I sense wearable Skyrim in my future.

Your phone can run Skyrim.

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I think the rule anymore is generally if it can run on a Switch it can probably run on your phone.

Ya, people don't realize how old skyrim is, and/or how fast phones are nowadays.

This little thing packs more oomph than full blown pc — crazy

>..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.

I don't think anymore is the word you're looking for.

It would make more sense in a context like "The rule that phones can't run Switch games is not valid anymore."

Maybe from the year 2005.

But that's true of almost all modern phones.

My Galaxy Fold Z3 probably outperforms my 2004 Celeron 1.5ghz with 512 mb RAM computer.

Actually, it might have had 2.5 ghz. I can't remember. It was a Celeron D.

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.

Dude you got a dell! 👍

Phones these days are generally fast enough to emulate the switch, we’re far beyond that

I mean pretty obvious. Can a 2004 Celeron run Fortnite, Genshin impact etc? No my phone can at 90ish fps on max settings lmao.

2.66Ghz. Don't ask me how I remember this from 2006.

But my tshirt can't... yet!

And the sad thing is, I'd buy it. Again. For my phone.

Yeah, well soon your credit card will be able to as well.

Thanks!

Self built, but probably equivalent to a Dell budget model from 2005 haha.

Goodness. It came out 2011. At this rate, it'll likely have gone 15 years until we see TES VI. I really can't understand why they don't employ parallel teams to make their flagship games. I wouldn't mind if they tried to milk out the series a little bit more (not that elderscrolls online crap, that shit ain't canon), over a decade is way too long.

I can’t wait for this to only be available to YouTubers and tech influencers while we get fleeced on the secondary market!

I get the reasoning behind it, but it's still wild we hit 1ghz in around 2000, then 2ghz just a few years later and have pretty much stayed there since for practically everything.

I remember the mhz/ghz wars just ramping up like Moore's law and then it suddenly stopped.

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Oh yeah? I remember springing for the math co-processor on my 486 when I upgraded from my 386. Doom worked so damn good after that.

I want to see doom run on those new credit cards that have the lcd display for the security digits

..I......I totally would.

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So where do you put the cables controlling your 3D printer in your phone?

They are two wildly different use cases.

Looks good as long is it doesn't have a crappy RealTek Ethernet chip.

since rpi4's are impossible to get the last couple years, I'll take anything if it'll run some octoprint and klipper.

Multi-core multi-thread wars started up about the time the GHz wars ended along with a huge amount of processing for gaming being offloaded to dedicated GPU’s

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I just set up Octoprint and Klipper on a Le Potato Libre board this morning! $35 and seems to be working well so far for that particular use-case. Compared to RPi MSRP, not a great deal, but for actual prices… no integrated Wi-Fi is the biggest downside.

Nah, I want to pay $700 more for a Mac Mini /s

Jeff Gerling will have 12 in a cluster while we all fight to get 1 lol.

If you asked me back in 2000 seeing the movement from 20mhz to 100mhz to 1ghz in relatively short time I'd figure we'd be at 15ghz by now and 128gb memory

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Hey, does anyone remember the 667mhz PCs? Weren't they supposed to be 666mhz - going along with the numbering convention they used (multiples of 16)?

:D

Lol no. Hrres sum gramar 4u.

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If something had the depth and width of a credit card, but is one hundred feet tall, it would still be referred to as “credit card sized”.

That's pretty cool. Didn't know some dialects use it. Thanks for the info!

15 years post Skyrim seems way too soon. Iirc, Bethesda said they haven’t even started developed of ES6.

Maybe 25 years after Skyrim, we’ll get a Skyrim remaster, and 10 years after that we’ll get ES6, but it’ll be streaming only.

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USB C port.

I never knew about this! Thank you for this information.

You guys have phones, right?

I really wouldn't expect ES6 this century, they wouldn't rush a game like this of course.

Your phone was capable enough years ago.

Original Skyrim requirements:

• Processor: Dual Core 2.0GHz or equivalent processor.

• Memory: 2GB System RAM.

• 6GB Storage

Yeah, think my phone could handle that. Hell, my Watch could nearly handle that.

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Wellllllll

Mac Mini M2:

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/19960328

Rockchip rk3588S:

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/11371316

But these $99 or whatever mini computers are still absolutely AMAZING for hobbyist stuff and emulators!l but for $599 that Mac Mini don’t start at a bad price for the speed

The $99 board would handle up through Dreamcast and some PS2 great but that M2 could get you Gamecube, Switch emulation and PS3

They had to have started some development since they released a teaser a while back

Dual core x86 is a fair bit different from dual core ARM

Maybe, but my phone has a Hexa-core (2x 3.46 GHz Everest + 4x 2.02 GHz Sawtooth) CPU so it’d be smoking that 2 core x86 without breaking a sweat

There are a lot of cheap i5-6500T pc's on ebay and unlike a RP4 they came with a ssd, case, powersupply.

