For the SNES, from what I heard it was partially because with the flat topped NES, Nintendo of America got a lot of repairs from kids spilling soda or whatever on the NES they were using as a table. For the SNES, they deliberately made it harder to that.
There's some overlap. I think it probably has a bigger impact on game attach rate for a certain segment of gamer. I bought a lot less games on Switch upon getting a PC handheld, not because of price (generally I find games are pretty comparable there), but because the PC version is more flexible and I'm pretty sure I can run the PC version ten years down on some PC. Will Nintendo's next console run it? No idea.
It's not really. The CPU in the Switch 2 isn't the most amazing and the Steam Deck has 4GB extra RAM (but it's also got a lighter OS), but the GPU is worse on Deck. Switch 2 offers pretty comparable performance in handheld mode, better in docked and devs are more likely to tailor games for Switch 2. FF7 Rebirth looks like trash on Deck, even on my faster 780M handheld it was pretty ugly, I had to hack in FSR3/4 support for it to look remotely decent. Switch 2 by comparison looks better. Star Wars Outlaws is another example.
You can't play Pokopia, DK Bonanza or Mario Kart World on PC. Even with a 5090. You also can't play Cyberpunk 2077 on the plane or train with a 2nd hand desktop unlike the Switch 2.
Shareware died before Steam. Steam launched in 2003 and didn't sell any 3rd party games until 2005. Nobody gave a shit about shareware in 2003. Nobody gave a shit about shareware in 2010 when Steam seriously became useful as a place to play more than the Orange Box and Counter-Strike.
I hated Steam when I first encountered it, but it's not a requirement to publish a game on PC/Mac/Linux. Nor is the process to install non-Steam games full of scary warnings like Google Play even on their own platform SteamOS. And they do let publishers give keys to 3rd party stores to sell unlike virtually every other platform. They aren't perfect but they are nowhere near what Apple does with iOS.
Why? With Bazzite and similar that's kind of the whole point of them existing. Just installing Steam from Flathub or the repo is not going to get the same level of integration (gaming mode, etc.). Bazzite works really well on my PC handheld and I don't think a generic distro with Steam added after the fact would be the same. Id you want a distro without Steam bundled there are lots of those.
> Why? With Bazzite and similar that's kind of the whole point of them existing. Just installing Steam from Flathub or the repo is not going to get the same level of integration
This shows a weakness than in the Linux desktop ecosystem that something has to be bundled to correctly integrate with the system.
It's no different to Chinese OEMs bundling additional stores with their phones.
EDIT: For anyone unfamiliar, the MiSTer is a homebrew FPGA project originally built around a Terasic DE-10 Nano that can emulate in hardware a wide variety of consoles and computers, leading to extremely low latency and (often) higher accuracy than most software emulators due to it being easier/more efficient to recreate cycle-accurate effects in hardware. It’s extremely flexible, allowing for both HDMI and analog output (with scaler effects, if desired), as well as both modern USB/Bluetooth HIDs as well as adapters for original controllers. It’s a very cool project and worth checking out if you’re enthusiastic about such things - retroremake.co has had some well-liked clone/re-engineerings of the MiSTer hardware but they’re going through a big shipping backlog so I don’t know when they’re in stock; there were some decently regarded Aliexpress clones as well, but I don’t know what the status of those is. An authentic DE-10 Nano is an option too, it’ll just be more expensive and you’ll still need to get an SDRAM board to run most cores.
Exactly the first thought I had too. I know extremely little about FPGA development, but three things I noticed that came to mind re: difficulty:
- Alex used a Xilinx FPGA, the MiSTer uses an Altera Cyclone - dunno how portable code (if that’s even the right term for e.g. VHDL) is from one to the other. I know the MiSTer has a light framework for cores to plug into to get input handling, scalers, etc.; so maybe it’s more a matter of porting to the framework…?
- Alex mentioned the SCC didn’t have a pre-made FPGA core so they used a real one. I don’t think serial handling would be critical but I do suspect you’d at least need a dummy to get the OS to pass self-tests and boot properly. Possible that maybe the Mac core has already handled this, though.
- What little I know of RAM and the MiSTer would lead me to think the SDRAM card a MiSTer setup typically needs wouldn’t be a problem over the SRAM Alex used, and that either the framework or the wiring of the RAM card handles the details for you - but I definitely don’t know that.
On the plus side I suspect/hope maybe a bunch of stuff from the classic/original Mac core could be borrowed to get it up and running.
There’s definitely plenty of cores that haven’t yet been developed on the MiSTer… for instance there isn’t a color 68K Mac core, only recently have people started on 3D0 and CD-i and Apple IIgs cores, the Saturn core was pretty shaky until a recent overhaul, etc. I think what’s there is just a function of what was either already developed for an FPGA or what had the biggest demand from their respective communities.
If you disable it as outlined in the article it will not come back IME. It is ridiculous and frustrating that you have to do it, and IMO it's extremely poorly named and placed but it does work at least.
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