Rediscovering Classic Games and Conclusion

Welcome to episode four hundred and twenty of the Dual Boot Diaries. That's the wrong one. Whoop's Atlanta episode forty one, but B, this isn't the Dual Boot Diaries. Okay, hold on, hold on, here we go reset in this episode of the Full Nerd, we talked about handheld. No, no, no, no , I don't do that one anymore. Oh, you're right, you're right. We're doing we're talking about handhelds. Hold on. Yeah , this is entry four hundred twenty of Expedition Handheld Even four episode. No, that's not it either. Also you've only been like ten episodes of those. That's too many episodes. Wait, what podcast this is? This is Brad and Will made a tech pod. You're Brad. Hi. Oh, hi, I'm Brad. No, you're not Brad actually, but Brad's out on family stuff this week. So our friend of the show, Adam Patrick Murray has decided I'm just doing the intro before we get to the intro. This was this was barely a cold open. It's a lightly warm. It's a stale, warm open, Brad you know maybe Brad, maybe I just have too many podcasts in my life It's possible it's possible. I got to tell you we have two dogs here again this week and I am a sleepy boy 'cause my wife and I went to the Valkyries game and were there until like eleven o'clock last night and then we came home to dogs that would not go to sleep because they'd been crated for four or five hours and they would come back and were wild. Oh, they had the energy. They had the Zoomies . So now , guess who guess who has two thumbs and slept about four hours last night this guy right here? That guy you can't see this isn't a video podcast No, I just assume I didn't even do it. I just it's a podcast of lies. They're just gonna have to assume you have two thumbs. Yeah. I do have two thumbs, see? Nobody can see that. You can, you can look, man . I'm only a single source , you know, people need to get in another source to truly trust the number of thumbs that you have. I don't even know if you count as a single source at them. I'm going to honest Mr Briskit two brisk two brisk two makes Welcome to Brad Will Mated TechPod. I'm Will and today as said in the cold open where I got ahead of myself . I'm joined by one Adam Patrick Murray of PC World in the Full Nerd and newly formed of Expedition Handheld, a podcast about handheld games things that aren't game boys or are the kids put like do they play is the Vita still a thing? Do kids still play the doing a David Letterman bit now, I think. But over the show Adam. Hello. Don't worry. I have a Vita right behind me if you need to go g merab it. Mine's right over there. I dug it out actually because I thought it was a PSP and it turns out it was the Vita instead. But I mean some would argue it's better , but you know, everyone has different tastes in handhelds. And that's what Russ Crand ell from Retro Game Corps and I talk about on Expedition Hintheld. It's just all kinds of handhelds, new, old, weird. We actually had a friend of the show Steve Lynn on recently he brought by a bunch of weird, mysterious horrible handhelds from the past. That was a good time so did he bring in lynx No, no, it was even more severe than that. So he had a Gizmondo . He got the end gauge, he had the game dot com. I know it's not dot com but it's Yeah , I remember that one. Yeah. So, you know, just little footnotes in handheld past . It was a good time. Yeah, but today we're talk going about to like basically the state the kind of current state of handheld game game stuff because there was new stuff that came out at ComputeX a couple of weeks ago which you were where you were at and you had some hands on time with there's some new I guess they're not APUs because they're intels and APUs are all AMD, right? But there's new there 's new chips for handhelds from Intel , which is a new the first time they've done that a dedicated piece of hardware . And yeah, and like also this may surprise everybody , but shit's going wild in the in the prices of existing X eighty six bas ed handhelds. Yeah. By the way, we can cuss here. Yeah, you can say whatever you want. We got all the words. We're not on YouTube. Wow is that Adam Patrick Murray's first podcast swear? No, I've definitely swear before, but usually I try to keep it buttoned up. But I forgot here, there's no rules. Yeah, we don't like this isn't on YouTube. So if we get if we say all the bad words in the first five minutes, who cares? It works itself out . Like Apple's not going to delist us. Nice. Well, I could hold on real quick before we dive into it. I have to give a little bit of an update because I know you guys are very excited about Intel's Wildcat Lake. We do a platform. Someone would say they were wild and about wildcat lake. Yeah, I have an interview over on PCWorld. com where I interviewed Tom Peterson Intel's Tap handhelds and their initiative. And I did ask the question, what about wildcat lake? And he was like, wait, what, why are you asking this question? Like he had to ask his handler off the side. He's like, wait, wildcat lake, why is he asking this question? And they were like, yeah, no, there's only there's only two no No , no, it's a four. It's four XE three cores for the GPU. And he's like, yeah, no, that's not gonna be enough . yeah, I tried to ask, but it doesn't seem like Wild Cat Lake is going to be in gaming handhelds, but I did see a lot of wildcat lake at Computex . Well, okay, so for folks who don't know Wildcat Lake is Intel's upcoming it's is it a Celeron or is it 's in the same kind of class as that, right? Yeah, they I believe they retired the cellaron name so I didn't see it I didn't or at least I didn't see the name Celeron anywhere. It's still the core. It's not an ultra, but it's an intel core series three hundred It's just the low end of that, the low power stuff. Yeah, so it's it's coming in a bunch of like five hundred seventy thousand dollars laptops of like five hundred hundred and six dollars laptops, it seems like. Laptops so many PCs, small boards . The thing the thing, the reason we are excited about it here at the TechPod is it's a pretty capable real, low power , great and inexpensive home server box or home lab box . So if you want to have like a big docker, big bunch of docker containers running on something , it seems like the next in a long line of really good intel processors, you know, starting with like the Alder Lake Celerons, which were like the N one hundred and N one hundred five, which were typically like two hundred fifty two hundred and fifty dollars boxes . So yeah, we're excited about wildcat Lake over here, but nobody at Intel seems like they're excited about Wildcat Lake. When I ask questions about Wildcat Lake over there , I get the same blank stares that you got from Tom where they're like, Which one is that again? Oh yeah, nobody No, nobody cares about that . Yeah, why is everyone excited about that? , listen, I'm trying to ask the serious questions for the tech pot audience , but it's not coming to handhelds. Okay. What they do have a new cessor series called the Intel Arc G series . So G for games? Yeah, pretty much G for gaming . But the interesting thing here kind of to start off is that this is the first time they've put together an APU style chip but they're they put it under the Arc flag . So most of the time, you know, it's considered a CP U. So yeah, it's it's an intel core or a core ultra . This, I mean it's it's Panther Lake based. So eighteen A, all the all the goodness we've been seeing with Panther Lake devices , but they said, you know what ? This isn't this isn't just