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Handheld Gaming - From Gameboy to PSP (Die Shrink Telegrams) (Patreon)

Published:
2021-06-29 19:31:17
Imported:
2021-12

Content

There has always seemingly been a decent amount of interest in us discussing handheld gaming, and finally - me and Dan want to get to it!  However, this should be at least two episodes in our opinion, and so on this one we will focus on handheld gaming from GB, GBA, DS, and PSP.  Basically "Before 3DS/Switch/Vita/Win10 Handhelds."

Write in below! 

  • Did you own a Gameboy, GBA, DS, or PSP?  What did you think of it?
  • What are your thoughts on the "Pre-Sony" Nintendo-dominated Handheld Era?
  • What did you think about the specs of these pieces of hardware? The games?
  • How did they compare to laptops for you back then?

You have at least 24 hours to write in, but try to get them in by Wednesday Afternoon to be safe!  Be insightful, use good grammar, and be concise. :)

Comments

Anonymous

I always grew up with Game Boys (Original, Game Boy Pocket, Game Boy Color). I loved them, but always had an issue with them not being backlit. We had the plug in lights that pugged into the multiport on the later game boys, but it was always super glairy. I have many fond memories playing Pokemon and all the games (I still own them) in the back seat of the car and in Hawaii and Jamaica for family trips lol I don't really have any thoughts on the Pre Sony Hand held era, but I always wanted a Sega Nomad and when I saved up enough money, they weren't on sale at Toys R Us anymore. I was always wanted that backlit screen. The games are what made the Game Boy popular for me, and I would spend hours on these games (probably swapping the batteries out constantly). I didn't really care about the specs or know what they were at the time. I liked the Game Boy more than laptops, but my dad would always show me his work laptop he would get and I would play DOS games or Jolt Cola videos on them or something like Wolfenstein. I always felt that the Laptops were different in terms of gaming, not as portable, but carried different genre's of games for me. FPS' like Wolfenstein, Chex Quest, DOOM and RTS' like C&C games were always better on a laptop and never good (in my opinion) on a handheld or a controller.

Anonymous

Hey Tom and Dan, with the raise of gaming phone, why doesn't Sony make a gaming phone? With the fact they have a good phone division, you would think this is something they would want to persue. They can easily do and dominate both hand-held and gaming phone industry in one stone. Literally all they will have to do is make a slightly more powerful PSVIta that can call and text and just put PSN on it and it would dominate. I just don't understand it

Anonymous

I didn't have traditional consoles growing up, so my quintessential gaming experience beyond PC was on GB. It was perfect for road trips and being able to play via LinkCable (or 4-way F1) was amazing at the time. I never collected a large library of games, but I got the GB/GBA/DS. The backwards compatibility was always an amazing feature. I kept/rebuilt both DMG-01's my family had growing up and have since passed them on to my kids. Despite the limited tech used for the games, even at the time, the gameplay still holds up (mostly). I doubt I am in the minority of people who had dreams of falling Tetris blocks throughout my childhood.

Anonymous

My first and only handheld was my GameBoy Colour. I still have it now. I had a few games for it but the one I played the most, and will no doubt play again in the future, was Pokémon Red. If only my paper magazine guide was as robust as that handheld console; it's falling apart but I still need it for the maps! I never bought another handheld as, in my opinion, only certain games lend themselves to such a format. And if Pokémon Red was damn near the apex!? You can't beat perfection.

Anonymous

My first handheld was a GBA and I first played Pokémon Red but my favorite was Pokémon Ruby on the GBA. I have had a GBA, 3 different DS, a 3DS and 2 2DS. I absolutely loved the games, I bought always one almost every single Pokémon generation, some times multiple. Why I had multiple DS is so I could “shiny” hunt in Pokémon with multiple games because the odds are the same as flipping 13 coins and getting heads on all of them. I miss the times of actual handhelds, I want to put something in my pocket, and the switch is really uncomfortable in my pocket if it can even fit. So my thought are at the moment the handheld console market sucks.

Anonymous

Hey Tom and Dan! So I got into handheld gaming at about the age of 8, with a DS lite and lego batman. After I discovered the wonders of the R4, I had much more fun enjoying the mario games and pokemon white. I still remember the summer clubs i'd go to where we'd all do Mario Kart DS battles, and there was that one dude with a PSP. So I guess I never really noticed Sony's presence during even that era. Upgrading to 3DS was cool thanks to back compat, which can even extend back to GBA with a few tricks :) For me there's not much of a comparison to laptops, as both lend themselves to different kinds of games entirely. And that's really what its about: the awesome games and the linking up with friends to play together. Specs were really irrelevant, as I guess back then as a kid having something affordable to enjoy was awesome, and you could always have a home console to complement that. Hope I didn't ramble on too much :)

