handheld gaming.
friday, january 12th, 2024.
This week, I snagged a Miyoo Mini Plus for $80. It's a small single board computer (SBC) handheld, featuring a SigmaStar SSD202D with a dual core ARM Cortex-A7 and 128 MB of RAM. It came in the mail on Wednesday and I stayed up until after midnight installing the custom firmware, Onion OS, and pushing and pulling the ROM sets according to the documentation to get everything to show up correctly.
It took a while to get everything set up but now I'm up and running and I friggin' love this little gaming handheld. I'm playing a bunch of my old favorites like Advance Wars, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, and Bionic Commando. There's even a port of Diablo for this thing! All on the go!
Mostly, I just wanted to be able to do some gaming on the couch and not have to sit at my computer desk for gaming. Last night was particularly cozy— I got to snuggle with my partner on the couch while getting a little gaming in! Now that I see that this little console works well, I've ordered another for them, too.
archive.org is particularly good for finding quality ROM sets:
Update on Jan 14, 2024: Tiny Best Set: GO! is probably the best way to fill a microSD card full of ROMs. It even comes with preview images for all the games!
I'm positively amazed that I can play all these old games on a handheld device. Those little ARM system on chip devices feel like the future. It's amazing the things you can run on an embedded Linux system.
OK, that's enough flapping about how much I love this little handheld gaming console! The weekend is here, and my partner and I have plans for a date day today, two hockey games, and I'll probably wind up cleaning up the yard this weekend after another storm rolls through today. So many branches and leaves to clean up!
SourceHut is experiencing an outage thanks to a DDoS attack. I hope Drew and company are able to get things back up and running without pulling their hair out too much. I can't even imagine trying to mitigate that sort of attack. My hat's off to all the system administrators that keep our digital infrastructure up and running.
Oh, this is also my 99th blog post! I can't believe I've written that many entries already.
I suppose that's all for now!
Until next time, be well. :)