now that i’ve got a vita for at least semi-reasonable portable emulation machine,
really just indefinitely holding out one of these that can reliably play saturn stuff + has some kind of 6 face button with a decent d-pad…
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i’ve seen it suggested that these things are actually made for people in certain industries that regularly need to use ancient equipment that will only interface with ancient computers, and as a result, are less powerful than people buying them for games might like
but i know nothing about computer specs so that might be bullshit lol
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The lack of any i/o is weird. No industrial device in the 386 era would have had USB and while you could put an i/o card in the ISA slot it would make wayyy more sense for the thing to at least have a serial port. Almost every contemporaneous computer would have had one and I have absolutely no doubt even modern industrial equipment still uses them in places.
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they do have vga and ps/2 ports, serial may just be impractical given form factor limitations… usb to/from db9 is fairly trivial, no ?
A ps/2 port is a kind of serial port in that data is transmitted serially but it is absolutely not a replacement for a COM-style serial port. Just for starters there are no separate Tx/Rx pins only data and clock lines, and absolutely no flow control pins.
I would be surprised if the usb port on that thing was usable by the actually running OS and isn’t just for firmware updates or something. USB came out in 1996, way after the 386 was obsolete. There are a few weirdo USB drivers for DOS but most just support mass storage and the ones I’ve found that don’t are commercial products. It’s also a protocol with substantial demands on the host (at least by mid-90s standards) and I think the 386 would really struggle.
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someone did a video review of the windows 95 handheld
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few months with the flip and i really do love this little thing
lucky me i bought the clear red (“watermelon”) model because the first run of all the other colours reportedly have a plastics formula problem and shells were breaking open around the hinges not weeks from new… oops !!
i told myself i wanted this for grab-n-go dreamcast and saturn but have so far played thru portal, hl2 & episodes, and shinobi ps2. lately fiddling with the delisted pacman ce port, swedish ski free grand mountain adventure and shiren 5.
for their new thing they’ve rolled back to the form factor of the 2 (4:3 screen, front speakers), with improvements from the 3 and flip (better sticks better placed, stacked triggers, android hard buttons) at a marginal SoC downgrade from those
really don’t need another of these things but they feel like inexpensive magic, fun to pull apart and fiddle around with, great to play.
as a since-forever ios person i can’t help admire the obtuse, scrappy, delightfully fucked up ecosystem that is games on android: gaudy intro’d russian scene releases, closed source emulator fiefdoms, unauthorized native ports of mid 2010’s indie games etz.
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Glad to hear you like it! So the buttons are okay? I have probably asked this 3 times in this thread but I thought the buttons on the RP2 were fine until I touched an anbernic and went “well this is trash.”
I also am not considering another one of these until I beat 10! Games on my current one.
buttons on the flip feel fine i think, nds’ish. bit more frictiony than glossy anbernic xbox skittles but acceptable. the funny-looking analogue slider sticks and triggers… they work !
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have they since fixed the plastic problem?
allegedly ! they claim to have improved the plastics since for all new non-limited non-watermelon colours… however they never really publicly acknowldedged the problem to begin with, it’s all broken telephone via their over-communicative and obviously under-informed english discord mods… big shrug
they do seem to have made right on repairs and replacments for vocal customers with the issue for what that’s worth
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firmware update and several dolphin versions later and this seems suprisingly quite improved, still many compromises involved (PAL-range limits with further tweaks often needed for acceptable performance) but maybe Good Enough in some cases, at least much closer to what was previously only workable for PS2-and-under emulation on this chip.
still not clear of per-title tuning hell but at least there aren’t multiple competing emulator forks to juggle and the best results seem potentially worth tinkering for
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i kinda want a thing to play gbc games with, or up to gba. is the miyoo mini decent for that? seems like abernics have battery issues according to earlier posts
miyoo are a fine choice for emulation up to psx. here are both models next to a gbc. the original mini is sold-thru but the mini plus (miyoo midi ?) is a more practical size anyway
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Terrifying and funny stock photos from amazon
Yeah I bet this can play RDR2 at full resolution sure
What are they playing? why are their hands so small? Also a handheld Famiclone for $20 actually sounds rad
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this is the one I’ve seen people talk about. i do believe it does TV out as well!
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Mine seems to have decent battery life (RG35XX), but I also swapped it with one I got off AliExpress that falsely claimed to be higher capacity than it is (it’s better than the old one, but not by much)
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if you’re angling for one of the mm or rg35xx i suggest buying from their official store
https://miyoo.aliexpress.com
https://anbernic.com
or a known-good reseller
https://www.aliexpress.com/store/1102180101 (ampown)
https://www.keepretro.com
if yr determined to go with amazon, make sure to filter for ‘prime’ so you’re guaranteed a refund if you have any problems
top community software projects for these are ‘onionui’ and ‘garlicos’ respectively
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Personally have been using MinUI on the RG35XX myself. It’s not as fully featured (some folks have made add ons to support a few more consoles that the project lead cut, like Neo Geo and PC Engine), but it installs on top of the stock Anbernic OS and is pretty nice! Clean, snappy, a few tweak options to boost performance for some games.
I dunno, it was good for me, the guy who gets one of these (or sets up a RetroPie or whatever) and spends more time scraping box art and screenshots and switching themes than actually playing them.
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