Anonymous

I've owned basically every relevant handheld (gbc, gba and sp, ds, ds lite, dsi, psp, 3ds and switch) and they were all great in their own way. (except the dsi. no gba bc) But its really clear why nintendo handhelds just completely dominated the pre-psp era to me atleast. i feel like other companies often focused alot on making something more powerful and thus you have stuff that needed 4 AA batteries and lasted like 2-3 hours. the gameboys had enough power for simple games, lasted forever and were actually made out of nintendium. never forget the gameboy that literally blew up in the middle east and still works. the neo geo pocket was similair but neo geo was never the right company to make a handheld to really compete. but man the PSP had games that almost looked like the ps2 and it had alot of them. while also being the perfect form factor for a handheld and having good battery life. being made by the then gods of gaming sony probably helped alot. Handheld consoles are not all about specs. its about having just enough power to make the games you want to make while also lasting like a good 8 hours. And for an actual question was the Gameboy Color a 'new generation' or was it more a spec upgrade a la ps4 pro?

Dr Forbin

Tom & Dan first love da show. I'm an old-head so lotsa game experience though console gaming was my first love. Handheld baseball, soccer, space invaders was expensive so when I got my first handheld it was like heaven on earth. My first serious handheld was a original Gameboy which was great it was monochrome but who cares it was mine and I loved the experience. By now alot of us play portable games on our cell phones, an infinitely better experience than the ol Gameboy. I seriously think the phone companies are aware of our gaming addiction that's why the Samsung/AMD collaboration is intriguing to me as a ol school guy.

Travis Gooding

I was given a classic thicc boy gameboy in grade school during recess by an old friend of mine. Was blown away by being able to game on-the-go. Never could get my parents to get me a GBC. I had a friend that had a gamegear with Bart Vs. The World and damn did i want one so bad. the colors, graphics and size were just crazy when i was a kid. Mind you, good god that GameGear was a battery destroyer, you HAD to have a AC plug for it. . When the GBA came out, my brother and I got one and man did we dump countless hours into Pokemon, RPGs and releases of Genesis/Snes games. For me tho, I think handheld gaming truly broke ground and made me go "This is in a league of its own" was the PSP. The games, countless MUST haves, amazing remakes(Lunar was GOAT). Rereleases with added/changed content(Suikoden, Breath of Fire 3, FFTactics WOTL etc.) . What sealed the PSP as one of the GOAT handhelds was the mod scene. My HS class schedule was absurd(private school, go figure). I had classes until 11am and had "free" time but unable to leave until 1:45pm. I remember tossing a SNES emulator on it and going through SO many classic RPGs I missed out on or hadn't played in years(Illusion of Gaia, Earthbound, Secret of Evermore). Followed with Genesis and its titles. . In relation to Laptops, We had a family computer, Laptops were still excruciatingly overpriced and were stagnant in performance for Years. In relation to games, I honestly feel that Pokemon, Fire Emblem and a handful of other titles kept the Gameboy afloat. I would actually argue that if NOT for Pokemon and the Tens of Millions those titles sold through the GBC/GBA era which was extremely lucrative for Nintendo, that Sony may not have eyed the mobile market and released the PSP. . In terms of Games POST PSP launch, I would argue that the PSP had games, and for the matter, exclusives in the bank that made it a truly MUST have. The Vita came out when I was working at a Bestbuy and I Kick myself in the ass for not picking one up, or atleast a PSTV even. I was just hesitant after hearing the whole "Proprietary" memory cards and cost of them PLUS the handheld. I played the demo unit of Uncharted Golden Abyss and was floored at the graphics. It felt like a PS3 handheld. I told myself "Just wait to see how developers and Sony treat the launch year and what titles are coming out". Slowly but surely, it felt like watching the titanic sink. Bad decision after Bad decision gutted my desire to get one and by late 2012, PS4/XB1 was already being talked about and rumored. By the time 2013 came around, I was focused on next gen launches and new PC hardware was finally making huge strides(Southern Islands and Keplar). Heard nothing from major devs on the Vita and it felt like Sony did not know what to do until the inevitable support dropped. . To the topic of the Die Shrink, I sincerely feel Sony could release a handheld and gain traction in the current market. They are set to work with AMD this year with 5/6nm designs. Current CPU budget for the PS5 is (from what i gather) around 40w at 3.5ghz with SMT active and GPU @ 2.23ghz ~140w. Miles Morales pulls somewhere around 200W under full load. PSU is rated at 350w, 80% would be 280w which would I assume be the absolute MAX power draw of the system but ~200w should be realistically the average/higher pull. GN has the 5700G in a 1080p GTA5 game workload pulling 48w on the EPS12v cable. Clocks 4.4Ghz CPU and 2Ghz GPU (8c/16t / 8 CU) PS5 SoC on 6nm should be around 262mm2. Set the CPU Clocks to 2.2ghz, GPU set to 1Ghz, 5 10Gbps 2GB gddr6 chips @ 256-bit. Pro @ 16nm pulled 170w, Die shrink it to 6nm, your looking at 60w, add in RDNA2 and Zen2 performance, efficiency, power usage, a MASSIVE undervolt at those speeds along with SMT disabled, You'll definitely get a very low total system power draw relatively speaking to a handheld of this power spec. RandomGamingHD tested a Ryzen 3100 @ 2.2ghz and in Cinebench r20 it hit a max temp of 56c. Utilize the same die foam cover and liquid TIM, put a small vapor chamber over it (Sony's patented 2-3 over the past 2 years), they had a vapor chamber on the Xperia Pro, actively cool the system, aluminum shielding on the backplate to help absorb memory heat. Toss in a 256/512Gb nvme with expandable storage, aim for the size between a switch lite and OG Switch and there you go. a Handheld more powerful than the PS4 Pro, plays an entire generation of games @ pro settings, system force an output of 1080p and you have a solid 30/60fps gaming experience with the improved load times etc. I also wrote this late, theres probably errors here and there, sorry this will probably appear as a wall of text. I do think Sony is in the position of ATLEAST a PS4/Pro power Handheld. Going this route without any additional bespoke hardware additions would allow a VERY seamless transition with minimal external developer requirements. Furthermore, I think it would definitely contend with any rumored switch pro on the horizon. Price the P5P at $299 and it'll be a Wii level event, they'll be sold before employees have time to walk them to the floor *late night rumblings* With the switch pro i have more questions than answers. For instance the DLSS rumored to be in use for it, the die space needed and size of the APU would increase drastically as would the entire cost of the device itself, new design, thermals, etc. Which i highly doubt Nintendo will do as A. They are cheap and B. They dont consider it a new gen. for modest DLSS performance, they would need around 14 TPC at minimum if they are doing some profound upscaling to 4k. so thats 112 Tensor cores, if the new SoC is 8nm, thats 27.3mm2 of die Space. With the jump from 16nm to 8nm, Current SoC would be using almost half its die space for tensor cores if im not mistaken. Either its an actual Console and not handheld, and is designed for significantly more power draw, temp management, watt requirements etc, or its a Mobile handheld and theres some MAJOR tomf*ckery going on with leakers and news media and this device is going to cost an arm and a leg