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/20020208?baseline=20027404

flips the turbo switch and boots up DOS

Wow, you must feel on top of the world. What a champion.

What kinda emulation would this be able to handle? I want to order the 8gb model

I run skyrim on my light-up shoes.

I see your expectations are in check.

But will it run Crysis ?!

Specifications incomplete. Runs at 1 FPS (frames per day).

Yeah....

Sadly there will always be some random "devil's advocates"/"rabid fans"/"corporate dogs" that will always be on their side, saying many of their loved reasons:

• "People will still buy it anyways"
• "They're making a shitton of money, why would they change that?"
• "Look at how many awards Skyrim got, so you have zero right"
• "It's a AAA game, it requires all that time and effort"
• "You don't run the company"
• [my 'favorite'] "They have to maximize their profits, it's REQUIRED BY LAW" [no it's not.]

At the end of the day, I would prefer:

• Games announced at most 1 year before release
• Decent profit, aim to spread the game so more people can enjoy it, not trying to squeeze every last cent.

I really hope not. ES6 maybe.

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Todd Howard was on the Lex Friedman podcast. They are in development but not the full team is on it yet.

That all sounds great but I’m sure it’ll be impossible to put your hands on one.

How would you do that? I mean would you just control the computer controlling the 3D printer or could the phone do the whole job?

I'm actually curious about this because hell yeah even the cheapest phone have so much CPU power, but it seems it's locked (sort of) and you can't just write 10 lines of python (or whatever) to control a stepper motor or three.

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.

I haven't done it, but whatever you can write for raspberry, you can write in Java for Android.

Why would I flip up the turbo switch? It makes all my games mess up and run too fast.

People seriously misunderstand fiduciary duty lol

I’ve heard even the beefy RPis can’t do N64, if this can I might upgrade my Retro Pi to a Retro Rad

I remember when the pi came out and it was supposed to be this super duper cheap mini pc board and now you're looking at £150 for a 4gb model 4. At that point I ask myself what am I even doing.

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Up to ps1/n64 probably

Ok thank you

> widely-available emulator handhelds

The Steam Deck?

My raspberry pi 3 had no issues with N64 games, be weird if they lost that ability.

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).

Much higher power consumption then any SBC though. Would be a neat way to run multiple printers though. Throw up some VM's and pass through some usb ports

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).

I don't know what kinda credit card you got where you're from but I assure you.. that ain't no credit card sized sbpc

I just got a Le potato! It’s pretty great for what I use it for (streaming movies/tv)

Ah, so like the fabled Half-Life 3

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.

!!!

These mag have quite a shot, then!

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

Rpi shines with software and community support rather than hardware and price imo but, for me, for most Rpi use cases, an alternative board can really do the trick.

Only maybe in robotic/education where you really need strong support for GPIO/sensors libraries you'd be better off with a pi.

Don’t forget about raspberry pi foundation hiring a cop on mastodon. Buzzfeed article about it

I thought the latest Intel processors can turbo to 6Ghz now.

For 99% of consumer products they're around 2ghz

666.6, so 667 when rounded.

Hey, at least you didn't buy a 14 node server rack cluster, and kit it out with 2 pi's to test it and then tell yourself "I'll buy the other 12 soon™".

Why must you torture me economy. Why

wow that article is the definition of overreaction

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.

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

The Switch is a phone from seven years ago.

Mostly the latter id argue

Switch emulation… that would be neat!

Is this a good (available) option for making a cheap USB network printer server or is there a better option?

:)

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

I have the rockpi-4b and it has been a champ. I have one running Pi-hole on my network, and another that is my astrophotography computer. The only complaint I have had is with regards to shipping time but other than that it has been great

anything beats paying 200+ USD for a raspi

Just buy a dedicated print server appliance. They’ve existed since the 90s.

Pi-hole requires almost no resources to run. Such a waste to dedicate and entire piece of hardware to just that.

Dayum, 16GB of RAM on a credit card sized board? My much bigger PC Tower only has that much. XD

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.

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.

666.66 rounds to 667mhz

I'm not holding my breath, but the RPi Foundation claims their production should get back to pre-pandemic levels this year.

Yeah, anything the Switch can run, your phone could probably run it better.

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.

