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Comment by RajT88 | Hacker News Reader

I look at stuff like this, and I just imagine the amazing things console manufacturers could do, miniaturizing and making mobile their past generation game consoles.

There's prior precedent for this FWIW - GameGear was (basically) a mobile 8-bit Sega Master System, and PSP was basically a mobile PSOne. I guess modern game companies don't see revenue potential there, which is too bad. The soft modded PSP's which load PS1 ISO's off a memory card are suuuuper cool.

An Xbox One in a Steam Deck form factor with decent battery life is probably doable. I imagine what's missing is either A. the ability to manufacture it cheaply enough to be profitable or B. The inability to sell new games for it, because everyone would just use their existing library, or C. Both.

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> PSP was basically a mobile PSOne

No? PSOne was a semi-mobile PlayStation 1, but PSP was its own architecture, which was much closer to PS2 than PS1 if anything. It was good at running PS1 games because it used the same vague CPU architecture so Sony's in-house high-level emulator, POPS, worked really well, but the PSP was absolutely not a shrunken-down PlayStation, and definitely not a PS1.

> An Xbox One in a Steam Deck form factor with decent battery life is probably doable.

In my mind the Steam Deck is already a portable Xbox One/PS4. Most of the hit titles of that generation were eventually released on PC (with a few exceptions) and the Steam Deck plays them flawlessly.

Well, imagine slidable gamepad parts of the switch, standardized for modern phones together with wasm, webgl and the browser gamepad API. Haptical feedback in any phone without wasting space, how cool would that be :-)

> the soft modded PSP's which load PS1 ISO's off a memory card are suuuuper cool.

Which is what killed it. Why buy anything if modded version had "free" games, faster storage, better load times, capacity, battery life... Piracy went of the roof with PSP.

What killed it is all the games were watered down versions of console games. PSP games were really unsatisfying on average, for no obvious reason. I own one with a bunch of games, and tried (hard) to really scratch the gaming itch when I was traveling for work all the time with it. I gave up and started lugging an Xbox 360 with me sometimes... The game to date I've played most on PSP is the PS1 version of FF7 (which I bought from the Playstation store, fwiw).

The DS had way more piracy and was a runaway success by all accounts.

Consider this: Nintendo has a history of understanding what gamers really enjoy; Sony has a very inconsistent history of this.

Read these two articles from the perspective of Sony selling ~83 million PSP's, and Nintendo selling ~154 million DS's:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PlayStati... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Nintendo_...

Getting back to my argument...

If Microsoft could figure out how to make a profitable Xbox One portable at a 300-400 dollar price point, make it digital-only (maybe with some option to import a game off a disc from your console), they'd sell a gajillion units.

My dream of a portable game console is playing Left4Dead for hours on end stuck in an airport. Still not doable - thanks to limited battery life of the Steamdeck-like portables.

I'm shocked that Sony even sold more than half the number of PSPs as the number of DSes.

What killed it was the UMD drive. Years after the PSP was discontinued, I read about a TIFF exploit and jailbroke my PSP. I ripped my copy of The Sims 2 from UMD to ISO and loading it from a normal Memory Stick made every loading screen 2 seconds instead of 2 minutes. (not exaggerating)

Flash memory was still rather expensive at the time of the PSP's development and launch.

A mass-produced UMD probably cost a dollar or three to produce and package and held up to ~1.8GB, whereas consumer flash was more than an order of magnitude more expensive[1] at that time.

I mean: Sure, flash eventually became cheap-enough that it became a no-brainer for people like you and I to do whatever we felt like, but the PSP launched in March of 2005 when flash was still precious.

(That said, I don't think I even know if the UMD drive on my PSP-2000 ever even worked. I bought it new along with a Memory Stick of a few GBs, immediately rooted it with a special battery[2], and ran old-school console emulators on it. I don't believe that I've ever used it with with a UMD.)

[1]: https://www.jcmit.net/flashprice.htm

[2]: "Special" battery as in, IIRC, it had a magic serial number that enabled some debugging tools that let the cat out of the bag.

Check out the Sega Nomad

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