working and every game from Pong all the way to PS1/N64 games downloaded on my PC, ready to transfer on to a 64gb SD card. (You transfer files by plugging the vita into the PC).

I beat megalomania while on a plane. Fun times.

I have the OG OLED Vita and it works very well. Some controls can be a bit dodgy on the PS1/N64 games, but for retro (pre-3d) era games it's fucking banging.
Sonic, Mario and MDK on one device? Yers plizz.
 
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Bog-standard Poster said:
I'm a mong and have no time to read, or follow, autistic instructions on how to hack shit.
That said, it took me all of an hour from picking up my PS Vita to having it hacked, working and every game from Pong all the way to PS1/N64 games downloaded on my PC, ready to transfer on to a 64gb SD card. (You transfer files by plugging the vita into the PC)
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For anyone else looking to get a Vita, follow the guides at gbatemp, it might be riddled with trannys but because they’re all unemployable the tutorials are kept up to date.

Bog-standard Poster said:
MDK
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Good man.
 
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Been seeing basically every handheld YouTuber shilling this thing. Either it's that good, or there's payola going on. The titles alone are suspect.
 
Oculus founder Palmer Luckey is making a new Game Boy Color system called the ModRetro Chromatic:
The approach of making a reproduction device with heirloom grade build quality is an interesting idea. Price is $199 and it is supposed to be available by Christmas this year.
 
King Vidiot said:
Oculus founder Palmer Luckey is making a new Game Boy Color system called the ModRetro Chromatic:
The approach of making a reproduction device with heirloom grade build quality is an interesting idea. Price is $199 and it is supposed to be available by Christmas this year.
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I already trust this more than that Anallingus handheld because it has the native screen res, has a body that looks ergonomic instead of a flat slab, the cart slot's not just 95% open air and faith in the cart not nudging, and it can still use AAs (fuck the redditor mongs making everything use mystery meat internal lithiums that'll ballooon in a few years).
 
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What does Chromatic bring to the table? How good is their in-house game development staff?

Because I can buy four working Game Boy Colors in four different colors for $199 which can already play Game Boy and Game Boy Color games, just not Chromatic games.

And if I only wanted one GBC and wanted to backlight it, that also comes in lower than $199.
 
Judge Dredd said:
Been seeing basically every handheld YouTuber shilling this thing. Either it's that good, or there's payola going on. The titles alone are suspect.
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I was genuinely interested in getting one until I saw that the screen resolution was fucked.

If I can't run GBA games at an integer scale for an obvious GBA knockoff then what's the point? I'm not asking for a 4k screen but could they at least put a screen in that scaled properly.
 
There have been rumors about Xbox making its own handheld for a while now. But long before that could happen, there will be an ASUS ROG Ally 2 model with a dedicated Xbox button:

ASUS ROG Ally 2 gaming handhelds leaked: up to AMD Ryzen Z2 Extreme and 64GB memory
The company will launch two models of the ROG Ally 2, which is officially named this way in documentation. As stated, there are two models: a black version and a white version. Apparently, the black version has a small difference: if you look closely, you’ll notice a button that either doesn’t appear with the logo or is used for a different purpose on the white model. That button is the Xbox button.
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It’s unclear whether Microsoft plans to launch an Xbox OS for gaming handhelds. More likely, this version will offer deeper integration with the Xbox ecosystem, possibly through a dedicated button to launch the Xbox app on Windows. This is of course speculative at this point.
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On memory: Steam Deck has 16 GB, technically matching the consoles, but falling short of typical gaming PCs that have 32 GB of RAM + 8-16 GB VRAM. AMD's software can be used to allocate a certain amount of RAM used by an APU as VRAM. 64 GB in a high-end PC gaming handheld is there mostly for marketing purposes, but I could see 24 GB or 48 GB options gaining traction, so you could do a 16+8 or 32+16 virtual split. I expect Steam Deck 2 to use at least 24 GB.

ASUS's cheaper model is supposedly using "Aerith Plus", which as far as we know is simply the same APU used in the Steam Deck but with slightly higher clocks. Offering something virtually identical to the Steam Deck years later is an interesting choice, when there are newer APUs for the low-end like the "Ryzen Z2 Go" (4-core Zen 3+, 12 CU RDNA2). But at least 4 million Steam Decks have been sold, so that is a lot of these Aerith chips that have been made, which could drive the cost of binning an updated one down.

ASUS's existing cheap model uses the Ryzen Z1 (Non-Extreme!), with a faster CPU but slower GPU than the Steam Deck.
 
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