My bad, you’re right - Metroid Fusion was indeed on the GBA. I was playing Prince of Persia 1 on the Genesis - there’s a ROM hack for it which fixes all the issues with the port and makes it behave pretty much like the OG DOS version, with the added graphics of the Genesis version of course.
Sadly the Miyoo is a bit underspecced for the N64 and Gen 6 consoles, so the PS1 is the highest it can emulate. For newer consoles, you’d be looking at something like the Retroid Pocket 3+ or the upcoming Anbernic RG405V, but of course, they’re bigger and more expensive. The main reason I prefer the Miyoo is because of how lightweight it is, which allows me to game for hours if I felt like it, and it’s size makes it easy to carry around too. But I guess it won’t be long before we get to see a future Miyoo, or an alternative in the same form-factor, having the specs to emulate m Gen 6 consoles.
I did the TV -> projector swap last year, got myself a 4K projector that sits above my bed and projects a massive 100" image on the wall opposite my bed, and it’s awesome. I’ve got my PS5 and Switch hooked to it, and I’m currently living the dream of being able to game and watch movies on a giant screen, all from the comfort of my bed. Some games really shine on such a screen and you see them in a new light, like TotK, Horizon series, Spiderman etc and it’s 100% worth the switch, IMO.
Now I also have a regular monitor - a nice low latency QHD 16:10 monitor with HDR, hooked up to my PC, which also uses a 6600 XT btw. Main reason I use this setup is for productivity, running some PC games that don’t have console equivalents, plus the colors look much nicer compared to my projector. Maybe if I bought a laser projector and had one of those special ALR screens I could get nicer colors, but all that is way beyond my budget. Although these days I’m not on my desktop as much as I used to be (I also have a Ryzen 6000 series laptop that I game on btw), I still like my desktop because of the flexibility and upgradability. I also explored the option of switching to a cloud-first setup and ditching my rig, back when I wanted to upgrade my PC and we had all those supply chain issues during Covid, but in the end, cloud gaming didn’t really work out for me. In fact after exploring all the cloud options, I’ve been kind of put off by cloud computing in general - at least, the public clouds being offered by the likes of Amazon and Microsoft - they’re just in it to squeeze you dry, and take control away from you, and I don’t like that one bit. If I were to lean towards cloud anything, it be rolling my own, maybe using something like a Linode VM with a GPU, but the pricing doesn’t justify it if you’re looking any anything beyond casual usage. And that’s one of the things I like about PC, I could have it running 24x7 if I wanted to and not worry about getting a $200 bill at the end of the month, like I got with Azure, because scummy Microsoft didn’t explain anywhere that you’d be paying for bastion even if the VM was fully powered off…
Anyways, back to the topic of CPUs, I don’t really think we’re at the cusp of any re-imagining, what we’ve been seeing is just gradual and natural improvements, maybe the PC taking inspiration from the mobile world. I haven’t seen anything revolutionary yet, it’s all been evolutionary. At the most, I think we’d see more ARM-like models, like the integrated RAM you mentioned, more SoC/integrated solutions, maybe AI/ML cores bring the new thing to look for an a CPU, maybe ARM itself making more inroads towards the desktop and laptop space, since Apple have shown that you can use ARM for mainstream computing.
On the revolutionary side, the things I’ve been reading about are stuff like quantum CPUs or DNA computers, but these are still very expiremental, with very niche use-cases. In the future I imagine we might have something like a hybrid semi-organic computer, with a literal brain that forms organic neural networks and evolves as per requirements, I think that would be truly revolutionary, but we’re not there yet, not even at the cusp of it. Everything else that I’ve seen from the likes of Intel and AMD, have just been evolutionary.
To be fair, on modern systems it does open quickly in spite of it’s size (probably because most of the shared libraries for UWP apps are already loaded in memory). And at the moment, the new Notepad doesn’t offer any additional features which are common in heavy duty editors, so the “bloat” is mostly from an engineering standpoint. Well, I guess with the recent unwanted addition of Bing search, we’re now starting to see signs of actual user-facing bloat.
Unlike the rest of the answers here, I’ve been mostly retro gaming this week. Got my new Miyoo Mini Plus handheld emulator and it’s been awesome, playing mostly SNES, GBA, Sega Genesis and PS1 games.
Games that I’m playing right now:
- Mega Man 7 (SNES)
- Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (GBA)
- The Lord of The Rings: Two Towers (GBA)
- Metroid Fusion (GBA)
- Prince of Persia 1 (Genesis Romhack)
- Crash Bandicoot 1 (PS1)
The awesome thing about the handheld I’m using is that it supports instant saving and game switching, so if I’m getting bored I just press one button and switch to a different game, and jump into exactly where I left off. Or just press the power button and it’ll instantly suspend, and pressing it back is again an instant resume. Other modern handhelds are more involved or not pocketable, so this has been perfect for me (especially considering the low weight of the thing). I think I’ve gamed the most this week compared to any other weeks this year, because of how convenient it is to game on the Miyoo.