a CPU with a GPU attached to it. This is a GPU with a CPU attached to it. I mean, whatever, it's all about framing like how different you got chocolate and peanut butter, you got peanut butter my chocolate. I've heard the story before. Yeah, but I mean , which is, I mean, sure, it's kind of similar to what AMD has done on their side . They have their normal laptop processors, and then for handhelds they have the Z series , which is once again just kind of shades of gray of the same thing . But here I think it makes a little bit more of a difference than what AMD has done on their side because they've actually they've actually prioritized the GPU , which is what really matters for handheld gaming devices. One of the so what's the structure of the chip . So it's it's the normal panther lake I believe X seven so like it has the full sight at twelve when I that's the most important part it,'s like that GPU can crank out some amazing goodness , but where they cut back was for the it only has two PCores instead of four in the normal configuration it's those are their own tile, right? Yeah, yep. And it still has the same amount of EQs. So that's four and then it has two low power e cores on the IO platform, whatever the extra chance IO diamond. Yeah . So and then they also cut down the display outs from four to two, which, you know, on a laptop or mini PC, you need multiple displayouts, but on a handheld no at most you just need two . And then also cut down the thunderbolt lanes from four to two, which once again makes sense for a handheld device . I did ask Tom about whether these are specifically engineered for this line or if these are ones that didn't hit qualification for a normal panther like device and he said it's a mixture of both. They do have the capability to spin up, you know, chips if they need it, but there is a fair amount of actual chips that just aren't qualifying to be full pantherlike based . Okay . I mean that's like that's fine, right? That's fine how the business works. Yeah. Yeah. And so they they're like, okay, cool, you know, maybe maybe one of the P Cores didn't qualify. So we'll just fuse off the other one and we'll call this an Acr G ser ies kind of, you know, deal . Did is there hardware announced for this yet? Yeah, yeah. So compute , they actually came out swinging with the MSI Claw eight EXAI plus, I actually have one right here. This is the third generation claw. Yeah, this is the third generation claw . We kind of knew that MSI was going to have something new because yeah, they've been very closely partnered . But what we didn't expect, at least us in the handheld communities to have two other partners at launch. So one of them is another major manufacturer of sorts. So the Acer has a predator ALS eight . This isn't their first handheld, but this is their first major handheld launched for the U. S. market. The last thing they did was that was giant, right? Was a giant screen huge deal that they announced CS, maybe? Yeah, they had a predator I'm sorry, an acer nitro blaze seven, eight , and eleven . Yeah, so it was a huge eleven inch device with detachable controllers and whatever. Those weren't actually designed and manufactured in house. They hired a third party company to do those. And those actually never got released in the U. S. this is this is really ACER kind of getting their their feet into the handheld gaming market at kind of a weird time , so we'll see how it is. But really the real surprising one was that the third player is a Shenzhen based company called One X Player. They had the One X Player , which is a Lenovo Legion go kind of competitor where it's a it literally has the same eight point eight H OLED screen, which is amazing and then detachable controllers , that kind of stuff and and like I was surprised that one of those , you know, kind of like this isn't derogatory, but you know, Shenzhen based companies or there's a lot of them and I put them on kind of a different tier in terms of manufacturing and global scale than somebody like an ASU or an MS kind of thing. So to have them there at launch was like, Oh, wow, okay, cool. This is interesting . That's pretty rad. Okay, so I'm going to ask the bad question now. What does this thing cost we know? Yeah , we do. Well, we know the MSIC claw EX is going to come in at one thousand eight hundred dollars . Woo There was like a little bit of a pre release promotion for seventeen hundred dollars, but it sounds like all those got sold out . Either way, that is a large chunk of change. Wow . Yeah, I am under embargo for review stuff, so I'm not get going to, you know , too deep into final thoughts and all that kind of stuff, but either way between that and the Steam Deck price increase , like we're we're kind of in a weird spot for X eighty six You had a hands on with the new claw I have it. Yeah. You saw I have it right here . Yeah, it's not a video podcast so they go you held it up Yeah, I got to I had extensive hands on at ComputeX, which I can talk about, you know, that is not embargo , but I have it here with me right now for the full review testing . Tune in to PCWorld and Expedition Hindheld next wee for the final thoughts over there. Post embargo stuff. Yeah . How can you give a sense of what performance is like compared to the existing AMD stuff that you've used? So they , I mean, Intel's been coming out swinging since Panther like launched. Like they've been walking into a room with swagger and this is this is no different. So I mean, when we were at that we went to an intel panther like press Detect day basically a few months ago last fall and tap when we were there was like, yeah, you're going to like this twelve core one like , so for folks who don't know and don't follow the space, Tom Peterson is like he's the G Sync guy. He was in NVIDIA for a long time. He was the one who was a G sync or reflex? G sync. G sync. Yeah, he was the he was the GSYNC guy who drove that whole hey, we need to get refresh rates and frame timing under control. This is impactful and important . And then he went to Intel a few years ago. So when he's excited about something, it's usually like he doesn't I've seen him before when he wasn't excited about things and you can tell he was excited about this GPU that they built for for these Panther Lake chips . So yeah, they they continue to have a big chip on their shoulder and the G three announcement is no different . They show off a bunch a bunch of slides where they're like, Hey, we're we are far performing ahead of the Z two extreme, which is the highest end of AMD's line of handhelds. Not only that, we are roughly matching performance or their full bore performance with us at I think it was they showed it off at eighteen watts. So they're saying Oh wow. Their best performance we can match at like at half power at steam of Steam Deck power base. Steam Deck TDP is like fifteen watts max, right? Yeah, yeah. And so like, you know, it's wild . You know, I can't I can't validate their claims, but, you know, we know like they pass these things through lawyers, all that kind of stuff. So, you know, they they definitelyinitely they def feel like they have a win on their hands. And if true, like this is definitely going to be the most performant handheld out there . But I mean does that matter? Like there's definitely a subset of people who are willing to buy the best of the best. I mean, I guess really if you think about it, it's not going to be the best performing handheld because like the Ryzen AI Max plus devices, the strict halo stuff. Like it's out there, but