Honestly I’m so sick of it being called the “GabeCube”, partly because it’s too close to GameCube phonetically that it actually sounds pretty much identical to GameCube in most cases, but moreso because it’s the result of the hard work of so many talented and passionate engineers at Valve, it feels really disrespectful to call it after the businessman who funded it.

It’s an amusing pun, I enjoyed hearing/reading it the first time. Second time onwards it’s just annoying.

Sometimes you just gotta build something just to see if you can, not because of any inherent utilitarian value.

Also, having a trackpad built into a Gameboy is indeed cool. I don’t have to use the d-pad to parse menus if I don’t want to, I can also use it like a joystick even if it’s probably inferior to the OG controller scheme.

PS Vita had a touchpad on the back, you could use it similarly.

Except the screen doesn’t work (yet)

Yep, and I bet you could find those on eBay or similar second-hand sale sites.

Thats basically gamehub on android. There’s other forks of it that arent as shitty but I still don’t really intend on using it outside of checking up on progress every now and then. I think gamehub is gamesir the company that locks their switch emulator based off stolen code, and requiring physically for you to use one of their controllers. So I don’t like the idea of them in general, even ignoring the privacy issues.

But I do hope that steam os becomes popular for this. If I understand it correctly the frame is going to run off arch64 and use a combo of android, and fex translation layers so it will be extreamly versatile. Right now one of the closes things I experienced is Ubuntu touch, but you have to do everything in libertine containers and even native Linux apps don’t always work well, along with waydroid.

The progress with fex is already impressive and if it matures anything like proton did, it might be just as simple. I can throw a pirated Photoshop 1.6 cs or something into bottles with proton ge and it works. Sure might not be the version anyone wants anymore but I can say “we have Photoshop” now.

Even if people don’t use steam is directly I think there will be community made projects that essentially just bundle in almost the same experience using the same tools valve is using. Kinda like how bazzite or cachyos make it easy to have a steam deck experience out of the box and focuses on more gaming specific utilities that the steam deck comes bundled with.

And its not going to be good right away. Proton kind of sucked when the the first steam decks where released. It has to be out there and start getting put through the paces, people need to be making reports on protondb, etc. When I got a q2 steam deck it was pretty much only the indie games and native Linux games that worked fine. Outside of that it didnt work or there was actual fiddling you had to do, and protonGE was more nessisary to use over proton.

The hardest part is everyone needs universal hardware. The os would have to be made for a few select phones, because with these bundles of translation layers like gamehub its a lot of tweaking and toggling on and off stuff that you don’t always fully know what it does or understand why you need it. Sometimes you have a shitty processor so you have to toggle a different series of settings to get them to work with your hardware, and the experience isnt always going to be the same.