I suspect Valve will limit initial sales. Based on what they did with the Steam Deck, I expect:

• You’ll probably have to have a Steam account with a purchased game on the account. Possibly the game will have to have been purchased before a specific date

• There will be a limit on how many purchases per account, probably 1-2

• Account in good standing (no VAC bans, not flagged for abusing game refunds, etc)

Have you heard of Cini Cross? It’s supposed to be kinda a spire-like nongram game

My friends and I were discussing maybe picking it up for game night. We had a lot of fun with sledding shenanigans in RV there yet, so should be fun.

I’m currently getting close to the end of Pragmata. It’s been a really fun game, the combat is new, the world has been interesting, and Diana is adorable. I think it’s hilarious how some of the best loot you can find is just stuff like crayons for her to play with.

What I was trying to say about TDP is that if the effective power efficiency is about the same for both, then the higher TDP will be a direct improvement in how much performance the device is able to put out.

It’s kinda the opposite of the relationship between the Deck and other more powerful handhelds. A lot of them are more powerful mostly because they have a max TDP of 25w. We’ve also seen this with new graphics cards, where the GPU power usage gets higher each year.

Now that Moore’s law is dead, one of the easiest way to have a more powerful device is to make it where it can utilize more power. If two devices are comparable in power efficiency, usually the device the uses the most electricity will be the most powerful.

ARM is specifically better at switching to a low power state. This makes it much more power efficient for low power states like web browsing or video playback, but has a much smaller impact on things like playing games. Add in the CPU overhead from fex, and you probably won’t see any lower power usage from ARM hardware vs x86 to run the same games.

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A couple things, Hades isn’t a good comparison since it has a pretty good optimized android port. You won’t get nearly as favorable a comparison on other games if one’s running on the Deck and the other is running through GameNative. The FEX compatibility layer will have a performance hit vs running on x86 hardware, although I don’t know if anyone has found a good way to measure it yet.

For RAM, the S23 has a slower memory bus than the deck, and Android + background processes will typically use 4-6GB of the system RAM. So you’re generally left 6-8GB for your combined RAM/VRAM, accessed at a slower speed, which will severely hamper a lot of more modern games.

For TFLOPS, phones are usually rated at a peak rating, rather than something that can be consistently sustained. A big part of this is thermals, which an external cooler will help with a lot. But you’re still going to probably have pretty significant decrease in performance outside of those peaks, typically only 50-60% of the peak power. There’s also practical TDP limits, even high end phones have a max TDP of 5-7w vs the Deck’s 15w limit, which will limit how much it can run.

It’s also just kinda nice to have a separate, low fuss gaming device. I can grab up the deck and immediately continue playing where I left off in seconds. I used to play more games on my phone before the deck, but I had constant issues with calls and other interruptions making it hard to get proper play sessions in. I typically gave up on playing any game that didn’t have save on exit, because of all the lost progress. And your setup sounds like it takes longer to setup, needing a cooler and controller setup each time you go to play.

Game Boy Advanced SD

You can try GameNative, it’s an attempt to bring FEX (the x86 > ARM compatibility layer) to android devices. There are some other projects trying the same thing, I think they’re called GameHub and Winlator.

Yeah, I can feel my palms hurting looking at those corners. Still is a cool idea though, growing up with the GBA and DS left me with a nostalgia for clamshell handhelds.

Technically it’s possible to do that already, I’ve seen Lethal Company configs where you a touchpad menu to enter all the computer commands for navigation/shop/etc. It’s definitely a pain to setup though, and I’d be really nice to have an easier way to set it up.

Unfortunately both devices need to be awake for this to work, but still handy.

At least for now, you’ll need to run moonlight through Steam. It uses Steam for input profiles, so initially it doesn’t seem like it will do much without steam running.

The original steam controller did have linux support without steam, but we don’t know yet how/when that will carry over to the new one. I also expect valve to eventually set it to work like the steam deck’s desktop controls, where it has default desktop inputs and you can hold start to swap to a generac xbox style controller inputs. However they haven’t announced that yet and I haven’t heard it mentioned in any reviews.

This comment was accidentally posted as a reply to me instead of OP, I’m tagging @supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz so he won’t miss it.

The binary is a command line only program, usual format for running it is ./pandoc inputfile -o outputfile"

If you want it runable anywhere from command line, you can put the downloaded binary in ~/.local/bin

I don’t know what exactly you want to use pandoc for, but you might also consider Morphosis. It’s in the discovery store and I think it’s a graphical front end for pandoc.

Yeah for sure, any 2D games or smaller games usually get installed to my microSD. But I usually don’t want to install anything larger than a couple GB to the microSD just because it takes forever to install and update.

I should also mention that some larger games (ie Cyberpunk) specifically have slow storage settings, that will try to compensate for using slower storage like a microSD. It won’t help with install/update times or general load times, but it will help some of the gameplay issues you can run into while playing.

I did some reading on it after posting my comment, it sounds like there’s been a pretty major improvement in rechargeable AA batteries in the last 10 years. Capacity has improved by 70+%, and much less power is lost during standby. So it’s probably worth trying again, I had just been avoiding them due to how poor the performance was back then.

What kind of rechargeable AA batteries do you use? I’ve tried a lot over the years for wiimotes/other controllers, but the battery life is kinda terrible.

The new steam controller is supposed to have 35 hours of battery life, I seem to remember my rechargeable AA powered controllers only getting like 2-4 hours per charge. They might have gotten 4-6 hours when they were new, but it wasn’t much better. Seems like even if the steam controller battery deteriorates to 50% capacity (17.5 hours) that would still be far better than my results with rechargeable AA batteries.