like, I mean those things are like over two thousand dollars generally and it's it's have weird configurations yeah, like some of the handhelds that have that like don't have an internal battery, so they have to have an external battery attached, like all that stuff. So yeah, anyway, for the normal kind of devices , I think that's Intel's gonna roll the roost here. And I really think like could dethrone AMD in this space because AMD is just has just owned this space forever. Okay, so two questions. What's the monitor on the claw like? What's the screen? So it's the same screen as the original MSI Claw eight from last year. Really good eight inch panel twelve hundred nineteen twenty by twelve hundred . It is IPS, but it is a really good IPS . one hundred and twenty hertz VR sync range from I think it's forty eight to one hundred and twenty. Okay, so you can get that smooth forty on. But I mean, it sounds like you don't need to worry about smooth forty on this thing. I mean it like the thing is I like me personally I like options like I'm somebody who pretty much plays on the couch plugged into the wall. So I'm usually like oh, yeah just, let the juice fly baby. I don't care kind of thing. And so I like having a really nice high end range. But there are a lot of people who are like, Oh no, I usually play it kind of like some sort of balanced preset, which is us ually somewhere around eighteen, twenty watts kind of thing because they want to extend battery life or they don't have to worry about the fans something like that . So I'm glad there's that. And hopefully if the power's there on this , like you're not going to you're going to have your cake in your eat it too . Are you able to turn on like ray tracing and stuff like that with this chip since it's a little more capable than the RDNA two that's in the steam deck and a lot of the other Yeah, well, I mean, it's interesting because so many of the developers usually go back and make Steam Deck verified versions of their game that either has a fallback solut ion or maybe like a light ray tracing solution which like doomed the Dark Ages went back and did that for the Steam Deck specifically. So like these devices are able to benefit from that work , but just like full native ray tracing stuff. I mean I can't remember the exact list of games they showed off right now, but I mean, if it's anything like other panther leg based devices that I've used, the ray tracing is surprisingly capable. Like are you able to do path tracing and all that kind of stuff? No, but it feed I mean, I guess I haven't I haven't tested ray tracing capability of Panther Lake versus like the launch of the RTX twenty eighty or something like that . But I would be curious I'm actually kind of curious like where in that timeline of RTX GPU's are we falling right now? I mean, it's probably more like a twenty seventy if I had to guess . But so it's able to run it , but very play control with ray tracing on, but probably not like full cyberpunk overdrive. Yeah , yeah. Yeah, okay. Okay , that's fun. That's that 's super interesting. I'm it's a bummer that those things have come in at like two grand basically because it feels like in a different world they would be that would be like a thousand dollars. Is that really you think that's fair? You know, I actually tried to theory craft this out with Russ on the most recent episode that we did because like MSI and Intel they didn't want the prices to go this way. No , MSI had an interview and I'm sorry, I don't remember the source off top of my head, but there was an interview that got passed around where MSI was like, Hey, listen, like , we're getting hurt by the SSD and the RAM stuff , and it's just driving the price up and it just is what it is, unfortunately . So I don't know where they would have aimed it . If I had to guess, I bet they were probably aiming for a thousand to, you know, kind of like be at the top end of that. And I think that wouldn't have been out of the realm of possibility, but But you never know. I mean, it's it's hard to say. Either way, the Steam Deck was always the go to. The Steam Deck was, hey, what you can get for four hundred dollars or five fifty dollars if you sprung for the OLED model is good enough for everybody. It's awesome hardware. Valve makes it. You know, so many developers are targeting that platform. And like every conversation we would have around another handheld would be hey, buy a steam deck. But if you're looking for XYZ , maybe more power, detachable controllers or a bigger screen, yada yada, then maybe this is more up your alley. Now that the Steam Deck has, you know, jumped up in price , it's so weird because now all the YouTubers are like, Hey, don't buy a steam deck . Yeah, it's just over night, like the whole conversation changed and like the hardcore of us are trying to, you know, figure out, okay, what are some good alternatives ? But you know, like these high end devices, like how do we pitch these to people? Because no matter what, like it's for the enthusiast. Like the steam deck was the closest, I think we could ever get to a mainstream device. And even then, like, I mean, we're only talking about like , I think five million for four million units sold as well. That's what they've talked about. Estimation is. They haven't given a number in like two years at this year and a half at this point. Yeah The thing to me that's interesting that makes this math weird is that like when you're talking about a five hundred dollar device and the cost of RAM and storage is a third to a half of that probably , right? For their bill of materials before they make money , then like it makes sense to buy the inexpensive one, right? But if you're buying if you have the same amount of RAM and same amount of storage and all of these devices basically because they're all basically like sixteen or thirty g twoigabytes of RAM and a terabyte terabyte SSD , but those cost a thousand dollars of your device. You might as well buy the one with a good CPU . Like the unfortunate thing is it's killed the hey , my kid wants a gaming PC. What's a cheap way to this is now a cheap easy way to get them into it, right ? And I think that I assume this is Windows, the Claw Shifts with Windows . I did ask at our press briefing days at Computex, have you is it going to have official Linux support ? You know, have you tested it? And they were like, well, we don't want to really claim official Linux support because that's just too hard. As we know as Linux experts may know there's a lot of different versions of Linux. So if they came out and was like, oh yeah, it has Linux support , but you know , you not you don't have you don't have a run as D three . You don't have don't have kubundu. Yeah no, whatever So but then we're like, okay, well what flavors or what distros have you actually tested on? And they said yes , essentially, meaning like all the major the ones you'd expect from the market and especially gaming ones, Bizite , Steam OS, even though it doesn't have official Steam OS, there is a beta version of Steam OS that officially supports the old generation MSICLA eight . Okay . And so, you know, like they're they now more than ever they are thinking more about it. But hey, guess what? Microsoft is a valued partner. And you know, so these are going to ship with Windows. You know, the question I would love to know the answer to is if they ced early hardware to like besaite developers and stuff like that so that those folks can have that stuff ready to go out of the gate. I mean, I hope I would