[emodendroket]

This is cool but of course it's only going to be a small handful of titles that ever receive this kind of attention. But I have been blown away that now sub-$300 Android handhelds are more than capable of emulating the entire PS2 library, often with upscaling if you prefer.

[observationist]

Moore's law never ceases to amaze (the vulgar version where we're talking compute/dollar, not the transistor count doubling rate.) It won't be too long before phones are running AI models with performance equal to or better than current frontier models running on $100 million dollar clusters. It's hard to even imagine the things that will be running on billion dollar clusters in 10 years.

[freedomben]

I do hope you're right, but I'm quite skeptical. As mobile devices get more and more locked down, All that memory capacity gets less and less usable. I'm sure it will be accessible to Apple and Google models, but models that obey the user? Not likely

[ericmcer]

It might not be in our lifetimes... the frontier models are using terabytes of RAM. In 10 years iPhones went from ~2GB to ~8GB.

2012 Macbook pros had up to 16gb, 2026 maxes out at 64gb. So 4x increase in 16 years. 1996 Mac desktop had 16MB of ram, so from 1996-2012 there was a 1000x increase.

We won't see gains like we did from the 80s-2000s again.

[raincole]

> compute/dollar

That's ironic because building a PC is getting more expensive than last year for the first time.

[heliumtera]

I don't think you're going to see phones with 512gb VRAM+RAM in your lifetime.

[spookie]

> ... It won't be too long before phones are running AI models with performance equal to or better than current frontier models running on $100 million dollar clusters.

Maybe, perhaps phones will have the compute power... But not enough memory. If things continue the way they are, that is. Great for AI firms, they'll have their moat.

[pants2]

In the same way we have websites running on disposable vapes, it may not be long before such a device could run a small local LLM, and lots of appliances could have a local voice interface - so you literally talk to your microwave!

[deadbabe]

They will not build that phone because then you won’t subscribe to AI cloud platforms.

[jkingsman]

It really is incredible. I've been playing through my childhood games on retro handhelds, and recently jumped from <$100 handhelds to a Retroid Pocket Flip, and it's incredible. Been playing WiiU and PS2 games flawlessly at 2x res, and even tackling some lighter Switch games on it.

[reactordev]

It truly is. My issue though, like in 2010 when I built an arcade cabinet capable of playing everything is you eventually just run out of interest. In it all. Not even the nostalgia of it keeps my attention. With the exception of just a small handful of titles.

- Excite Bike (it’s in its own league) NES

- Punchout (good arcade fun) NES

- TMNT 4-P Coop Mame Version

- NBA Jam Mame Version

- Secret of Mana SNES

- Chronotrigger SNES

- Breath of Fire 2 SNES

- Mortal Kombat Series SEGA32X

- FF Tactics PS1

I know these can all be basically run in a browser at this point but even Switch or Dreamcast games were meh. N64/PS1/PS2/Xbox was peak and it’s been rehashed franchises ever since. Shame. The only innovative thing that has happened since storytelling died has been Battle Royale Looter Shooters.

[pjmlp]

And then folks waste whole that power away, with embedded widgets applications.

My Android phone is more powerful than the four PCs I owned during the 1990 - 2002, 386SX - P75 - P166 - Athlon XP, all CPU, GPU, RAM and disk space added together.

[PlatoIsADisease]

I sit here with a laggy windows 11 computer with an Nvidia GPU and wonder: WTF

Its fine with Fedora, but Windows 11 is terrible.

[grimgrin]

I'll take a longbet with you that this or successors tackle more than a small handful of titles

We live in interesting times

[mrguyorama]

I find PS2 emulation to be lacking.

Of course I am spoiled by Dolphin and their meticulous work, and the leap in N64 emulation, and PS3 emulation is way farther than I thought it could ever be.

But PCSX2 is mediocre. It reports the vast majority of the library in "green" emulation state, but that usually means there are glaring issues that someone is choosing to overlook, like shadows that are broken.

The Ace Combat games for example are all broken with the hardware accelerated renderer. Things run like garbage in the software renderer for a lot of games. Multiplayer functionality is spotty and hard to set up and poorly documented.

The state of emulation of that console generation is not up to snuff, save for Dolphin. It's still very much in the "Shut up, it works fine for Super Mario 64 so it works" mindset it seems.

This is true even of official emulators! The Xbox emulator that ran on the Xbox 360 has many games that are "officially supported" with serious issues. Forza Motorsport 1 has weird slowdowns on key tracks. I understand the serious hardware difficulties but I still wish emulation accuracy was an option.

[Onavo]

I suspect we will see a proliferation of emulator development in the next few years.

In a lot of ways, emulators are the perfect problem for vision/LLMs. It's like all those web browser projects popping up on HN. You have a very well define problem with existing reference test cases. It's not going to be fun for Nintendo's lawyers in future when everybody can crowdfund an emulator by simply running a VLM against a screen recording of gameplay (barring non deterministic éléments).

They can't oppress the software engineering masses any longer through lawfare.

[PlatoIsADisease]

I gave up video games, but I remember that being a huge reason why I picked Android a decade + ago. Emulators :D

Apparently now iphone allows it. Eventually Apple gives features that are standard elsewhere. Veblen goods...

[BrtByte]

Emulation is amazing for access right now. Recompilation is about making sure MGS2 or GT4 still runs in 2045 on whatever weird hardware we're using then

[lysace]

There is so much work hunting down the proper upscaled/improved texture packs though. Supposedly.

[flykespice]

What the dev of AertherSx2 did to run games smooth, even on my midrange 2019 android phone, is wonders.

Too bad the dev is a very emotionally unstable person that abandoned his port, despite his big talent.

[dottjt]

On the flip side, maybe those traits are what lead to the existence of the emulator in the first place. Better something than nothing.

[Sarkie]

Wasn't he hounded by users as usual?