I remember doing some web development work for HardKernel/ODROID back in ~2010 and I just did it for free (I loved the idea of an "Android Game Boy," plus Chris Pruett at Google recommended it for gaming and game development[1]), and they ended up sending me an ODROID-S out of the blue. I was totally surprised and felt I didn't really deserve it (MSRP was like $200-300 and I was a poor college kid), and I'll never forget the gesture.
HK earned a longtime fan with that move for sure, haha. :) This new handheld looks great, I hope they have their "mainstream moment."
Is there a place that collects info on all these sorts of projects and allows you to compare specs and software? I bought a Retroid 2 on a whim but I'm wondering if it's the best out there.
Finally, https://www.reddit.com/r/SBCGaming/ has a pretty active community. There are also a couple of good discord servers that I could track down if you're interested.
> We will start selling and shipping the ODROID-Go Ultra in early October 2022 at a price of $111.
I really hope the production will keep with the sales...
I bought a miyoo mini because I heard from a friend from a friend, that it's great before it got popular, and got it for cheap... then it became popular, and it's practically impossible to get at "normal" prices, only through resellers at 2x the price.
From what I've seen, the ODROID handhelds (Advance, Super) prices remained relatively constant due to brands like Anbernic typically having better build quality.
Personally, I've tried both the ODROID Go Advance and the Anbernic equivalent RG351M. The build quality and controls on the Anbernic are definitely better. However, I ultimately stuck with the ODROID as it was cheap enough not to worry about damaging or losing.
The main selling point of miyoo mini was the low price. For $60 you got s/nes, gb/c/a and sega handhelds plus a lot of PS1 games.
If they made the price eg $90, I'd add $10, $20 more, and buy a better device (or maybe I wouldn't buy anything at all, because it's above the $100 mental barrier, and it's not "cheap" anymore).
I really love HardKernel's openness, but there are a few things I'd really like to see them work on:
* Build quality. I'd prefer a slightly higher BOM of it led to a significantly better experience. Everyone complains about the controls on Odroid Go devices, meanwhile the Chinese clones come and improve this and get a ton of sales that could have gone to HK. The 3-headed charging cable that comes with this device is another example. That thing is an abomination and likely a fire hazard too. They don't have to go full USB-PD, it could just follow the much simpler and cheaper-to-implement BC 1.2 standard. But instead they do their own wired thing, presumably for some minor cost savings.
* Their shipping / checkout process. First, you have to sign up for an account. Then it estimates some ridiculous amount for shipping (e.g. $60 shipping for a 10-oz $80 item.) Then the address form is in a different language (Korean?) despite the rest of the site being in English. It switches to English after you find the right control, but it's just confusing and the whole process almost certainly costs them some sales.
* Their forum members can be oddly aggressive sometimes, e.g. defending that crazy charging cable. One of the arguments boiled down to "it's safe to use if you're an electrical engineer". They also attack any mention of a competitors product. And the moderators support this behavior.
All of this combines to keep me from buying an Odroid so far, despite it being the kind of thing I'd really like to support.
- the weird power cable (did they cheapen out on PD? for just 7.5W there's no need to do something like that)
- the lack of exposed GPIO header (no hacking, they could have just left in unpopulated)
- the bigger size (the Odroid Go Advance was just the right size)
- the lack of option for a 10000 mAh battery
Hopefully, the framework laptop starts a new trend of devices where you can keep the shell and screen (just replacing the inside) and new motherboards can be swapped-in, with the old one returned and resold or recycled.
A subscription-basis model for motherboard upgrade or damaged case replacement could help a big reduce the waste from people updating their phone every year.
For this question I think I know the answer: USB PD chips are hard to obtain right now. So they probably left it out just due to a lack of general (reliable) availability.
It does have exposed GPIO, though! You can see the connector above the CPU and other microchips in the first motherboard picture. This is in keeping with the Odroid Go Super design, which also had exposed GPIO in that location.
The bigger size allows for a much better screen. But I agree that you loose something in pocketability.
I suppose technically you could upgrade the battery yourself. Although a larger battery is at ods with that size constraint.
Eyeballing it, I would guess that you can swap the motherboard out from the previous generation Odroid Go Super, so that may actually be an option.
I don't think I'd want a subscription, but sure some people might go for that.
I had an ODROID Advance and the buttons and sticks were so miserable that I gave it away and replaced it with a RG351V, on the same chipset and 4:3 DMG Game Boy-style layout, and the difference in actually USING it was night and day.
I wish ODROID actually just sold these as kits like they used to for folks to just install better sticks and buttons on their own if they want them, and especially if it retained some hackability. Clones offering better gaming experiences - better controls, less wonky charging, more solid cases, integrated wireless, video output - are only going to come out faster and faster.
