So glad I could help!

I hope you enjoy sinking back into it after such a long time :)

Today’s NeoCities article is just little feature about fheroes2, the free, open-source project rebuilding the engine behind Heroes of Might and Magic II.

Its latest update adds optional health bars, smarter opponents and gentler behaviour on easier difficulties, but I liked the smaller things the community has spent years fixing, from missing pieces of town artwork to clearer battle information.

My article also touches a little on how some contributors got involved and how this 1996 PC game has found its way onto Android, Vita and Switch. Thought it might interest anyone who enjoys seeing old games cared for, or fancies exploring Heroes II for the first time!

*miss 48K!

Thanks!

These kind of oddball gaming stories are what keep me sane to write, so this is a lovely comment to read :)

Just a little article about a odd (but fun) emulation project. Supratim Sanyal has got 18 Nintendo Game & Watch games, including Donkey Kong and Oil Panic, running on a ZX Spectrum 48K.

The Spectrum emulates the chip inside the handhelds, so it’s running the original game code while drawing those familiar LCD segments on a TV. My favorite bit of it is that Sanyal also made a new Game & Watch-style maze game called Munchy, which you can try without supplying any Nintendo ROMs (well, if you have the admittedly niche hardware that is)

Thats really kind of you to say!

I know for a fact that Russ will cover streaming PC games in his review. He was at a wedding over the weekend and is only just filming his impressions video now, so his full review is still a little ways off. But we’ve chatted about it, he’ll be reviewing that very thing.

I’ve just published my not-quite-a-review, not-quite-an-impressions-piece, but something closer to a good old-fashioned feature article about the AYN Odin 3 Portal, which is a retro handheld designed to emulate old games (but can also emulate PC games very well). I wanted to approach this one a little differently from your typical handheld review.

I interviewed several developers behind the software people are most likely to use on hardware this powerful, including jpolo (ARMSX3), Camille LaVey (Eden), Utkarsh (GameNative) and Json (DroidDeck). Their insights into the Dragonwing Q8, the challenges of modern emulation and where things are heading form a big part of the article, alongside my own testing of everything from PS2 and GameCube to PS3, Xbox 360 and PC gaming.

It’s also a rather long read, much closer to those enormous feature articles gaming websites used to publish years ago. I’ve always loved that sort of writing, and I suspect it’ll appeal to a certain kind of retro gaming enthusiast who enjoys digging into the technology and the people behind it. Or I hope so, anyway. It is a long read.

As for the Portal itself? I think it’s about as close to the perfect larger Android gaming handheld as you can get, provided you can afford it. The OLED is gorgeous, the controls are wonderful, performance is extraordinary, and that infamous high-pitched fan whine from the Odin 3 is completely gone. Not everything runs perfectly, especially some demanding PS3 games, but gaming on this thing has been an absolute pleasure.

Hope you enjoy the read!

Hahahahahah

I love this comment. I know, I asked a lot and recorded a lot from each one. So I’m quite impressed if you went through all of this!

" including lengthy review processes"

The Decky team makes sure plug-ins are safe by testing things themselves, how terrible. They just added more to their review team too. Again, these are humans who are reviewing plug-ins themselves

“prohibiting AI use in plugin creation”

False. As it stands, devs submitting to Decky have to tick that “Generative AI was NOT used to write a majority of the code I am submitting.” which means that it can be used to assist. They asked the community some time ago what to do with AI going forward, and this was their result

“and disagreements between plugin creators on Discord.”

Oh right, that asshole from like two years ago who was a racist jerk in the Decky Discord? The one who also got banned from the r/SteamDeck sub-reddit, Decky’s and two others soon after for promoting his slop so aggressively and behaving like a baby? I love how this writer phrases it like it is a regular thing. Sensationalist crap.

…feel free to use DeckyHub if you want something vibe coded with Claude. I wouldn’t trust anything unverified being installed onto your Deck.

https://gardinerbryant.com/author/dash/

In that case, have at it!

And thank you so much, what a kind comment to find :)

Hello there, original writer of the article, and the posts here.

I’ve been contributing to the fediverse for years now. Not only am I on Lemmy every single day, I’m on Mastodon. Gardiner (my partner in the site, he and run it together!) is well known for his support of the fediverse. Every video he makes goes to subscribeto.me

I explained elsewhere in this post why I share my posts as I do, but maybe just do a quick scroll through my profile here. You’ll see years of me sharing to this space.

Karma farmers gonna farm.

What exactly do you think I will do with this karma?

Check up a couple comments, I’ve replied!

:)

At the moment, I don’t think there’s any one option which is better than the other. GameNative has been on the scene for some time now, so the benefit is months upon months of refinement! DroidDeck however has only been around for a little over one month now. Their team has a ton of experience with similar projects, but as a whole this one is quite new.

