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_91919 t1_j5g02bb wrote

>..although I suspect the main draw is that the form factory is close enough to the Raspberry Pi Model B that it could be used as a drop-in replacement in some situations

Something that "just works" on a Raspberry Pi will take days/weeks of debugging to get working on a Radxa board. Maybe they are better now but I still have PTSD from using a Radxa board years ago. Can't beat the RPI ecosystem.

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GatoradeNipples t1_j5g5lsu wrote

As I understand it, this is more interesting for manufacturers than for end users.

If you've been paying attention to the whole emulator handheld ecosystem (Anbernic, Miyoo, Retroid, etc), most of those run on Rockchip SOCs. A new Rockchip SOC coming out means there's gonna be a solid power jump in what those are capable of, which means we might finally see widely-available emulator handhelds that can do PS2 and Gamecube without issues.

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Jon_TWR t1_j5h3at2 wrote

> widely-available emulator handhelds

The Steam Deck?

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GatoradeNipples t1_j5h3s7k wrote

Stuff like the Steam Deck and GPDWin and etc is kind of its own separate class from what I'm talking about.

The devices I'm referring to are generally very small, top out around $200ish in price, generally manufactured in China, and specifically geared towards playing retro games (usually running some variant of EmulationStation or a home-rolled libretro frontend, with a select few having a proper OS of their own or running Android). As it stands, these basically top out at Dreamcast and PSP (and some games in either library don't run very well).

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Jon_TWR t1_j5hl16t wrote

I mean, yes…but Steam Deck is $400, and can emulate through the PS3/Xbox 360/Switch.

Some games might have some issues, and I could be wrong but I feel like it’ll be a while before an ARM SBCcatches up to the power/tdp of the Steam Deck.

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jay9e t1_j5hqzkg wrote

The steam deck is also pretty huge tho. The form factor is not quite the same.

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AkechiFangirl t1_j5ine70 wrote

Well he said tops out at $200ish in price but that is the absolute max. Most of the market is in the 50-100 dollar range and imo they don't compete with the steam deck. Something the size of the DMG Gameboy (or, in the case of some of the mini handhelds like the Miyoo mini, the size of a Gameboy cartridge) with excellent battery life is simply not in the same product category as the Steam Deck. Sure, the Deck can emulate a few of the more recent consoles (as well as y'know, PC games) but it is absolutely massive, has a battery life of like, 5 hours max if you're playing NES games or whatever, and this one is personal taste but the dpad kinda sucks for retro games. Like, it's usable but I don't really want to play any platformers on it.

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RiderExMachina t1_j5j70pk wrote

The main difference here is that the emulator handhelds the other person is talking about run ARM CPUs where the Steam Deck is still using an x86_64 processor.

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QuerulousPanda t1_j5h7r3x wrote

All those little handheld emulators look sweet as hell these days, but I don't understand why, despite technology improving steadily and cpus getting better and more efficient all the time, they're always underpowered.

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talkstoaliens t1_j5i4p1l wrote

Why do you say they are underpowered? I’ve got several anbernic handhelds and I’m always impressed by what they can emulate. Some systems actually require a legit gaming computer to emulate the games, but that’s not a hit against the handhelds. Steam Deck is an emulation powerhouse for the price though.

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QuerulousPanda t1_j5i98ea wrote

I've been getting ads for ambernic and powkiddy handhelds and they look pretty great, with some great features, etc. I can absolutely see the appeal but they're also a bit too expensive to be worth taking the risk on.

By underpowered though I mean even going back to the dingoo a320, they've always underdelivered. You can't be sure sound will work, the emulators cant hit framerates, they offer support for many consoles but a bunch are "just barely", and even though performance and capacity has increased vastly, whenever I check out video reviews, I see games struggling to run properly.

It's just weird, it feels like they're always using bottom of the barrel components that appear to have decent specs, but just aren't up to the right level.

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AkechiFangirl t1_j5inslo wrote

A lot of the issues you're describing can probably be attributed to the stock firmware. For whatever reason the manufacturers of these devices ship them with firmware on it that functions and manages to do little else.

There are a lot of community options (depending on the device of course) that make them far easier to use and in some cases more performant too.

Yes, they can be a little pricey but for less than 100 bucks you can probably fit it in your budget. If you can't, well, the device you're using reddit on can probably also emulate games, so, you can get your fix that way.

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VexingRaven t1_j5iefct wrote

Didn't modern PCs still struggle with some PS2 titles even just a few years ago? It was never an issue with my specs but I always heard a lot of titles were unplayable on anything but a high end gaming PC, and although that was quite a few years ago I doubt the new Rockchip is going toe to toe with even a 6 year old gaming PC.

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AkechiFangirl t1_j5io2h6 wrote

Well part of the answer to that is simply Moore's law, computers have just gotten faster and more efficient in 6 years, the other is that PS2 emulators themselves have had some great progress lately.

Here's some gameplay on a $150 android handheld, see for yourself.

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VexingRaven t1_j5ioieo wrote

Moore's Law or not these systems still don't (quite) stack up against the PCs I would've been playing PS2 games on at the time. I was unaware, however, of just how far PS2 emulation has come. Might have to give it a poke again sometime.

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AkechiFangirl t1_j5ioxdv wrote

What I meant was that it is a part of it, but yeah definitely the majority of the difference is in the quality of the emulators.

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GatoradeNipples t1_j5jnagd wrote

PS2 has had a lot of rapid advancement in emulation over the past few years; there's still some problem titles (MGS2/3, the Ace Combat series, the God of War series) that require extra beef to get to fullspeed, plus a few games like Silent Hill 2 and 3 that are a little glitchy regardless of your hardware unless you enable workarounds, but past that, if you have a quad-core that's either Haswell or later (for Intel) or running on some form of Zen (for AMD), and an even halfway decentish GPU, you can run 95% of the library fullspeed without issues.

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Green0Photon t1_j5gz2ki wrote

Imagine if everything was upstream Linux and used UEFI/EBBR to boot and interact with firmware. Then we wouldn't have to deal with weirdo quirky systems and people could actually use these boards with confidence.

It's just that RPI is so popular that its quirks can be worked around and that it can be mostly upstreamed.

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cAtloVeR9998 t1_j5h55fq wrote

It may not be SystemReady, but it will capable of running a generic ARM image with a standard ESP setup. Though the catch is, you need to flash the SPI ROM first. This means either plugging it into a different machine, booting it up into firmware flashing mode (maskrom), and using rkdeveloptool to flash the image. Or boot their custom image off a microSD card or eMMC module and flash from there. You can do that now that on the Rock Pi 4 (running the RK3399). Everything has been upstreamed too my knowledge. Rockchip is currently in the process of up-streaming support for the RK3588(S), so it will be some months until a purely generic ARM OS will be bootable. Though in both their provided images, and in a generic ARM OS, it may be advantages to apply their provided device tree overlays (eg, switch the default PCIe Gen 1 to Gen 2. Support for some Raspberry peripherals).

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Green0Photon t1_j5h8jbc wrote

!!!

These mag have quite a shot, then!

And maybe someone will be smart enough to sell them preflashed.

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cAtloVeR9998 t1_j5hl796 wrote

Also note that with the SPI firmware installed, NVMe booting “just works”

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