3 ms·

Ah thanks, some of these look pretty cool, like the Retroid 2 and the RG350, and I love Panic so of course I know about the Playdate. :) The problem as you say

Ah thanks, some of these look pretty cool, like the Retroid 2 and the RG350, and I love Panic so of course I know about the Playdate. :) The problem as you say is the lack of native titles, and an uncertainty about how long the devices will be supported for. In this day and age an official distribution channel like the App Store/eShop is important too, even if it's just a website you can download from onto an SD card. But I'll try one of these out!

mikepurvis 6y ago
The whole value proposition of emulation handhelds pretty much assumes rampant piracy of old titles, which gets especially murky when you have, say, a SNES game which is abandonware, clearly unavailable except at collector prices, whatever, but then it got remastered for the GBA or DS, and is definitely still available for purchase in the 3DS online store (alarm bells). Besides that the population of these devices is relatively small, it seems there are a lot of subtle incompatibilities between them too, in terms of button quantity and layout, number of analog sticks (ranges from zero to two), etc. So yeah, I'm sure someone will try it at some point, but it's not hard to see that this isn't a super appealing target for trying to stand up a paid app store. The best-case scenario I could imagine would be an all-you-can-eat Netflix-style affair where you pay $10/mo for access to a rotating catalogue of titles that are a mix of native ports, emulation under legal license, etc. On the other hand, if legal emulation was part of the pitch, it's hard to imagine it going anywhere without classic NES and SNES titles, and Nintendo would have basically zero incentive to legitimize such an effort by playing ball with it, when they're actively selling those titles under emulation on their own storefronts for their own hardware.

3 ms·

Ah thanks, some of these look pretty cool, like the Retroid 2 and the RG350, and I love Panic so of course I know about the Playdate. :) The problem as you say

by Razengan 6y ago

mikepurvis 6y ago
The whole value proposition of emulation handhelds pretty much assumes rampant piracy of old titles, which gets especially murky when you have, say, a SNES game which is abandonware, clearly unavailable except at collector prices, whatever, but then it got remastered for the GBA or DS, and is definitely still available for purchase in the 3DS online store (alarm bells). Besides that the population of these devices is relatively small, it seems there are a lot of subtle incompatibilities between them too, in terms of button quantity and layout, number of analog sticks (ranges from zero to two), etc. So yeah, I'm sure someone will try it at some point, but it's not hard to see that this isn't a super appealing target for trying to stand up a paid app store. The best-case scenario I could imagine would be an all-you-can-eat Netflix-style affair where you pay $10/mo for access to a rotating catalogue of titles that are a mix of native ports, emulation under legal license, etc. On the other hand, if legal emulation was part of the pitch, it's hard to imagine it going anywhere without classic NES and SNES titles, and Nintendo would have basically zero incentive to legitimize such an effort by playing ball with it, when they're actively selling those titles under emulation on their own storefronts for their own hardware.