Not in Skyrim, which won't use your six cores but will limit you to what ever performance one of your ARM cores provide

The Apple M1 proved that ARM cores can outpace x86 in terms of performance. Not sure why you’d think ARM chips are inherently weaker or less capable of gaming than x86

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The apple M1 is a VERY different beast from the ARM device here. It has a significantly increased number of instruction sets supported, as well as is capable of x86 and amd64 emulation. While you can absolutely run windows 10arm on one of these, you will be significantly limited to what software is designed for ARM.

We deal with the surface Pro X a lot at work, and getting something as simple as a printer driver to work consistently a ROYAL PITA. And those are devices that DO have x86 and AMD64 (Win11) emulation built right in. Running something like as complex physics engine is a total different ballgame. While it most definitely can be done, it requires the cpu to do a huge amount more work because it has to emulate a different architecture since most physics engines don't support ARM in the slightest.

I'm not saying its not possible with any ARM chip, I'm just saying its extremely unlikely with that one. Even if you could get it to run without crashing (good luck, skyrim is crashy on a good day), you would be looking at a sideshow.

Sure your device might have a fair bit of horsepower, but also keep in mind that skyrim isn't capable of using ARM cpus without hardware emulation (currently) which adds SIGNIFICANT overhead. Not only that, but it wouldn't be able to use more than one cpu core. As for which one, your guess is as good as mine.

Also cellphone ARM cpus don't have layer 2 or layer 3 cache, and some don't even have layer 1 cache. This alone is enough to basically negate any possibility of a cellphone running desktop workloads.

You also didn't account for any performance required to actually render things. The cpu on the phone may be capable of the simulation calculations, but it straight up doesn't have the horsepower to do those AND render the simulation.

There's a reason that phone cpus draw 5W at the most and even basic power efficient laptops have a minimum TDP of 15W. A significant amount of that power is going to fetch actions to and from the various caches on the cpu.

How is it for kernel updates? Rockchip have had a not great history in that regard

Everything you just said is completely wrong.

• Skyrim is on the switch, which is Arm based.

• Basically every modern SoC has a ton of cache, L1/2/3. The A14 in my phone has 192+128KB L1 per Firestone core, and 8MB L2 shared.

• “Render the simulation”? This is a video game we’re talking about here, not folding@home. All phones have had some kind of 3D GPU for over a decade now. The ones in flagships now already far exceed 360/PS3.

• Phones still reach high performance levels despite their power limits.

There are already many games that run well on Windows 11 VM on M1/M2 (Parallels Desktop). For example the Witcher 3, and funnily enough, Skyrim (1080p medium runs at 60fps reportedly). So that's just not true. In any case, performance issues is not a result of the ARM architecture pre se, but rather the fact that PC games are designed with x86 in mind only. If Skyrim were to be converted to Unreal Engine or Unity, for example, it would run very well on ARM devices.

Edit: Can’t believe I forgot about it, but the Switch literally has Skyrim available. And the Switch is an ARM-based chip with a “mobile” CPU/GPU, with 2015-grade performance. Modern mobile processors like the Apple A16 or Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 easily offer 2~3x the CPU/GPU performance

How does this processor compare to the rpi4b?

I'm reading here and there that 'much' isn't always all that true. Be nice to have real figures.

Well, until you try to upgrade past the base RAM.

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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.

Unfortunately I damaged the Wi-Fi module on the board (the and connector failed) when upgrading the eMMC chip so instead of throwing out the whole system, it was just easier to relegate it to Pi-hole duty

Kernel updates have been fine… I use Armbian as my distro and update it monthly with little to no issues. I’m not religious about checking it every day since the Astrocomputer isn’t connected to the internet. Or the Pi-hole computer I just let it run as is and don’t really mess with it

They hired someone with a lot of relevant expertise and people are losing their minds because he used to be a cop. That article is ... just trash.

Looking at the actual post on rpi:

>“I used to be a police officer tackling serious organised crime and terror threats across the east of the UK,” Toby tells us

and the people in the BS BF article are extrapolating that as somehow being anti-protester and lamenting that his hiring is somehow "pro cop". Wild stuff.

Who cares, you will not be finding one

Skyrim already runs fine on low end arm devices (Nintendo switch).

The switch at this point is basically the same as an entry level cell phone.

I think the apocalypse will have come by then and we’ll be “playing” Fallout instead

If only iOS would open up to more games. I’d love fallout or Skyrim on my phone. Best I have so far is KOTOR

That website name...

Aaaaaaand it’s gone

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.

Yeah, windows PC versus a near universal computer that can be almost whatever you need it to be.

Most of them a power supply that maxes out at 120w vs the pi4 with its 15w power supply. My guess is at idle usage would likely be around 30w so still a decent amount above a pi but still cheap to run 24x7.