hope so. Yeah, but probably not . They should yeah, they should. That would be really smart, but like knowing how a lot of these launches come in, not just hand helds, like flying by the seat of the pants. Nobody wants stuff to leak and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, okay. I can't say and I actually didn't say this on Expedition of Hellheld because I forgot is that this has a manufacturing date on the back of it. And this was manufactured in March of twenty twenty six. Oh wow. This hands. They've been making them for a minute, huh? Yeah, yeah. I mean, this definitely is this is not a final retail unit. This is a what I have in for testing is a pre production model. But I mean they tell me it's close to retail. Interesting . Okay , so we've hit we touched we kind of danced around this, but the Steam Deck prices have gone up. I think we talked about it a couple of weeks ago as well, but Valve basically doubled the price of all their Steam Deck models a couple of weeks ago ? Yeah , it hurts like I think the hard part for me is that usually people have to make a decision, right? Yeah. Like when the steamck De was down at four hundred dollars to get in the door , you're looking at, oh, okay, well could I get a steam deck or could I get a switch to, which is generally around that ? If you're looking at the OLED model, which started at five hundred fifty, you're like, o kay, well, it's more than a stream, you know, a Nintendo Switch two . You know, you're starting to push into the bigger consoles kind of thing like, yeah, okay, but I want it portable y,adda, yad . And then usually when people are looking at stuff that's more expensive , then you get the people who are like, oh, well, why would I get this versus a gaming laptop or whatever? And so like consoles kind of , I usually try to use console pricing as like an anchor, even though it's not a one to one because hey, you're not going to take your your PlayStation five and put it on, you know, your lap , you know, like and play it. It's not a handheld device . So I mean, but either way the PlayStation five Pro, I think is at nine hundred and fifty dollars right now and like the, I mean that's the top end steam deck OLED variant as well . And so like they both have gone up and it sucks. I'm not going to say it's like great , but like they're everything's going up so. like And they're just kind of matching it. And so I think that really the bigger thing is does somebody have the disposable income to buy any of this stuff let alone the eight thousand eight hundred dollars MSIC claw eight EX eighteen hundred bucks is like it's funny. There was a there was a thread going around like game developer Twitter yesterday or Blue Sky yesterday where people were pricing out their machines that they built like started this generation. Like people who have like a Ryzen nine series or Core three Core two from Intel, right? Like the newer CBUs and they were pricing out what their workstations cost that they're using for like unreal engine five development. And they were like, Oh, I paid twenty two hundred dollars for this machine two years ago and now it would be five thousand six hundred dollars because they have like three, four terabyte SSDs in there, right? So yeah, it hurts. It hurts. Yeah . Well, I mean, and like the big thing I worry about is, okay, does this mean it's the death? Or are we past the heyday of PC gaming handhelds , like I really hope not yeah, but I mean with the pricing the way it is I mean maybe another way to look at it is that it could be sure but it also would mean those same questions should be asked of the consoles like or is this the death of home console because those prices have gone up as well. I mean Microsoft personal computing. I think Microsoft's asking those questions right now if nobody else is true . But luckily, like I feel like there are there are interesting alternatives. Okay , because they there are still some X eighty six based devices that are hitting that five hundred six hundred dollars is price point for reasons we can get into, but like Russ and I did a video a couple weeks ago on the PCWorld channel like debating, hey, do you wait for a steam deck OLED? And this was because they're out of stock pricing. Yeah, it was out of stock at that time. The pricing hadn't gone up yet. Do you wait for a Steam Deck OLED? Or do you buy a I think it was a Memorial Day sale sale where the ASUS RG Xbox Ally, non X, was on sale for five hundred dollars . So that's the Xbox branded one that's not the soup up Z two extreme one, right? Exactly. Yeah. So it's the more entry level one, it's white, you know, it still is the same awesome hardware on the outside, but on the inside it has a couple cutbacks. I feel like I tested that one out for a couple weeks of and I like it was it was a perfectly cromulin handheld. I mean power wise so that one has a Z two chip in it I think or maybe it's Z two A it's their name scheme is terri ble. Either way, it literally is almost the exact same processor that's in the Steam Deck. Yeah . So like roughly you can think, okay, how is it going to perform? Well, just look at how the steam Dcke performs and it's , you know, almost one to one kind of thing. So it's like, oh it's not, you know, it's still an option that's out there. It is still actually being sold not at that price. I think it went back up to the six hundred dollars price, but you know, that is normal like that is more of a quote unquote normal steam deck is pricing if not a little elevated . But unfortunately , like I think I think the only reason why they're able to continue to have those pricing is that they have inventory right now . And when they have at the moment they have to build new ones, they're either going to say, yeah, we're just not going to build anymore or they're going to say, okay, we'll build more, but we have to do it at the current cost that we paid for it. So like , I mean, I hate saying this because I don't want people to feel left out, but like if you're looking to get a handheld the five hundred six hundred dollars price point, then you should probably jump on that sooner rather than later. Well, yeah, because a lot of the stuff is price low because people paid for their memory two years ago like they're they're dealing you're if you have a company like Acer or Sus or Lenova or somebody that's big and buys memory in huge lots, they're they're paying twenty twenty four prices not twenty twenty six prices right now still . So what else is it? Like the other thing that's happened is well, I mean the other thing that's happened is arm, right? Arm Arm stuff is getting kind of good I can't believe I'm saying but it's getting good, right? I mean so, this this is is definitely something that has kind of caught me by surprise over the past couple weeks if not months . Russ usually I'm sorry, Russ over retro game corps, he usually does testing on Android devices, you know, like arm based devices. Like the Retroid Pocket and stuff like that, right? Yeah, yeah. AYN, INEO, all that kind of stuff. And he was like, he did a video an app called Game Native , which uses the translation layer for Arm to X eighty six PC gaming . And he's like, wow, this is actually surprisingly good . Like it falls on its flip face here and there, but it's surprisingly good . And then all of a sudden, I started seeing a bunch of other people making the same kind of videos . And I was just I was laughing it off at first because I was like, come on, like I have I have, you know, three different ways from Sunday to