4 ms·

This thing is clearly meant to have great specs for its form factor, but it doesn't even have 1080p on a 7" screen. It's slightly better than 720p, which is wh

This thing is clearly meant to have great specs for its form factor, but it doesn't even have 1080p on a 7" screen. It's slightly better than 720p, which is what I expected on my smartphone 5+ years ago on a smaller screen (and even then you could find that on a budget phone). This feels like a worse PSP. It's meant to be powerful, but the battery life will suck and it won't be powerful enough to matter. The fact that I can pull out my phone and have a substantially better screen (resolution and quality as OLED is preferable to LCD) just makes this a nonstarter for me. This is the sort of thing I'd salivate over when I was a teenager before I understood tech specs don't make a good product. In fact, it reminds me of this thing which I was excited for over 10 years ago (I don't remember when it launched, but it took forever and by the time it happened I'd lost interest). https://openpandora.org/ https://openpandora.org/ EDIT: The Pandora stopped production in 2013 and they've been working on the successor since, which apparently just delivered the first preorders. https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/ https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/

mepian 6y ago
Smartphones can't run PC games natively, which I personally prefer to smartphone games.
- glsdfgkjsklfj 6y ago
  Crazy how people buy computers nowadays based on which OS you are allowed to run on it, right? Almost feel like the early 80s all over again, but less for technical reasons.
  - simias 6y ago
    In this case it's also a hardware issue. If smartphones ran x86 I'm sure some clever hackers would've found a way to boot windows on them and from there you could play any game you like. But being ARM it's pointless.
    - glsdfgkjsklfj 6y ago
      that is pointless and show a lack of understanding of the core issue. first, there were tons of x86 android devices. samsung tab3 to name the last one i used. second, most of the code on android is tainted GPL code. technically GPL was supposed to not prevent you from running whatever you want on devices you own if it was distributed with GPL based code, but alas, that is exactly what happens.
  - dimitrios1 6y ago
    > Almost feel like the early 80s all over again, but less for technical reasons. It's almost exclusively due to technical reasons.
    - glsdfgkjsklfj 6y ago
      right... (tried to add as much as you to the discussion)
- TylerE 6y ago
  "Can't". There are plenty of PC games that have mobile ports. All the GTA3 ingine games, several bioware rpgs. You're confusing "can't" with "publisher hasn't bothered". The hardware, certainly on newer iphones,is plenty powerful.
  - ekianjo 6y ago
    His claim is still correct. It does not run PC x86 games natively. If you have to port every PC game one by one it will take forever.
    - kitsunesoba 6y ago
      Yes, the body of x86 PC games is massive and the overwhelming majority will never receive mobile ports. Furthermore, it's still going to be a few years before phones have enough power to emulate x86 competently enough to be able to play these titles via emulator.
ekianjo 6y ago
The Pyra is actually shipping for the first preorders. Several people I know have received their unit.
- Judgmentality 6y ago
  I appreciate the extra info. How do they like it?
  - ekianjo 6y ago
    It's still pretty much WIP on the software side of things. The graphics drivers are not working as they should yet, and the default (debian-based) distro needs polish.
    - Judgmentality 6y ago
      Just curious, as you seem to be an enthusiast in this space - what do you see as the ultimate goal of this form factor and/or platform? Is it for emulation in general, for specific consoles, is the hope to play Steam games that don't demand powerful computers? I get that it's a general purpose PC and people can do what they want with it, but I assume there is a leading reason to develop this. And reading the comments there is an entire world around this space I am woefully ignorant of. I'm genuinely asking out of curiosity, I know my first comment was dismissive but that mostly means I'm not the target audience.
nicolashahn 6y ago
It's a shame the Pyra is so underpowered for how expensive it is. The Raspberry Pi can beat it on both compute and memory.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  The Pyra is not really about its internals but the whole packaged unit. Making a raspberry pi fit into such a form factor is actually pretty hard.
  - nicolashahn 6y ago
    It would mainly be hard because of all the peripheral ports on the board taking up space where you don't want it. I bet making a Pyra with the compute version of the Pi: https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/compute-module-4/?variant=raspberry-pi-cm4001000 https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/compute-module-4/?varia... wouldn't be too difficult.
parsimo2010 6y ago
The PSP had a 480x272 screen, and you’re saying that this thing having 800p feels worse? The Switch does 720p in portable mode and it’s tons of fun and is selling like crazy 3+ years after release. You can’t expect a portable device to render most games at a playable framerate at 1080. Cell phones can have high resolution screens to play videos and render text. Most cell phone games can’t render at 1080p except on the highest end flagships. Since the S20 Ultra can literally be double this price it’s not a fair comparison anyway. Then you talk about how tech specs don’t matter when you were just complaining about a spec? I don’t really understand that argument. There will be plenty of people that buy this. The only real issue is that you still can’t get a Neo, the GPD Win 3 is going to enjoy a lot of sales from people that don’t want to wait.
- Judgmentality 6y ago
  > The PSP had a 480x272 screen, and you’re saying that this thing having 800p feels worse? I was accounting for the fact that the PSP launched 16 years ago. It's a similar form factor - big screen, big power, short battery life. > The Switch does 720p in portable mode and it’s tons of fun and is selling like crazy 3+ years after release. Comparing this to the Switch is silly. They are nothing alike. Thinking you can compete with Nintendo in handheld gaming is like thinking you can compete with Google in search. History has shown this time and time and time again. Nintendo sells the Switch because it's the only way to play Nintendo games. That is 90% of their value. The other 10% comes from having an affordable handheld gaming device in a comfortable form factor and they've been trying to get more third party and indie support. > Then you talk about how tech specs don’t matter when you were just complaining about a spec? Specs don't matter, and this thing has nothing to sell itself but specs - and its specs aren't even that good. > There will be plenty of people that buy this. I'm not saying nobody will buy it. I'm saying I won't, and I doubt it will be considered a success by most. But hey, if you like it and want to buy it go for it! If you love it that's what counts.
  - Jetrel 6y ago
    To piggyback on what you're saying - the thing that makes Nintendo do so damned well - even beating iOS for games, is that their market is carefully curated to produce a "middle class" of game developers. Specifically ones who don't go bankrupt and stop making games, which is basically what's happening on iOS, and even worse on Android. iOS gamedev is kind of a slaughterhouse, where a tiny crust of lottery-winners make it look viable, but the other 98% or so of devs don't break even. There are a lot of reasons for this, and all of them are things Nintendo's worked pretty hard to counter. Refusing to let stuff on the store if it doesn't meet certain QA criterion, forcibly preventing the race-to-the-bottom on the price wars, deliberately avoiding top-10 lists and any of the other reflexive techie moves that end up being anti-patterns (by being attention-funnels that drive further sales to the people who don't need it, and starve the ones who do). There's a LOT of stuff they do right, and some of this they're historically famous for (the QA angle was the thing that famously let them buck the videogame crash of the 80s, in contrast to the prior vendors who had no qualms about allowing outright broken/unplayable games on their devices). This stuff is important. Generally what makes markets like this work isn't a technological problem, but a social/political problem. Nintendo understands that game devs need to make a living, but apple and google treat them as cannon fodder, and it has consequences for the quality of work. If you don't get this right, people will make a bunch of shallow stuff that's a low upfront investment (Angry Birds, Monument Valley, etc), but you'll have shockingly few "deep" games like BotW, because nobody can stomach that risk, especially when they'd have to make an insane number of sales to break even at (presumed) lower prices.
hknapp 6y ago
Cell phones need high resolution to render crisp text, not for games

