I dunno man, I feel like even homebrew doesn't have much of a chance of saving this. I guess it all comes down to what chip they're using, but this thing seems too underpowered to emulate the system properly. It'd be hilarious if someone hacks the system and is able to install Retroarch (or even a newer version of the open source emulator Sony used here) and gets the included games running better than stock on the same hardware. Seems like a stretch though.
Not much of a chance of quality being improved before release considering release is 6 days from now.
As Stranno happily shows, its actually a rather decent (and above all,
modern) SoC. I can see why that would raise the costs, although.. it shouldn't be by that much.
Atleast the hardware side is
interesting, i would say.
Holy shit totally overlooked this.
That is actually... quite
decent. 4x Cortex A35 at 1.5 Ghz (Which is rather unique for such a box, but they may not be really powerful) and PowerVR GE8300 is similarly unique and..
modern, although the GPU architecture is less recent (PowerVR Rogue) Aswell as DDR4 support. It actually has more modern tech than the PSTV (Which was PowerVR SGX) and it its quite a bit more powerful than the NES/SNES Classic.
I think this also explains
why the performance is so shitty: Quad Cortex A7 and (especially) Mali 400 MP2 are very
standard in terms of hardware, having been around for years now. That + a dedicated emulator by Ninty gives the performance it has now.
Compare that to a relatively new CPU, a new GPU, and a open source emulator.
Any mentions of RAM size? I am looking through some teardowns but nothing yet. Is it DDR4 memory like the SoC supports?
Actually geniunely surprised by this tech. This might be
interesting for homebrew, although PowerVR is far less supported in that scene though.