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Comment by dexwiz | Hacker News Reader

Are there even handheld consoles anymore? The Vita died years ago. I don’t think I have seen a kid with a DS since 2020, they all have switched or iPads now. These sort of demakes are possible bc you know the exact hardware it will run on and can optimize. Mobile is a crap shoot for specs, and you have to target a much broader range of specs.

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> Are there even handheld consoles anymore?

The Nintendo Switch came out in 2017, and remains quite popular.

You aren't seeing many DS series devices around anymore because it's quite old at this point -- the last major product in the line (New Nintendo 3DS) was released in 2014.

Most recently I think the spirit of this kind of device has been captured in the Playdate (https://play.date), but you're right that there are no new handhelds from the big companies

There's the Switch, which, given its low power compared to other eighth and especially ninth gen consoles, has a few demakes of its own.

I'd guess the switch is expensive, fragile and large enough that people consider it more transportable than portable. Kids would take it while going on holidays, in the plane, etc but you don't see many kids carrying a switch in the street and playing it in the bus because it doesn't stay in a pocket and require a protective bag.

The same applied to the original gameboy. In fact only the Gameboy Advance SP and maybe the DS Lite were small enough to fit in a kid's pocket.

I used to carry my original DS and PSP in my pocket in middle/high school. They were big but it was doable. Vita was the first I felt was too big particularly because of the analog sticks.

The Switch has a port of Burnout Paradise from the Xbox 360/PS3 era. The remake is fairly impressive, and may speak to the convergence of mobile and console gaming.

The Steam Deck is a handheld, but blurs the line between PC and console, since it runs Linux (or Windows) and can play most of the Steam game catalog. It's not a flagship console in the sense that developers target it as a platform (yet)

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