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The decision to have an external battery sounds strange at first. But then, maybe it feels fine, having a lighter device in ones hands while the bulky battery sits on the table or wherever.

You can do that with most laptops afaik.

Part of the appeal of a handheld over a laptop is not having to lug around a giant power brick if you want full performance, having said that given the efficiency of newer slim-line laptops you can get decent performance on battery nowadays. and they can sit on your lap (belly) quite comfortably. A portable PC handhelds advantage is too be ..err portable :p

their own 'pocket 4' model is more versatile than this.

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The decision to have an external battery sounds strange at first. But then, maybe it feels fine, having a lighter device in ones hands while the bulky battery sits on the table or wherever.

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I wonder if this project would have had an easier time if they got some code/documentation/hints from the original dev to work.

…this is sarcasm, obviously. It would have been easier. Publishing specs/protocols for this kind of service should be the bare minimum mandatory thing to do at closing time, and I hope the stop killing game initiative move toward this direction. I understand that publishing actual server software and so on might be problematic (licensing, IP protection, etc.) but unlocking clients and providing some docs? Come on. Even if it's an horrible mess (as any project documentation should be hehe), if there's a passionate community around, they'll handle it.

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Looks pretty neat!

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Wasn’t the social features what made games like this? Very much like the Forza Horizon series if you take away the social online content like leaderboards and actual competitive racing the game wouldn’t be really that great.
Which is why true offline racing games like Ridge Racer, BurnOut, Split/Second (to name just a few) will always be better being preserved

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See, NVIDIA? This is how you do it.

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what AMD plan to do with amdvlk for Windows

Wondering the same, but the open source Linux drivers have been much better than the Windows drivers (on the OpenGL side as well) for quite some time. ATI's hardware has always been better than their drivers, going back decades, so having Valve, Google, Red Hat, and the rest solving that for them has been great for everybody.

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It was released a month ago, but it's not in the main stable repos and I don't have time for testing software any more... hence why I switched from Arch a good while ago now.

Also using Arch I learned the hard way that the first couple of releases of a new version aren't stable enough for daily use, despite being deemed "stable" in their own development process.

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Now that is really good news! Hopefully this means they will start working on ray tracing performance and all those features that Adrenalin for Windows has but Linux lacks.

I wonder if mesa 25.2 improves this even further

If you need it, why don't you install it? It was released more than a month ago.

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A bunch of people in that thread are asking what AMD plan to do with amdvlk for Windows if it's not going to be developed?

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I think ray tracing is largely a gimmick at the moment. The biggest difference in most games between max settings and max settings with ray tracing is watching your average frame rate take a dive when you use the latter with little in the way of significant visual improvement. I suppose we'll eventually get to a point when ray tracing is obviously superior without the performance penalty, but we're not there yet.

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Is the Steam version DRMFREE?

From what I see on pcgamingwiki: no. I don't know exactly if/where we can verify that on steamdb.info.

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just played a little bit of it and i love it

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Never had any problem with RADV in the... Gosh, 9 years since? From all the way back with my beloved RX480. I still remember the "RADV is not a conformant Vulkan implementation: Here be dragons!" warning. How far we've come.

Great news in my opinion. I haven't noticed any ray tracing performance gap, but I'm also using a 7900XTX and avoid using raytracing on principle when I'm not checking "max settings" performance with a game.

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This is good news. 99% of people I know didn't even bother with AMDVLK since Mesa is superior in most cases and it ships with most distros. But there's some issues I like to see resolved in Mesa, like bad RT performance and some overall performance jankiness in games, like traversal stutter in Indiana Jones GC.

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@_Mars in my experience, that's already done.
Playing Doom The Dark Ages on mesa 25.0 was a slideshow on the 3rd level and required me to install amdvlk, but when mesa 25.1 showed up in Fedora repositories, performance was on par with amdvlk - and that's using an RX 6600. I wonder if mesa 25.2 improves this even further, but I guess we'll get the answer when Fedora 43 hits our SSDs

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So, surely this means AMD will help with the performance gap regarding raytracing, riiight?

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First I was shocked that AMD discontinues something open-source related.

Then I read the news. Now I am relieved. ^^

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So hopefully Arch won't offer to install amdvlk by default now, because alphabetically it comes before vulkan-radeon?

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people aren't buying nintendo hardware just to play SMB

They're offering various emulated titles in their online subscription plan; so I guess even a clean source port like this *could* be used to make the claim that it leads to a loss of sales.

Having said that -- I just wanted to look up that 'subscription plan' to make sure -- which I thought would be a simple search on their website. Turns out the official Nintendo website is an overdesigned clickity-click-click hellhole not unlike the intentionally confusing web pages of mobile service providers. ... Now, call me crazy (?!?!), but there's an argument to be made about a POTENTIAL LOSS OF SALES for Super Mario World, because the actual content & the link for the godforsaken online membership plan is so well hidden.

-- hey Nintendo, time to cease and desist your own website.

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I should be shocked that it took them so long, but I'm not. Also, it'll be interesting to see what "full support" really means. So much happens behind the scenes. I wonder if Valve played any part in this, especially with all their new rumored hardware on the horizon.

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Only 10 minutes in with my partner and already really happy with it, has all that same charm I loved with builders journey

It has a dedicated button for singing! Best feature

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For things like the original SMB it's stupid nintendo doesn't just release it on GOG, people aren't buying nintendo hardware just to play SMB. It's their newer titles selling the hardware.

They're quite happy to release mobile phone games, I feel like releasing nes and snes games on pc would do more against piracy then them just throwing their lawyers around

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Loved the demo, definitely picking this one up at some point

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Unlikely Nintendo can do much unless you actually try sending over the game with the ROM.

Then again, Yuzu didn't break any laws and Nintendo still threatened them with no legal basis in doing so. So evidently they're well above the law and can sue whoever they feel like blaming for their problems that day.

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I honestly can't comprehend why people keep bothering with 'Native Linux'

PC ports used to be broken as hell in the 2000's, should they have stopped porting games to PC and instead relied on Valve to make an Xbox 360 emulator for their storefront? It'd give better compatibility after all and put less strain on the developers.

It's a shame they've chosen to do that. The desktop Linux market is significantly bigger than the Deck market.

I agree, hope this is temporary. Baldur's Gate 3 runs like complete garbage through Proton to me. Like a third of the game's total CPU usage is just Wine services, the audio is constant crackling with a little bit of the game audio mixed in and it has all kinds of extremely distracting visual bugs I imagine are brought about by Proton as well.

Honestly if anything, the Steam Deck is the one device that DOESN'T need a native port.

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This looks so much fun for the Deck! Very much looking forward to leaving ea.

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pb: Will it work with only resource packs and without roms, something like freedoom?

It needs the NES ROM, but that file is not difficult to find.

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Just because they did some additional restauration with other titles doesn't mean they would or even can rework every game. They just make sure it runs on the current Windows (!) release.

That is correct, and I don't think this is wrong on its own, but you should still never take them at their word when they say it's "the best version of this game you can buy on any PC platform" to mean that you're gonna have an ideal experience with the game if it's one that got multiple releases. As I already mentioned, these games exist in way better forms in many other places and even back then, this collection was not considered high quality. That's the marketing stunt that's not very clear to many.

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This game does not include the actual Nintendo game data and requires you to provide your ROM so it's as clean as all the decompilation/recompilation ports we've been getting for N64 games recently. Unlikely Nintendo can do much unless you actually try sending over the game with the ROM.

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