Meritorius

Hello Tom and Dan! After begging my parents for a Nintendo DS to play with my friends for at least 3 years. They didn't want me to play video games, but that didn't deter me from being fascinated with them and also they were fools to still let me use the family computer, where I discovered countless browser games. Also I just played on a friend's DS and Wii anyway. My dear grandparents eventually decided to give me a Nintendo 3DS for christmas when I was 10 years old. With it I got Mario 3D Land, Mariokart DS and Super Mario Bros. DS. At first I was very intrigued by the 3D and the AR cards that came with the device, but that got boring rather quickly. The actual games were pretty cool themselves, but what I really wanted to do was play them with friends, and that it did well. There's nothing like the feeling of playing Mario Kart in multiplayer on a school excursion. I also found one of my favourite game series on it: Monster Hunter. Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate was the first game I spent multiple hundreds of hours playing and it really got me into playing. It also used the 2nd screen very well. The #1 most annoying thing with hand helds in my opinion isn't that they're often very weak, it's that you can loose them. To this day I don't know how it happened, but one day it apparently just fell out of my pocket. (I eventually bought a new one myself and I didn't know about the used market, my wallet still hurts when I'm thinking about that. I didn't experience the the Pre-Sony handheld era but hey, competition is always healthy. The specs of course were years behind PCs and even their brands' stationary console. Low resolutions and framerates didn't bother me as much back then as they would now, but even at the time I was annoyed by it sometimes. There's one thing, though, that made these problems irrelevant: the battery life. My fully charged 3DS could last 3 days worth of gaming and even weeks in standby. This really came in handy when I forgot to turn it off when travelling and the outlet in the train didn't work. (very specific, but it's just an example) Most of the games I played on the DS family were pretty good. I don't know what witchery they used to get Monster Hunter 3 (that was, apart from the graphics, pretty much the same as on the Wii U!) and 4 to run at all, and somehow even with playable framerates. There were decent 1st party games (my model came bundled with 3D Land) and the other games I played made use of the features (and sometimes gimmicks, looking at you, 3D) really well. 2 years later I got a laptop, mainly for school, though I also immediately thought about playing games on it. It started with some browser games (there were some really good ones with pretty decent graphics, even) and eventually lead to League of Legends, Age of Empires, Minecraft and World of Warcraft. I wasn't really playing any singleplayer games on it, I played those on my 3DS. My laptop wasn't strong enough to run a lot of interesting PC games, I didn't really know about them being on PC. The Portability was a lot better on the Nintendo, the furthest I'd carry my laptop was my grandparents, and even then I would be extremely careful. Being a shitty 2012/13 Acer laptop, it still broke at the hinges, though. I could carry the 3DS anywhere without needing a backpack and it wouldn't break even when dropped. I kind of treated them as 2 completely different things, which they were. Sorry if this was a bit long, it's a bit late here and writing gets a lot harder for me when I'm tired. Thank you for doing the podcasts and videos, I really enjoy them!