mepian 6y ago

Smartphones can't run PC games natively, which I personally prefer to smartphone games.

glsdfgkjsklfj 6y ago
Crazy how people buy computers nowadays based on which OS you are allowed to run on it, right? Almost feel like the early 80s all over again, but less for technical reasons.
- simias 6y ago
  In this case it's also a hardware issue. If smartphones ran x86 I'm sure some clever hackers would've found a way to boot windows on them and from there you could play any game you like. But being ARM it's pointless.
  - glsdfgkjsklfj 6y ago
    that is pointless and show a lack of understanding of the core issue. first, there were tons of x86 android devices. samsung tab3 to name the last one i used. second, most of the code on android is tainted GPL code. technically GPL was supposed to not prevent you from running whatever you want on devices you own if it was distributed with GPL based code, but alas, that is exactly what happens.
- dimitrios1 6y ago
  > Almost feel like the early 80s all over again, but less for technical reasons. It's almost exclusively due to technical reasons.
  - glsdfgkjsklfj 6y ago
    right... (tried to add as much as you to the discussion)
TylerE 6y ago
"Can't". There are plenty of PC games that have mobile ports. All the GTA3 ingine games, several bioware rpgs. You're confusing "can't" with "publisher hasn't bothered". The hardware, certainly on newer iphones,is plenty powerful.
- ekianjo 6y ago
  His claim is still correct. It does not run PC x86 games natively. If you have to port every PC game one by one it will take forever.
  - kitsunesoba 6y ago
    Yes, the body of x86 PC games is massive and the overwhelming majority will never receive mobile ports. Furthermore, it's still going to be a few years before phones have enough power to emulate x86 competently enough to be able to play these titles via emulator.

ekianjo 6y ago

The Pyra is actually shipping for the first preorders. Several people I know have received their unit.