The interesting thing (to me at least) is that the Retroid Pocket Duo which I reviewed not so long ago wouldn’t work at all with GameNative, but would work a dream with DroidDeck.

• Both projects make use of AI to assist, but DroidDeck more-so than GameNative.
• I use both, because as it stands each can work when one won’t
• GameNative has a couple handheld manufacturers paying attention and working with them for native builds for specific devices, while DroidDeck hasn’t got that

I think while they’re similar, they do different things. GN focuses on making the games themselves playable while DroidDeck gives you the entire Steam interface.

P.S. I also just uploaded the massive complete chats record with the members of DroidDeck to my NeoCities page, if you wanted to read all about their work. It is a long read though!

https://handheldhideout.neocities.org/articles/droiddeck-the-complete-team-interview.html

Oh no problems!

I just shared an article (the full interview of my questions and answers with the DroidDeck team, which I turned into that feature article on our site!) which is on my NeoCities site, by cross-posting to three communities here. From what I see though it is the exact same issue again, just with a different method.

I think this is in fact a Fediverse issue, and not how I’ve been sharing articles to communities here. I’m sorry!

There’s a few cross folk in here, whose comments (I can’t pretend don’t hurt a bit!) do disagree. I’ll just have to have a think how I share on here going forward. The last thing I want to do is annoy anyone, but it takes a user all of 2 seconds to click on my profile here and see I’m deeply invested in the fediverse and have been on Lemmy for years now.

I appreciate your comment, thank you for saying so!

Oh gosh, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to give that impression!!!

Thankfully if there’s a group of devs who I would consider the least likely to buy into that side of things, it is the RetroDECK team :)

To me, cross-posting your own posts is a sign of an overinflated sense of self-importance.

When I see a comment like yours, I just wonder why I bother sharing my articles here.

Oh my Gosh. Okay, this is me!

One creator I enjoy and follow on the Fediverse is Gardiner Bryant as his content is really enjoyable.

First off, thank you so much! Really appreciate you enjoying the articles we put out :) One think I might emphasize here though is that so far as the site goes, Gardiner and I are partners! This is one of my articles though (so I’m to blame for this appearing so often in your feed). In fact I’m 99.99% sure Gardiner doesn’t actually share his articles on Lemmy at all.

Sadly he ´s the target of my post as he shares his content on many different communities that I follow.

(And I’m ‘she’!)

I’m sorry it appears like this. It used to annoy me back when I was regularly on Reddit, when a post was cross-posted to a different community I’d have to follow that link, read their description of the post, then follow the link then go back a few steps to start/join the discussion in that community. Since joining Lemmy and sharing here (it has been a long time!) I just went against that grain and posted in the communities it was relevant to, to give each community a space to chat about it.

I had no idea your app was showing it this way, or that how I was doing this was annoying anyone. I’ll just go back to the age old cross-post method instead, going forward. Interesting that your app shows it this way, the one I use seems to do that for me.

Sorry to annoy you! It won’t happen going forward :)

Remind me to reply to this in the morning! I’m just about to go to sleep :)

I’ve been chatting with Lazorne, IceNine, Xargon and Lahrs from the RetroDECK team again, and I’ve put together a fairly lengthy feature about their upcoming 0.11.0 update, which is without a doubt their biggest yet (although I do say that each time!).

For anyone unfamiliar with it, RetroDECK is a self-contained retro gaming platform for the Steam Deck and other Linux devices. It brings emulators, game engines and other tools together into one convenient package, taking so much of the hassle out of installing, configuring and maintaining everything. It has always been my recommendation for the Steam Deck, though obviously it isn’t locked to just the Deck.

Version 0.11.0 is a pretty enormous step forward. The team has announced 23 new components, including Xbox 360 emulation through Xenia Edge, support for lesser-known computers such as the FM Towns and SAM Coupé, classic game engines, interactive fiction through Gargoyle, and even Mudlet for accessing old text-based multiplayer worlds. There’s also a substantial overhaul of RetroDECK’s underlying architecture, making it easier for the devs to integrate and maintain all these different components, while keeping things straightforward for users.

But what I found most interesting while interviewing the team was just how much of this work is driven by their personal experiences and passion for preservation. We talked about old gaming communities that are somehow still alive, forgotten hardware, the importance of making obscure systems accessible, and even Xargon’s previously unannounced project to preserve and emulate the 2-XL talking robot from the 1970s.

I think projects like RetroDECK have an increasingly important role to play in game preservation. It’s not just about making old games playable on modern hardware, but helping people discover systems, communities and experiences they might never have known existed. And the easier those things are to access, the better their chances of finding new audiences.

It’s a long read, admittedly, but I really wanted to give the developers room to tell their stories rather than simply run through a list of new features. Hope someone here enjoys this :)