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0 pointsnickloewen6y ago0 comments

Those all appear to either emulate other consoles, or come with games built-in, though. This seems to be closer to the MakeCode consoles discussed elsewhere in these comments, since it sounds like it will allow you to make your own games for it (although it's not clear yet how easy that will be).

In that respect, it seems fairly unique to me, if only because it is beautifully designed and polished. It seems like the other options for making your own handheld games are either a bit clunky (eg Adafruit's PyGamers) or require quite a lot of know-how and effort (eg Gameboy or DS homebrew).

I hope that this will result in a bunch of new high-quality indie games. It seems that people are unlikely to invest a lot of effort in making spectacular games for the PyGamer, because the audience is small... Nintendo-handheld homebrew has the potential for a larger audience, but requires so much work that I imagine a lot of potential creators are dissuaded.

I'm on the lookout for a shiny indie-friendly portable that's easy to develop for, because I think that could lead to some exciting new things. Maybe this is it.

0 comments

beenBoutIT6y ago

It only works for this crowd if it's either impossibly rare and hard to come by or expensive enough to keep it out of the hands of most non-hipsters.

Causality16y ago

How do you know any of that? There's no photos on the site to indicate how polished it is, no mention of being able to run homebrew on it.

nickloewenOP6y ago

That’s fair, I don’t know for sure (hence “I hope...”).

I think shininess is fairly likely, because they are collaborating with Teenage Engineering, who have a reputation for making nice things like the OP-1.

Homebrew is much more questionable. On their “media” page they imply that an SDK is forthcoming, but they certaibly don’t make it as clear as I would like.

At any rate, the point I was going for was less that I am 100% behind this gadget, and more that I think there is room for more options in this realm, and this ticks at least some of my boxes.

abrugsch6y ago

pimoroni 32blit may well be everything you described... easy to develop for (LUA or C++, comes with free assets and tutorials) Nicely designed (ok, it's not finely CNC'd aluminium but it looks a lot nicer than most of the chinesium or other indie-cades out there) and open source - they've said the toolchain will run on linux too (I specifically asked)

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