For anyone thinking about picking one up explore buying a used vita. It can do everything this does (sans GameCube) but it can play vita games as well. Sd card adapters are <$10
Worth mentioning Vita is pretty finnicky. SD card adapters use the game card slot not the memory card slot and and so aren't the simpliest to configure and get going. Official cards that use the memory card slot are capped at 64GB and 64GB cards were only sold in Asia and have only gotten even more stupid expensive over time.
It's a decent handheld but Sony's paranoia really kneecapped it. And it doesn't quite have the ease of use as a lot of the retro handhelds available today.
I recently breathed new life into my Vita with Adrenaline and a whole bunch of old PSX games. It really is a fantastic device, great build quality is exceptional and perfect handheld hardware for anything below 2012-era AAA games.
It really was let down by the business folks at Sony. I guess the upside is that it paved the way for the Switch and Nintendo really learned from Sony's mistakes (but even then, my Vita sees a lot more usage than my Switch).
The ps vita is the one console I keep taking out of storage periodically. It's such a great handheld console with a great library of indie games and amazing for emulation.
I haven't had any issues with mine (OLED model) FWIW. If you have an OLED model I think there is a way to put the card in the PSVSD, which might be more reliable.
Only the 3G models support the PSVSD. You do have to fiddle with the drive setup, some of the adapters don't work with some FW versions, etc. It's just more of a pain IMO than dropping ROMs on an SD card like other handhelds.
Yeah but it's a 30+ step process to even to be able to use the sd2vita and emulators. Modern retro handhelds have an ease of use convenience factor. Proper SD card support, USB C charging, TV out, literally drag and drop ROMs, etc.
This is very true, modding any console can be quite the effort and a huge challenge for non technical people.
To get the mod working I had to compile the software for macOS 10.13 as some libusb function wasn’t working correctly and wouldn’t inject the payload to the vita. This was well out of my comfort zone.
The official flash cards also are very prone to corruption, especially the larger sized ones. Getting the SD card adapter is practically a requirement.
the PS Vita is an excellent console, especially give how old it is.
What's sad is that modding anything requires a level of technical knowledge and patience that most will not have. I fully agree with you though - i bought a used Vita and could not be happier with it as a handheld console.
What does the OS situation for these handhelds look like? Could they be usable with a pmOS or Mobian install? It might also be interesting to look into UX paradigms for a more general purpose use of this class of devices, as opposed to just gaming. E.g. they might supplement SBC's for some educational uses.
I have a previous model, the Odroid-go Advance. There are a bunch of canned distributions bassed around RetroArch and EmulationzStation, but it's just an ARM Linux box underneath, which can even be fitted with a USB keyboard.
From looking at a different forum on the submitted link https://forum.odroid.com/viewforum.php?f=194 it seems that mainline support for the Go Advance is still a work in progress, and quite a bit of stuff is not working properly. Once that's addressed however a pmOS build for that could be feasible. pmOS has a wiki page on the Odroid N2+ SBC, but this handheld comes with changes that might make it harder to support.
I think it's just a plain old web forum with a standard News/Announcement section.
In the before times (when WordPress was new and shiny, or even earlier) this was a run-of-the-mill setup and every community had a locked Announcement section where only moderators/admins could post.
Yes, they can play native games. The new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game has a Linux/arm build that works on previous generations of this device, Beats of Rage works, there are native builds of Super Mario 64, Another Metroid 2 Remake (AM2R), Half Life, etc.
They are targeted at emulation, but it's just a small ARM computer running Linux, so you can really do anything you want (within the limits of what the hardware can run, of course.)
There's a reason it costs Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo millions in R&D to finalise their controllers: it's hard to get right; and terrible if it's even slightly wrong.
This is clearly a budget option but I'd wish budget manufacturers tried to key into existing controllers more. Slide in ports for Nintendo JoyCons, for example. Or club together to fab a common input and ergonomics platform, just leave the computation, display and battery capacity variables.
Various controllers have been de-facto standard over multiple platforms over the years. DE-9 joysticks¹ used to be standard, and you could buy your own favorite model to your microcomputer or console. Nowadays it seems that the Xbox controller² has occupied this niche.
I had some 360 controllers that lasted ~10 years, which seems pretty good for a controller. The rubber on the top of the joysticks wore away after maybe 7 or so years, and then they eventually became wobbly.
A ~4 year old Xbox one controller just got too much drift, surprisingly enough. I was kind of disappointed. But with these small sample sizes, could just be a fluke.
opposite for me. replaced many thumbsticks on 360 controllers, have had better luck with XBone. but, i kinda suspect the same cheapo parts are used on both, so...
DS4's have been solid for me, with the biggest issue being their rather disappointing battery life. Probably depends a lot on the types of games most often played, playstyles, etc though.
