emulation

Recently I've been testing a SiFive HiFive Premier P550, and as part of that testing, I of course plugged in some AMD GPUs I had laying around.

I'll get to that testing at a later date, but one thing I enjoy in my testing is finding what 3D accelerated games and other applications can be run on alternative architectures. With the great work from Wine and Proton over the years, a great many games run out of the box on Linux—and they can be made to run on Arm and RISC-V architectures with almost as much ease as Linux on X86/AMD64!

As a kid, I never had a Game Boy, Game Gear, or any other handheld console. Heck, as luck would have it I've never owned a Nintendo Switch, either.

I've played console and PC games, I've only used handhelds twice: once in middle school, when a friend let me borrow his Game Gear for a day, and last year year when my dad brought over his Nintendo Switch—which my kids quickly commandeered.

I guess out of a sense of jealousy, I decided the first thing I should do with Raspberry Pi's latest hardware, the Pi Zero 2 (see my review here), is build myself a handheld retro gaming console.

And what better way than with the Null 2 kit (pictured above, from it's Tindie page), a kit integrating off-the-shelf components on a custom PCB, wrapped up nicely in a custom acrylic case.