play my PC games on bigger devices. Why would I ever try it out on Android or Arm and I was like, ah, okay, I shouldn't dismiss it outright. I should try it out. And man, I have been, I've been surprised, dude. It is like it has shook me in ways that I'm like, oh, I see a different feature laying out before us. So so okay , I've heard this before . Is it good in the Oh yeah, you could play all your Xbox three hundred and sixty games on this thing and it's great or, is it good in the hey, I'm gonna play zero zero seven first light or force of horizons seven, six, whatever the new one is on it I mean, well there's mult iple things at play here. Like Quacom's hardware is very capable and like not that there's not other arm based devices, but Qualcomm is kind of the Snapdragon series is the one most people are develop ing against. And I mean, they've done a lot of work to beef up ray tracing , like, I mean these are capable things, but people usually kind of dismiss it because it's mostly going in phone phones, right? Well, or like corporate laptops, yeah. Yeah, yeah, well maybe . And so there's there's that. This hardware is actually pretty capable . Number two , there is a lot of develop ment work being done on this translation stuff . And I mean obviously Valve is contributing to it for with their FEX program . That's specifically for the headset , but oh, hey, guess what? I mean, it's open source, so everyone else is able to take those learnings and put it on to other X eighty six gaming . And this feels like I mean, I guess I wasn't around pre Steam Deck days to mess around with this, but this feels like the early days of proton , where hey, you know what? We're doing a lot of work here. And when it works, it works awesome. And when it doesn't work, it falls on its face. So that has definitely been my testing is that I just I download a bunch of games and try them out just to see if it works kind of thing. And sometimes it's like, oh, Hades just works. Cool, great . Or I loaded up something old like oh why can't I think of the name? The game that had the like the Twenty Guitars, the Xbox three hundred and sixty Colvarez? No, no. It's like a isometric view I can't think of the name of it. Anyway, it's an older Xbox three hundred and sixty arcade game, which I was like, oh, you know, this should play it, like power wise, like it's not taking up a ton of resources. But there was like graphical glitches. There was like a line down the middle of the screen kind of thing. So it played, but it had a graphical glitch kind of thing . And then was that an actual Xbox three hundred sixty M or is that an Xbox three hundred sixty X eighty six port? I mean this was this was from my Steam Library it was a port to the PC. I'm just saying it it launched around Xpex sixty timeframe that's how usually I kind of chunk it up is like o,h yeah you know , the power that they needed back in the day is usually lower than what's needed now. Anyway and so yeah, I'm not going to say I'm not going to say oh we have a silver bullet here , but the fact that Valve is doing all this work for their headset and they have for the flags , the FEX is the translation layer for their steam frame frame . And if they're doing all that work to get normal steam games running on the frame, which is a arm based processor, like everybody else is going to be able to benefit from that. And like the community, there are just like on Linux at open source, there are many different drivers . So kind of like in Steam OS right now , if you go on your Steam Deck, you can pick different versions of Proton, there's experimental, there's ten, like now eleven is in beta, whatever . Inside of this game native app, you can pick different Mesa drivers , community drivers, like turnip drivers, things like that. So like, like really everyone's kind of , I don't know if there's a really good database the way that SteamDB is , but I know a lot of people are doing work to chronicle and be like, Hey, you know what, if you're going to play this game, you should make sure you load up this driver with these settings and then it'll play really good , which is not great for mainstream users, but either way , like the power that I'm seeing out of these arm based handhelds, which are much cheaper than X eighty six devices , like I start I start looking towards, oh, I think this is the future of low end handheld gaming . Like I can I can easily I think rather than a four hundred to five hundred dollars steam Deck being X eighty six based. Either I Valve is going to switch to ARM in the future or the X eighty six prices are always going to be at the top end because like Quakom Quakom peaks at a certain point and executive six devices like can go pretty high end . So I think maybe we'll see a future where all the low end devices, maybe sub are all armed bas and if you want, you know, more power you get X eighty six . I mean, I think that I think I think that kind of makes sense. I also think more well, okay, three things. One, I think the kind of people who are running X eighty six games on arm are probably okay at this point are probably okay with doing fiddly stuff like going to a form someplace and looking for the right settings, right? Yeah I do I think that honestly, I think and this would be if I was pitching something to Valve, I would be like, hey, one of the things you all should do is make a tool that collects all this user information and and makes it so that you just hit the like the G force experience of running emulated games on steam platforms, whether it's Windows on Linux or X eighty six on Windows Linux on Arm . But but like we shouldn't have to do that work. And the developer and honestly , a lot of it is hey, I go to Proton DB and I look for the settings and then I put all the stuff in and it sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. It would be nice if that was kind of automated for me in some way like a feedback loop like yeah that would be nice and I mean they already do it with the controller mappings, right? Like if you look at how the controller mappings work on the Steam input stuff, they have a system for users to submit things and then them to get voted on and approved and all that. So all you have to do is build that but for the settings and command line, basically is the is the man, that's really that's really smart. I wanted to go send my resume to valve and see if I need somebody to get the team going But yeah, right now it's definitely tinkered territory. I mean the people who are buying these arm emulation devices like the AYN's, the Retroids, the INEOS, all that kind of stuff is mostly tinkers . I mean, like I feel like it when When the what's his name over at a giant bomb Jeff Grubb? No, well yeah, when Jeff Grub and Dan and stuff are buying buying handhelds and like configuring them for their friends and like reselling them and stuff like oh you know it started like it is starting to get somewhat of a mainstream kind of thing because it I mean we're talking about a hundred dollar two hundred dollars devices that can emulate not just PC stuff but, also like every other classic console. It's interesting because well A that reminds me a lot of like the old days when somebody was like, Hey man, I know a guy who can mod your Xbox for you and 'd drag it out there and then he'd be like, yeah, come back in two hours I got you. And it's like doing a drug deal, right? Like they're in the same situation. Hey, man, I can hook you up with a thor that has all those can run all the business you need I think that this