Unfortunately. The i7-6700 is like 8 years old now, and yeah not really that great for anything but basic tasks or playing old school games. Even if you get a modern GPU, you’ll be held back by the CPU. And in case you decide to upgrade to Windows 11/12 in the future (say once Microsoft ends support for Win10), you will need to upgrade your CPU and therefore everything else. Might as well do the upgrade now and switch to AMD for both CPU/GPU as it’ll work out cheaper, and AMD is a better option for gaming anyway.
I just checked this page and none of the games that I’m playing currently are on it (Diablo 4, Elden Ring, God of War, Jedi Survivor etc). It’s not like the games I’m playing are obscure or brand new either. Not to mention some of the console exclusives that I’m also playing, like TotK on the Switch and Horizon FW on the PS5, but of course, I understand that the cloud provider can do nothing about that.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m quite enthusiastic about cloud gaming as well and looked seriously into it a while ago, because I wanted to upgrade my PC but the upgrade costs were looking pretty high (this was during the peak of the supply chain issues during COVID), also I wanted to break out of the constant and expensive upgrade cycles.
But everything I looked at had some or the other limitation, either they didn’t have the games that I was playing, or the service wasn’t available in my country (eg Shadow PC), or it didn’t allow you to bring your own games (Stadia), or it was working out to be too expensive (Azure VM), or had other limitations such as not supporting ultra-wide resolutions at 60+ FPS. I think for me, being able to play my own games is a big fan requirement for it to work, and the pricing of things like Shadow could work out for me, but those sort of services have limited availability, and rolling your own VM on a public cloud can turn very expensive if you’re a heavy gamer, as I’ve experienced first-hand in Azure.
Therefore, IMO, cloud gaming, while is the future, just isn’t there yet.
I actually like exploring the universe, but I’ve been pretty disappointed from what I’ve seen so far. They tried to add space-sim elements to it, but did a half-assed job at it. To make things worse, the planets are mostly barren and not worth exploring either.
In saying that, it is a Bethesda gene, so I’m expecting some beefy mods that add more content and immersiveness to the game, and once that’s done, I may consider buying it when it goes on sale.
In the meantime, I’m really looking forward to finally playing Cyberpunk as it was meant to be, with the new Phantom Liberty DLC.
Which is why in, say, Mass Effect it works well, because you get to explore your ship and talk to the crew between missions and that’s fun, while the travel is minimized
This is exactly what I was expecting. I mean, I’m not asking of hours of travel thru endless space, they could’ve employed wormholes to cut the travel time, but still make the distance seem… distant, a bit more believable and immersive. It could only be a few minutes of travel if you take the wormhole into consideration, but there’s so much you can do to fill that time. Like the spaceships are vast, so you could be assigned activities to do around the ship, like maintenance and minor upgrades, or maybe you could access the ship’s various computer terminals to do stuff - could even have various mini games, or just a mini spaceship RPG type elements, similar to some of the Star Trek games. Just because space is vast and empty doesn’t mean you’re just sitting there and staring at darkness.
Or maybe I had my expectations too high and was expecting a space sim, which this clearly isn’t.
A mission might send you to the other side of the vast starmap, but the actual travel time between systems is always the same (and the poorly explained fuel system, which is actually just your range, isn’t much of a limitation). When I discovered that so much of space flight is effectively a series of non-interactive cutscenes, it largely shattered the illusion of exploring a vast universe. It’s impossible not to compare Starfield to the way you freely enter and exit planets’ atmosphere in No Man’s Sky, so it’s a bit of a letdown every time you see a planet and remember it’s just a picture of a planet you’ll never be able to reach by flying toward it. It’s something that happens a lot.
The fact that you can’t fly over to planets and land, and that you get around the vastness of space by simply fast traveling, is disappointing. This seems less space-y, and more like Fallout-y to me.
As someone who isn’t really into FPS games these days, I think I might give Starfield a skip.