Firstly, I mistakenly wrote (and linked to) “Xbox controller” when I actually meant the Xbox 360 controller.
Secondly, you seem to have missed my point. I did not mean that the actual Xbox 360 controller is the best, I meant that for games and other similar applications, an Xbox 360 controller seems to be what most interfaces are designed for, and an Xbox 360 controller can also be plugged into anything with a USB port, which is everything. Therefore, you can choose to buy any good Xbox 360-compatible controller on the market and use it with most software and hardware.
I meant the USB Xbox 360 Controller, not the wireless one. Otherwise, I don’t know; you may be right that DualShock is taking over, I don’t really follow the space, I just know what I’ve seen in various games, but this might be changing in newer games; I wouldn’t know.
AFAIK they all use ALPS joysticks and they all drift. Gulikit is using hall effect joysticks in their KingKong Pro 2 controller which won't drift. The Dreamcast used hall effects as well (plus the 3D Saturn controller, I believe). They made replacement sticks for the Steam Deck, so hopefully they'll target a few other popular controllers next.
My CH mach III just died. It's about 30 years old, and one of the potentiometers finally gave out. I can't find anything comparable outside of industrial controls...
S922X is an old soc, but looks like they got new kernel for it. Wonder if Amlogic managed to update their proprietary blobs or odroid provide no hw acceleration and decoding whatsoever.
Used the N1 for about a year, and while I enjoyed the experience with it as a decent Linux machine, the video acceleration left a sour taste, especially the atrociously basic kplayer which is the only video player that had it.
Looks a little faster than the Anbernic Rg351. I'll have to see some gameplay footage of the Dreamcast and GameCube emulation to see if it's worth the upgrade.
Really love the detailed specs, schematics, and board shots. Open hardware projects have an aesthetic all to their own, and understanding how hardware is built and works together somehow makes these products more enjoyable (at least this is a principle we've adhered to while building the Simula One[1]).
This would be kinda cool, but also kinda the most terrible idea I can think of. MMORPGs rely so heavily on network effects to gain and keep players that any barrier to entry - and the requirement to have dedicated hardware is a pretty huge barrier - can be utterly fatal.
That said, I've really been enjoying Final Fantasy XIV on my Steam Deck - being able to pick it it up at lunch time and do a quick half hour of crafting or gathering really does present a different way to enjoy the game.
This one will likely have two years of support and that's it, which is the common nature of these systems, especially made by ODROID.
It does not matter about the specs here, it's always about the games and all this is useful for is playing pirated games.
Consumers who love the Nintendo Switch are not missing out on anything here, given that they know that their Switch will be supported for longer than 2 years.
...it's running Linux. It will be supported until the sun dies.
It's also sad that you think I can't play games I own on this. As if I'm going to rip my mint copy of FFVII open when I can play it upscaled. It's just a sad backwards way to think about it.
It's an ARM SoC, those can't run vanilla Linux images and require someone, usually manufacturers or enthusiasts, to maintain SoC-specific Linux builds for the boards.
whats the equivalent performance like? i mean if its linux and only $111, i will try it but what about availability? would it be available in say... india?
i would buy this just to support the linux part of the "whole package"...
We'll, it doesn't have built-in wi-fi, but I suppose it would work with a USB dongle.
However, an iPad is going to be significantly more powerful than one of these devices; you're probably not going to want compile code and whatnot on one of these.
It is based on the Odroid N2+, which can definitely replace a Pi.
I used some in the past and they are powerful alternatives.
The only downside is worse software support (the official images have only older linux versions), but there are alternative images. I had good experience using Armbian images instead of the official ones.
TBH, I want legit content for my (previous model). I have a few of the new homebrew console titles on it, and stuffed it with a few PS1 discs I owned (these can be imaged on a modern PC optical drive).
I seriously considered getting a tool to dump the actual legit cartridges I own to populate the unit, but they're surprisingly pricey (I think like 50USD+ last I checked), and it felt like the sort of thing that you'd get a lot of questions about if Customs opened the package. So it largely sits in a drawer waiting for me to play the FF5 PS1 adaptation.
except it isnt? in most countries piracy is not the same as theft, and in many of those countries you can "pirate" things you can no longer buy, that is the main reason for archive.org to still being alive.
If you want help maintain the quality of the conversation just avoid writing cruftcomments like the guidelines ask - there's one for every line in your comment.
HK earned a longtime fan with that move for sure, haha. :) This new handheld looks great, I hope they have their "mainstream moment."
[1] http://replicaisland.blogspot.com/2010/01/fragmentation-more...
(I've posted this comment a few times on HardKernel/ODROID stories. Just want to pay it forward to these guys.)