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Like a raspberry pi but in stock?

>The Apple M1 proved that ARM cores can outpace x86 in terms of performance.

And a lot of the performance wins are due to the ASICs on the SoC instead of actual core performance. ASICs will always outperform general purpose processors because they are specially designed to do a certain task well instead of doing everything ok.

>Switch literally has Skyrim available.

Skyrim is not a good example for this though. Skyrim had it's ten year anniversary 2 years ago. This means that the "2015-grade performance" is actually 2 generations ahead of what was available when Skyrim released.

>then 2ghz just a few years later and have pretty much stayed there since for practically everything.

*looks at the base speed of 3.6GHz and max boost of 5GHz at stock of his 12700k*.

The wall CPUs hit in terms of frequency was 5GHz-6GHz. Silicon just doesn't like going past those clock speeds without pulling a ton of power and producing a butt load of heat.

I'd wager 99.9%+ of all consumer cpus used today are in the 1-2ghz range.

Only issue with porting Skyrim would be buttons, but I suppose since most people own some form of console controller (XBOX is the best for this btw), that wouldn’t be an issue. I’d love to see an iPhone of the highest scale play through, especially if it used VRR to scale power consumption. And hey, if Bethesda can’t do it, you fucking know a modder will

Yeah a teaser which any decent editors and VFX artists or devs with 2 minutes on Unreal could smack together. I’ll trust their dev team once I see either cinematic trailers or even a clay render of a single environment

Fun fact: Cyberpunk 2077 has a reference to ES6. Jackie says in a piece of lore that “my grand pops was super hyped for a new game or something. Can’t remember what is was called, but it ain’t out so it must’ve been bad. Haha. Hey V, if you ever find yourself in one of those old-timey game rental places, try and figure which one it is for me, eh?”

So even in 2077 they haven’t released it

The key part is to 'act in the best interests of [the company]'. Maybe loss leaders helps build the user base, or helping another company means building a future portfolio that spreads the influence of the company. Both of these would be seen as a death sentence if "maximize profit" was the only goal.

It could be argued that killing the company for a single quarter's highest profits could be seen as an act against the best interests of the company, but proving that can be impossible (unless the person in charge ends up parachuting out immediately afterwards, and even then they would have to have some hard proof against them.)

I'm talking about how the smartphone would control a 3D printer. How would it do that?

How do you know it was in reference to es6? Sounds more like HL3 to me.

A phone is literally a computer. It takes commands and puts out signals. Whatever signals the raspberry pi puts out to the printer, the phone can do through USB.

The machine that's doing it doesn't matter. Phone, desktop, laptop, calculator, pi, Xbox. As long as the right software is there, and the machine is fast enough to do what needs to be done, any device can send out the right signals.

So USB is how you connect it to a printer.

Numbers are a bit off, for example an rpi4 will idle around 2.875 watts and peak around 6.4 watts ( https://linuxhint.com/power-consumption-raspberry-pi/ ) compare this with a NUC NUC6i5SYK that idles around 10 watts and peaks to around 50 watt ( https://www.legitreviews.com/intel-nuc-nuc6i5syk-skylake-mini-pc-review_181093/4 )

Let’s say you are at idle 80% of the time and peak for 20%, should be around 18 watts for the nuc and 3.58 watt for the rpi4. Typically if you are running some sort of service you will need to run this 24/7, and let’s take an example electrical cost (mine) of 24 cents per kwh for electrical with distribution fee. That’s around $3.11 per month or $37 per year for the NUC or 62 cents per month / or 7.44 per year for the rpi.

Now don’t get me wrong there are applications for both but with how many various systems I already have it’s not a insignificant difference depending on application.

Okay I understand now, I think it boils down to:

"As long as the right software is there"

and your lack of understanding how computers and networks work in general I guess?

Is there a "software" for your phone to control a/my 3D printer? I guess not. Java compiler is a software in itself, as are C/C++ compilers, 3D printer firmware etc. You can technically write it, but that is usually done by either a multi billion company or an open source group of hundreds, thousands of people (I mean you need to use stuff done by others to get your thing running).

Also, how do you hook your phone up to the 3D printer? It won't happen by itself.

You are right in theory, but not in practice I'd say!

Cheers

/u/Valmond

Imagine telling a software engineer that he "doesn't know how computers work". That's adorable.

I had klipper running on an mks pi! Then I bricked it.

/u/theferalengineer made a video on it

Makerbase mks pi, bigtreetech pi4b/cb1, orange pi, libre renegade, old computer collecting dust in the basement...

:D