makes the decision matrix having arm machines that are capable and also in increasingly interesting and weird form factors. Like the Thor is really interesting because it's basically like a three D S kind of form factor Yeah with like a really nice capable arm CPU. It's really nice and it makes the decision matrix for people who are buying stuff but both simultaneously more difficult and also kind of eas ier, right? Because like your chance of getting something good that's gonna actually do all the things you want is pretty high . How does stuff like anti cheat work on these arm based machines . Is that a no go? Yeah It pretty much lines up with with what we have on the Linux side. So if it's kernel based, it's just not it's just not a thing. So okay . But hopefully, I mean, I think the other part of this is that because of the pricing, because of the world right now , at least I've heard and I don't know if you have maybe you can back this up, but like a lot there's, a lot of push to say, hey , let's try to get more out of what we have now rather than buying the newest hardware. Yeah. Like we're all in on this. And I think developers are on this as well to say, hey, you know what We need to optimize for lower end things and make sure everyone who has hardware can get access to our games. And that like I love pushing forward. I love having new features and all that kind of stuff, but also maybe it is good, hey, you know what? Let's take a step back for a couple years and not push the bleeding edge and just make sure everyone with low end hardware can kind of catch up, right? Yeah . So and I think low end based devices are going to do that. Like, I mean the something that's a hundred to two hundred dollars , you know, arm based device, like a retroid pocket, yeah, you you're thinking first to pick it up to play retro games on it . But man, I tell you what, emulating is like such an almost solved equation. Like sure there's the PS three, which is weird and there's a lot of work being done there and real random weird consoles like the three DO that haven't fully been figured out. But for the most part, like there's people who are playing switch games on emulation and just running fine like emulation is in such a good spot. Like I feel like the other wild west is the PC stuff. So I just feel like people are like, oh, okay, now how do we how do we get all this PC gaming emulation stuff up to stuff as well keep well. And like the choice between , hey, I want an AMD APU with like a couple of generations back GPU and a couple of generations back CPU or an arm handheld that probably costs about the same that has like the bleeding edge new GPU is like it's an unusual choice to have make, right? Well, and yeah , I mean here's the other part of it too is that at Computex Nvidia released or announced their more consumerish arm platform . Microsoft was on stage, all the major OEMs were on stage . I mean, we're talking about laptops and desktops that are thousands and thousands of dollars, so they're not fully consumer, but you have akQu om with their Snapdragon platform pushing from the low end up into computing and now NVIDIA coming from the top end and like strong arming down. Like X eighty six is getting squeezed in the middle here. And so like for NVIDIA to come up and say , hey, we 've been we've been working with developers to make sure that these games run on arm is a big deal. Like I literally played three games at my briefing and one of them was Fortnite . Like that's why Will Smith Fortnite was there , but yeah, yeah, but like they were like, hey, listen, we worked with them to figure out an anti cheat that worked on Arm . And you know, there was a couple other games like Pragmata , Alan Wake two, just being like, Hey, yeah, it's this running up to snuff as X eighty six? No , but we got it running and like we're dedicating valuable time and resources to it in a way that is just like oh arm Arm is getting attention now. Well, and then the other thing about like NVIDIA coming into the market is they're putting the high end perfectly qual chips into the into the stuff the laptops like the surface and stuff like that . Presumably that means at some point in the future there will be some downstream chips that don't quite hit the snuff required for a full workstation style laptop, AI workstation style laptop , and there's an entire possibility that that stuff will scale down. We'll start seeing like handheld versions of the SKUs in six months when they know how the manufacturing is going to go on those . I mean the NVIDIA does have Tegra, right? Yeah. I mean , Nvidia is in the Nintendo Switch two and we have not seen an update to the NVIDIA shield . Like imagine a Nvidia Shield with essentially a Switch two power performance pro file, like what could be done with that? Arguably it fails this category, right? Right? Yeah. So like NVIDIA is definitely primed. I mean, can they keep their eye on the ball? Who knows, you know, they're so deep in the AI money that gaming is such a small little side note. But yeah, do they care about this the niche of the niche of the niche? I mean, there are people there who care for sure, but do they have enough resources and time, you know, to really do interesting things with the gaming devices? I mean, I hope so , but you know , we'll see. What about stuff like the analog pocket? We haven't talked about that at all but that',s the analog makes I don't want to say closed because they're like semi open , right ? Yeah PGA based emulation devices. Yeah, and it's not just analog. I mean, FPGA is definitely there and it continues. And I mean, analog had, what was it the analog three D, the N sixty four B. The N sixty four one Yeah like there's other devices out there have a miserable in my CRT right now. Yeah. I think the problem like I don't have a ton of experience with them. I do have an analog pocket, of course , but like from what I understand of the FPG A stuff is that the problem they're having there is scaling up, but they can't really scale up to higher end hardware fast enough. Like, I mean they got they got N sixty four working, right PS one seems to be something that people are working on, but jumping to then PS two level FPGA devices like might take a little bit more time as well. Like I said, I'm not as tuned in on that, but from what I've heard , it's just it's just slow. Like I said, like Arm is already able to like play PC games, current PC games and Nintendo Switch two and all the newest consoles, all that kind of stuff, power wise at least yeah where FPGA is still, you know, like really focusing on retro stuff. I think I mean, we've covered FPGA stuff fair amount I before don'.t have any experience with the analog stuff just because I'm firmly in the buy the cheap open thing rather than the expensive closed thing category in that space. It is really nice hardware though. It is nice hardware. Yeah. I look at those analog pockets, I'm like, oh man , that thing looks pretty good. Yeah , but it seems like I also think that there's a reward , like a return on investment that makes more sense with actually the older hardware design for the low latency of the CRT and stuff like that versus frame lag gear, you know, once you got to the era where you were doing three D rendering and the actual three D performance was limiting what you could do and you would see like frame sags like crazy on PS two games and gamecube games. I actually think that running emulation on software rather than on hardware maybe makes more sense because it turns out the hardware experi ence was kind of shit on a lot of that stuff, especially in the early three D days and like giving it more performance in a way that doesn't break the game is maybe not a bad thing. Like getting an actual stable thirty or sixty out of a PS two era gamecube era. I'm not just picking on the PS two, but like all of those early three D things had some real performance problems. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And like some of it there's some charm, but like put it this way. Playing Mike Tyson's punch out on a mister with a CRT is way different than playing Mike Tyson's punch out on a retro pocket on an LCD , right ? R, rightight look , yeah. Well, and I think that that's the other thing that I've noticed a lot recently with myself too, is that there are some people who just don't have like a nostalg ia for classic stuff. Like Russ , he is perfectly fine to play older games on these emulation devices. He's like, oh, you know, I don't really have a reverence for the hardware in some cases, in some cases . And then, you know, maybe the game I never played it back in the day, so I'm just playing it fresh kind of thing. But the more and more that I mess around with like the AY and Thor , I was like, Dang, this is great. This can play all my DS and three DS games. And then I whipped out or I mean, I have my DS my original one still, and then I bought from Steve Lynn a DSI And I started playing on this being like, oh, this might be kind of fun just to see what the experience was like. And then I was like, dang , I actually just kind of missed the original hardware. Like, I've been enjoying, yes, I can I have all the devices that I can just play under the sun , but when it comes to it, I've just been really having a good time going back to the original hardware and sometimes plugging into a CRT or in the case of home consoles or with the handhelds, I mean, I just got a PSP and it's just like I right now have an MSIC claw eight EX in my position and I'm sitting down to play it and test it out and stuff play it and in the back of my mind I'm like I kind of just want to be playing the PSP which is probably bad to say but it's no it's funny you say that because like one of the things I realized I had, the mister set up for years and I did the thing that everybody does where you just get the whole NES ROM set and take out all the Majong games and then put it on it. Majang. Come on. Look, I like Majang, but I don't need I don't need forty five weird Majang games. But I realized that having all those games was too kind of too much. It gave me like the worst case of menu paralysis I've ever had. Oh yeah. So I went through and I just pulled out like for each core, I pulled out like the ten games I was interested in spending some time with and I made a folder and it was like , you know, it's like Will's ten and I open that up and I'm like, I pick out of there and it's a much easier choice and it's like it's a mix of stuff that I love playing but like also I was like I want to I like I hadn't played Zelda two in forty years, right? I probably played a lot of you know, everybody says that Zelda two is a much better game than I remembered it being. Really? Yeah, I don't I think I didn't okay, just to be clear, at the time I got Zelda two , you did not play a game because you didn't like it. You just played it and hated it 'cause it was the only thing you had that was new. Yeah, and you're like, Oh, well, like, I just got this for Christmas, and I guess I won't get anything till my birthday, so yeah, I'm just gonna play this. This is the one for the next ten months . And so like I got real good at Zelda two and I beat Zelda two multiple times. Oh nice. But it was the first time I'd ever seen like RPG mechanics and stuff like that. And so friend of the show Jeff Gerstman has been doing for the last like three years his ranking of all the NES games ever. I don't know if you've seen this. Yeah . But he finished it the other day and didn't no, know he finished it. Yeah , yeah, like finally, seven hundred and fifty some games later . And it's older to fall . Higher than you would expect. Okay . You can there's more on eight bit and Nintendo. Science, I think is the URL But it's interesting going back and looking at some of these games because like there's some games that have really complicated mechanics in that in those early generations that they didn't explain well at all and I completely did not pick up as a twelve ten year old or twelve year old or whatever , but that now when I sit down and play them, I'm like, oh wow, these people were way ahead of their time, like way ahead of their time So it's been fun , it's been fun giving myself constraints on that. And I think you've kind of gotten down the same hole with the GBA and the PSP, right? Or the DSI in the PSP. I mean, all of them like yeah, like I'm I'm definitely I'm sure people in the audience are like me where I had all this stuff. I mean my first personal console that I ever had was a original Game Boy DMG and like I loved that thing, but I remember Ild it I sold it to some neighbor kid on the street for pennies on the dollar just to get something else new and I'm just like kicking myself because all of my old hardware I just don't have anymore. And so now I'm like, oh, I'm going to have to have to rebuild that library again and I'm looking at current prices and I'm just like , look, you can't go back in time Adam, but you can rebuild your youth. So that is the thing to remember. It's more expensive to rebuy my youth than I anticipated . I think somebody told me the other day about a copy of Super Super Mario Bros. Like I think about my unopened box of Super Mario Brothers because I had two copies. I had the one that came with the game with the console that had like Duck Hunt and the Super Mario Brothers and then Combo. I had the other one that like my grandparents bought me 'cause like, oh, this is the game that the kids love. It's the Mario Broth ers. And one just sold unopened for two point three million dollars the other day . And I'm like, Jesus Christ, where is that? I gotta casually ask my sister if she still has it. Yeah. It's not going to be grated clean, but you know, whatever. Well, but that's the interesting part is that we're talking about emulation, we're talking about playing games on the high end new hardware, but I also feel like there is a growing ground swell of even the younger generation rediscovering the past. Like maybe it's just my YouTube algorithm is just completely, you know, effed with handheld stuff, but like I'm getting all these like kids in their twenties being like, ooh, I picked up a PSP for the first time. And wow, this thing is surprisingly good. It turns out Lumines still rules. Who knew? That's still the good version of Lumines. Yeah. And then they it's still really easy. I mean, it's easier more than ever now to mod ware as well . Like I replace my GBA screens with IPS panels backlip. Yeah, backlip panels like this PSP one thousand a new kit that came out in the past like year or so where it's just like drop in new IPS panel. Like you don't have to do soldering, anything like that. Like the technology 's gotten crazy. And then in order to soft mod it, like I got a microSD card, put it in, and there's this thing called it Arc, ARK and you literally just, you know, hit hit play on that. It runs a little script and then you can play all the rums that you want. Like there's no it's not breaking systems or anything like that. So like the it is nice to see the younger generation appreci the hardware from the past, but then still use it to emulate new experiences as well. Well, as I say, it turns out one of the things that was fun about having a kid and introducing her to games was like she doesn't differentiate between old games and new games in a weird way, right? Like she knows that like if she wants to play Super Mario Bros. on her switch she has to go into the, you I know got, to go play the NES games here. But like when she comes in here into my office and we fire up the CRT and she's like, I can't play Mario Brothers, like that game still owns . And like, it's good for hours of entertainment in the same way it was in that nineteen eighty six still. Like a good game from nineteen eighty six is still going to be good in twenty twenty two. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, you're right. And so whether you're looking to buy one piece of hardware that hopefully plays , or you're looking to dabble here and there and either recapture your youth or buy something that fills a specific niche. Like there still is more options than ever. It's just the pricing is kind of messing with a lot of stuff. So there's there's the last frontier for me is I want to be able to play games in my office on the CRT on the Mister and then also have the save the ROMs and the save states and the save files work on retro arch on my steam deck. Yeah. And there's somebody that's working on it. There's a project that's going right now to do exactly that to like to like have a retro arch folder and a Mr Save folder and have them kind of transmogrified between each other automatically when one gets saved. Oh, that would be nice. Yeah. Yeah, 'cause I mean, there's like that retro achievements , like where you sign in on any device and it can gauge your progress and you get achievements, whatever. I think I'm anti that though just conceptually. Yeah, I don't I don't really care about that, but if I could sign up for some cloud serv ice that syncs cloud games from any emulation device that you have, like, dude, I'm up for that. Or you just run a Docker container and let it do it automatically, and you don't have to pay for a cloud service. There you go. There we go. Yeah . So yeah, I guess that's a pretty good do we miss anything? That's a pretty overarching state of what's going on with handhelds right now I think it's it's pretty exhaustive when Russ and I first started the expedition handheld podcast , like we were a little worried to do it weekly because we're like is there really going to be enough to talk about in handhelds like to talk about every week. But no, there's there's even during this time, this period of, you know, rising costs and less devices getting launched, man, there's still always something to talk about. That's awesome. Yeah, yeah. I mean, because like , like I said, I'm on this journey of rediscovering handhelds from the past. Russ is very much, you know, in like the emulation game . I'm also on the side of X eighty six handhelds. So like it kind of works the way we tech team stuff. And then we sprinkle other stuff in there like EGPUs , which you know, attached to these handhelds , which has finally gotten good, all that kind of stuff. So it's weird, weird business there. It's like track ball stuff. What where can people find expedition handheld Adam? Yeah, well anywhere that podcasts are sold, then you can find Expedition Handheld. If we're not there, please let me know . But yeah, if you want to watch the video version, we have a video version that's up on Spotify , but the YouTube channel , the Fulner Network is the YouTube channel that you can watch over there . And I do collaborate with Russ or use the collaboration feature in YouTube. So it does show up in his YouTube feeds as well . So yeah, no. And then we have a discord, the Folder Network Discord that you can go hang out. We have a handheld channel. Good handheld, good Linux channel over there too. Yeah, good Linux. Yeah. Who knew? There's nerds that are into all this kind of stuff. Yeah . It turns out nerds are okay. Yeah, real quick. I will say looking at the definitive ranking NES games Zelda two , the adventure of Link lands at number six . It was five . Well, look at that before yesterday. Yeah, dethroned by somebody, but that's crazy. That's crazy talk. You think so? I like I'm going to tell you you should go back and replay Zelda two the Adventure Link . It is he's making faces. Oh he just he just flipped around to grab recently picked up the Legend of Zelda Game and Watch, which does have Zelda two on it. I was just saying is that the re that's the reissue one? Yeah, this is the reissue one . Yeah, that has Zelda one, Zelda two and then Adventures of Link the Game Boy. That's pretty good. Yeah, I expected to never fire up Zelda two, but maybe I will. I wouldn't play it on that thing, but I would I would definitely try like I was surprised . I had a lot of fun with it. It was it was it was not what I remembered it being it's a it starts a little slow but it's worth a look. Will, I had a lot of fun with this. Hey, it was a pleasure having here. Thanks for coming by Adam. And yeah, everybody go check out Adam over at the Full Nerd Between that and well, Dualwood Diaries, three episodes left. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wrapping it up . Who 's going to delete which partition? No, no one knows. It's impossible to guess really. No one's ever going to figure that out. And yeah, I've enjoyed expedition handheld a lot. It's I learned something every week so you know good job over there for you and Russia. Hey, thanks. Thanks Adam. And that will do it for us this week. I hope everybody enjoyed the show. Please go over and follow him at the full nerd on YouTube and check out Expedition Handheld if that is of interest to you all. Now, we have reached the part of the show where we thank everybody for supporting us. We wouldn't be here without you all because this is a listener supported show. So thank you to everybody who chucks in a couple bucks every month to support the podcast. If you would like to find out how to do that, you can go to patreon. com slash tech bod. Again, it's patreon. com slash tech bod where for five bucks a month you get access to the discord which is full of beautiful nerds who talk about stuff like handhelds and how to set up their misters and all that stuff all the time . And then you also you can also get access to the monthly patreon exclusive epis ode where Brad and I talk about different topics every week, things of interest , things that we are maybe thinking about doing an episode about, maybe we thought we could do an episode about it. was Theren't enough there. It's part dumping ground, part research, part just a place for us to chat and hang out. I don't want to say it's a ramble cast because that's a registered trademark of somebody el se, but we do occasionally ramble over there as well. So thanks everybody for supporting this show. An extra special thank you goes out to our executive producer to your patrons , including Infelicitous Rips, Jordan Lippitt, Oct orthorpe Bunny Still for Work , David Allen, James Camic, and Pantheon, makers of the HS three High Speed three D printer. Thank you all so much. Have a lovely week. I think we're hoping Brad will be back next week but we're not sure and if not, we'll find another awesome guest to come on and talk about stuff. But I hope everybody has a lovely week and we will see you next time on Brad Wilmate TechPod as always p,lease consider the environment before printing this podcast.