Judgmentality 6y ago
I appreciate the extra info. How do they like it?
- ekianjo 6y ago
  It's still pretty much WIP on the software side of things. The graphics drivers are not working as they should yet, and the default (debian-based) distro needs polish.
  - Judgmentality 6y ago
    Just curious, as you seem to be an enthusiast in this space - what do you see as the ultimate goal of this form factor and/or platform? Is it for emulation in general, for specific consoles, is the hope to play Steam games that don't demand powerful computers? I get that it's a general purpose PC and people can do what they want with it, but I assume there is a leading reason to develop this. And reading the comments there is an entire world around this space I am woefully ignorant of. I'm genuinely asking out of curiosity, I know my first comment was dismissive but that mostly means I'm not the target audience.

nicolashahn 6y ago

It's a shame the Pyra is so underpowered for how expensive it is. The Raspberry Pi can beat it on both compute and memory.

ekianjo 6y ago
The Pyra is not really about its internals but the whole packaged unit. Making a raspberry pi fit into such a form factor is actually pretty hard.
- nicolashahn 6y ago
  It would mainly be hard because of all the peripheral ports on the board taking up space where you don't want it. I bet making a Pyra with the compute version of the Pi: https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/compute-module-4/?variant=raspberry-pi-cm4001000 https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/compute-module-4/?varia... wouldn't be too difficult.

parsimo2010 6y ago

The PSP had a 480x272 screen, and you’re saying that this thing having 800p feels worse? The Switch does 720p in portable mode and it’s tons of fun and is selling like crazy 3+ years after release. You can’t expect a portable device to render most games at a playable framerate at 1080. Cell phones can have high resolution screens to play videos and render text. Most cell phone games can’t render at 1080p except on the highest end flagships. Since the S20 Ultra can literally be double this price it’s not a fair comparison anyway. Then you talk about how tech specs don’t matter when you were just complaining about a spec? I don’t really understand that argument. There will be plenty of people that buy this. The only real issue is that you still can’t get a Neo, the GPD Win 3 is going to enjoy a lot of sales from people that don’t want to wait.

Judgmentality 6y ago
> The PSP had a 480x272 screen, and you’re saying that this thing having 800p feels worse? I was accounting for the fact that the PSP launched 16 years ago. It's a similar form factor - big screen, big power, short battery life. > The Switch does 720p in portable mode and it’s tons of fun and is selling like crazy 3+ years after release. Comparing this to the Switch is silly. They are nothing alike. Thinking you can compete with Nintendo in handheld gaming is like thinking you can compete with Google in search. History has shown this time and time and time again. Nintendo sells the Switch because it's the only way to play Nintendo games. That is 90% of their value. The other 10% comes from having an affordable handheld gaming device in a comfortable form factor and they've been trying to get more third party and indie support. > Then you talk about how tech specs don’t matter when you were just complaining about a spec? Specs don't matter, and this thing has nothing to sell itself but specs - and its specs aren't even that good. > There will be plenty of people that buy this. I'm not saying nobody will buy it. I'm saying I won't, and I doubt it will be considered a success by most. But hey, if you like it and want to buy it go for it! If you love it that's what counts.
- Jetrel 6y ago
  To piggyback on what you're saying - the thing that makes Nintendo do so damned well - even beating iOS for games, is that their market is carefully curated to produce a "middle class" of game developers. Specifically ones who don't go bankrupt and stop making games, which is basically what's happening on iOS, and even worse on Android. iOS gamedev is kind of a slaughterhouse, where a tiny crust of lottery-winners make it look viable, but the other 98% or so of devs don't break even. There are a lot of reasons for this, and all of them are things Nintendo's worked pretty hard to counter. Refusing to let stuff on the store if it doesn't meet certain QA criterion, forcibly preventing the race-to-the-bottom on the price wars, deliberately avoiding top-10 lists and any of the other reflexive techie moves that end up being anti-patterns (by being attention-funnels that drive further sales to the people who don't need it, and starve the ones who do). There's a LOT of stuff they do right, and some of this they're historically famous for (the QA angle was the thing that famously let them buck the videogame crash of the 80s, in contrast to the prior vendors who had no qualms about allowing outright broken/unplayable games on their devices). This stuff is important. Generally what makes markets like this work isn't a technological problem, but a social/political problem. Nintendo understands that game devs need to make a living, but apple and google treat them as cannon fodder, and it has consequences for the quality of work. If you don't get this right, people will make a bunch of shallow stuff that's a low upfront investment (Angry Birds, Monument Valley, etc), but you'll have shockingly few "deep" games like BotW, because nobody can stomach that risk, especially when they'd have to make an insane number of sales to break even at (presumed) lower prices.

hknapp 6y ago

Cell phones need high resolution to render crisp text, not for games