News Gaming Console on a Stick to Feature Dual Raspberry Pi Chips

[Admin]

The Pimoroni DV Stick will plug into an HDMI port, sport dual RP2040 chips. It's due in a few weeks.

Gaming Console on a Stick to Feature Dual Raspberry Pi Chips : Read more

 

[bit_user]

How much RAM does each chip have? The decision to use 2x seems weird to me:

1. Only seems to help things that aren't fast enough to be usable/good on 1, but still fast enough to be usable/good on 2. That's actually a fairly narrow window, in computational terms, since it operates on more of an exponential scale.
2. Adds cost, pushing the solution ever closer to a full 2 GB Pi v4. Might've been more interesting just to fit one of those in a stick @ reduced clock speeds.

Aside from retro and super old emulated games, I don't imagine a lot of demand for gaming on this. It's one thing to live with lots of limitations, when you're tied to a handheld form factor, but as soon as you have a monitor-pluggable device I think small size becomes an unnecessary liability and rarely worth the performance tradeoffs.

That said, I have no sense of the gaming scene for these things, so feel free to correct me if I'm way off base.

 

[DotNetMaster777]

Good idea

 

[frogr]

Two frame buffers can prevent video tearing while updating the frame and also doubles the "bandwidth"" to the frame buffer

 

[bit_user]

Two frame buffers can prevent video tearing while updating the frame

I understand that, but you don't necessarily need two microcontrollers to do double-buffering, depending on how much external DRAM they have.

 

[theguyuk]

In the old days a z80 often provided graphics in arcades machines so nothing new there. You could just add a Bluetooth controller to your old smartphone. Each time you upgrade your smartphone you get a new handheld...