I’m not sure about the price/performance ratio of the actual SoCs, but if you take the Pi Zero 2 W for instance ($15), it can comfortably emulate most consoles up to the 5th generation (PS1, Saturn, N64). The performance is equivalent to that of it’s direct competitor, the Miyoo Mini Plus ($80). If you want to upgrade the Miyoo Mini, you’d have to buy a whole new device, but with the PiBoy you only need to update the Pi (which will only be $15). So sure, it may still need a few upgrade cycles to match the value, but if you treat the original purchase as an investment, spending only $15 for an upgrade doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. Especially when you consider the resale value - the Miyoo Minis are already cheap, so the value of an older model wouldn’t be much if you were to sell it off on say eBay or something, since most folks would prefer buying a newer model which can handle emulating more recent consoles. Whereas the Raspberry Pis - even older ones sell well, one reason being a perpetual supply shortage (just look at all the people in this thread treating buying a Pi like finding unicorns), the other reason being a Pi is always useful - even the first Raspberry Pi can still be used today for things like basic home automation tasks, or even as a tiny web server, as a home security system, or wherever - hundreds of projects out there which don’t really need the computing power of a current gen Pi. Since the PiBoy is targeted at DIY-ers, no doubt there would be a significant portion of it’s buyers into DIY stuff and could make use of a Pi around the house. As DIY-er myself, I can never have enough Raspberry Pis, and always carry a spare Pi or two around with me when I go around - you never know when it may come in handy. For instance, when I recently visited some relatives overseas, I used one of the spare Pis in my backpack to convert their old printer into an wireless printer, so they could now print directly from their phones - and saved them from buying a whole new printer. Raspberry Pis always come in handy like that at unexpected times and places, so you can never have enough of them, but if you do, there are plenty of folks who’d be glad to take the Pi off you for their own projects.
Regarding the display on the PiBoy, I doubt you’d want to upgrade it that many times, I mean, it’s just a tiny 3.5" display used to play mainly 8bit and 16bit games, getting something like a higher resolution or vibrant display would make no difference, since most of these games are low res with a low color pallete. In fact, most of the OG displays of these handhelds had shitty displays by modern standards, so any modern display in itself is a big upgrade compared to what gamers played on back then. At the most, an upgrade which may be worth could be a brighter display or an OLED panel or similar, but even then it would be a one-off upgrade and really, it doesn’t add that much value when you’re mainly playing retro games on there. A display upgrade for a retro console is just one of those “nice to have if you’ve got the spare change” kinda deal.
Also, here’s the main thing: with competing handhelds like the Miyoo Mini Plus (or w/e) there’s no guarantee that there will be an equivalent upgrade. They could change the form-factor in the next Miyoo Mini, or change the material of the chassis, like say switching to a metal chassis, which may make it heavy for you. For instance see the Anbernic devices, although they’ve been around for a while and have released many devices, a new Anbernic may not necessarily be an upgrade for your current one, with so many different form factors to choose from. Like the RG351MP, which felt like a good upgrade on paper, but in reality, most users felt it’s metal body made it quite heavy, making it unsuitable for even moderate length gameplay. So the decicison to go all metal was actually a downgrade, making the earlier plastic versions better. So companies may pull stunts like this, messing around with the form factor or changing features, and then you’d need to look for some other manufacturer who may not have an equivalent, they may use Android for instance, which may result in poorer battery life and performance, so it may not be an upgrade for you.
Also, there’s the problem of support - most of the official firmware on these devices are never updated by the OEM, and they also kinda suck, so most SBC gamers prefer to use a custom firmware, like OnionOS, GarlicOS, ArkOS etc. And these community built firmware may suddenly decide to drop support for older devices, for instance, see how the very popular ArkOS dropped support for the still-popular RG351M/P devices, and users were forced to look for a different firmware. Now this is where the Raspberry Pi shines - not only are there several gaming-oriented firmware you can choose from (such as Retro Pie, JelOS etc), the fact that this is basically a full-fledged computer and a Pi means there are several generic distros you could always switch to, like the official Raspbian for instance, and then just set it up to boot directly into Retroarch or Emulation Station or w/e to get a similar experience as a custom gaming distro. And that’s where the Pi really shines, it’s massive community support and the plethora of software (and hardware) options. A device like the Miyoo Mini may be popular now, but it’ll soon be forgotten, like the poor RG351M/P, and turn into e-waste, whereas a Pi lives on practically forever, if not as a gaming SBC then maybe as something that’ll turn your coffee machine into a smart coffee machine.
That’s the true beauty of a Pi - it’s worth cannot be simply compared in terms of dollars.
Of course. The main advantage of this is upgradability. Say you wanna play Gen 6 consoles in the future and there’s a Pi Zero 3 out, you could just swap out the Pi to upgrade your handheld. Or maybe someone comes out with a better shell, maybe even a different form factor with a 16:9 display or something, you could just swap out the bits instead of buying a whole new handheld.
Also, here’s an alternative which uses a RPi Compute Module 4 instead, if you need more power.
Katamari Damacy - The objective is to roll a ball-like thing called a katamari, to roll up objects, and make the katamari bigger and bigger. You can roll up anything from paper clips and snacks in the house, to telephone poles and buildings in the town, to even living creatures such as people and animals. Once the katamari is complete, it will turn into a star that colors the night sky. Sounds weird, but it’s super fun, trust me. Plus, it’s soundtrack is kickass.