Retro handheld consoles anyone?

[ddabrahim]

It is super easy to side load APK on to Android. Enable developer mode to allow side loaded apk and use Google Drive to download your apk on to Android and then I think you can download apk installers from the Play Store but it is also possible you device comes with an installer that launch automatically when try to run an apk.

It was a long time ago when I was playing with Android, but it was not complicated at all.

[BrotSagtMist]

I am surprisingly illiterate to tech.
None of this modern stuff follows any logic that i understand.
On the other side ive been told my laptop is absolutely unusable for others so there is that.

[ddabrahim]

I know how it feels, this is also one of the reason I don't really target mobile, there are so many jump arounds to get simple staff working it is insane. This is why I think the best option is a Windows/Linux portable but usually those are very expensive.
Although some of these emulator consoles in theory should also run Linux, but since they were not meant to run anything other than the emulators, the idea to even attempt to change it sounds way too complicated to me.

Even if you connect it to a computer it may just show the memory card storage with the ROMS inside. Guess it is possible to find system configuration files and edit them to launch your game file instead of the emulator but side loading an apk on Android should in theory be more simple in my head at least.

[BrotSagtMist]

Well to make it short: After thinking about it for days i just ordered it and instantly regretted it, NOW i am convinced the other colour would be better, or even a different model. Thats the problem with so many choices.
Ohwell, lets see how it turns up.

[BrotSagtMist]

Well well my order came.
Weird device, not sure on it.
BUT, apparently it runs ubuntu.
I should be able to just apt löve, but i have yet no idea how to even start a program on this thing.

[Pinko]

Well well my order came.
Weird device, not sure on it.

A photo would be interesting for me.

[BrotSagtMist]

still the same as linked on the first page.
I am not a review channel.

[ddabrahim]

Curious to know if you can manage to run it and if yes how.

The problem I see is that if it isn't connected to the internet you won't be able to install love but even if it is connected and it is based on Ubuntu it doesn't mean the repositories are enabled. But even if you have connection and the repo is enabled, it may not support keyboard input.

The only way I can imagine it if you are lucky and at least it is connected to the internet then maybe you can write a shell script to add the repo, install love or package your game for Linux, copy the game on to the device and add the shell script to the application launcher configuration file to launch your game. But where is this configuration file I have no idea.

I would love to know if you can run it and how.

[BrotSagtMist]

Well as it turns out this is basically a years old stock ubuntu minimal distro.
The usb port accepts a keyboard and i can just switch to tty.
My current problem however is that there are no keyboard config files installed so only US qwertz keyboards work, i dont have a single one, i would need to look up the position of every letter manually so i gave up digging into the system for now.

But the OS is on an SD card and can simply be inspected. So i could just chroot into it, run apt , provided i find out why qemu wont work. Chrooting into an ARM OS on PC can be tricky.
But, the other thing is, there is nothing device specific on the OS itself. This is not a closed down custom image made for this device alone. Which makes me believe it should be possible to just boot any generic ARM linux, debian maybe, as long as i keep the bootloader where it is.
I will have to dig out my ARM laptop first before i continue working on this device, if i am right i should be able to use the same SD card image on booth which would make working on this thing so much easier.

[knorke]

It would suck to accidentally brick the thing without a way to recover.
Is it possible to back-up the system SD card? Or download the original image?

I am interested to read more about those devices and how they work for game/löve-dev.

Mildly related, there exists some kind of gameboy with a crank:
https://play.date/