Anonymous

Hey Tom and Dan! Love the show and keep up the good work. Bit of an old hand in that I started out with the original gameboy and eventually had a GBA. I also briefly had a game gear that I inherited from a cousin, so I got to experience the main systems pre-Sony. As a kid, i was happy to simply have something i could take with me on long trips even if i needed several packs worth of four AA batteries with me to keep the system running for longer than 2 hours full tilt. I eventually had a rechargeable pack that i could charge and then power thr gameboy sans batteries all the while wondering when technology would allow me to have a.) Color b.) A backlight for the screen c.) Some kind of internal battery that i could charge from the outlet. d.) When will we have multiplayer that didnt involve a cable connection daisy chaining units to each other. Funny enough, technology would evolve to the point that a device would encompass each of the things i was musing over--it just took a span of 10 to 15 years from the time I started gaming on the go. I think it would be the DS and PSP era of handhelds that finally put everything together and then some. I never imagined that games could be downloaded directly downloaded to a system and that the handheld consoles would have an os and games that could rival a home console in length and complexity. I had a laptop for college (back in the era single core pentium and celerons) to go with my single core athlon but I didnt really game on it save for some mechwarrior. It was when i got a laptop for myself when i started to actually game on laptops but I was really a desktop gamer and laptop gaming to me was more a novelty or something i made do with until i could spec out a proper desktop. I think i have a very specific notion with my devices. A desktop does everything from work to gaming. A laptop is primarily for work and occasionally watching videos and some gaming especially if it isnt too taxing like dota or emulators. A handheld console though is just perfect for gaming on the go. I cant quite game on a phone and im too lazy to install emulators on em even after buying a decent controller. Its really the form factor that helps drive the fascination on using a handheld and specs rarely became an issue. I was very much spec agnostic at the time and I still am for handhelds to this day. To sum it up, i would get myself another handheld out of nostalgia if something really interesting comes our way. Im intrigued by the switch and nearly bought a 3ds. Somehow i feel like the switch was a bit of a step back from the 3ds. To my mind, the latter has a kind of charm that the former doesn't quite have anymore. I was salivating over a psp and vita at one point, but i never got around to buying one but im very impressed with what a handheld could do. Im especially looking forward to a steam handheld especially because i can see some games on my collection actually lend well to a handheld collection. Cheers and looking forward to the next installment of MLID and Broken Silicon!

Anonymous

Hi Tom and Dan, I owned a GB, DS, and PSP. I played the most out of my DS since it was a public transit companion when I was in college, but I remember my PSP 2000 as the first handheld that I repaired. I still use it so I guess what I did stuck! I think that the DS/PSP era was the inflection point in the philosophy of handheld games. Even going back to the GB and GBA, the hardware was fairly weak given the home consoles and PCs of that era. In those days, I felt that games were focused more on fun and "doing more with less" by squeezing as much as possible out of the hardware. A dinky Z80 being able to do Link's Awakening? With memory controllers, anything is possible! By the time we got to PSP, I think game designers were able to more "brute force" the visuals they wanted out of the handheld simply because the power was there. I feel like without the constraints of the earlier generations, game designers started to push polygons as opposed to gameplay/fun. Maybe it's me, but even though any SOCOM game looked like a console experience, I'd rather play Mario Kart DS.

Anonymous

As for comparison with laptops, I am always felt more at home with laptops. When I had my Gameboy, I had a 486 66MHz laptop with no sound card. Since I was a PC centric gamer, I would have more fun playing DOS games like DOOM or Jazz Jackrabbit. Then again, the laptop was super heavy and a Gameboy was so much easier to carry around. The Gameboy had games with actual soundtracks as opposed to PC speaker sound, which was a huge plus. I guess the time when I thought a laptop was mostly equivalent to a handheld in terms of games was with Windows 95/98 laptops. By then, laptops were able to have decent sound as well as 16 or 24 bit color graphics. As good as DOOM was for the GBA, I'd rather play Unreal Tournament on a Pentium III 500MHz laptop, even in software rendering. Of course, you could only play Unreal Tournament on battery for 45 minutes at max, as opposed to the many hours you could play on any of these handhelds (maybe except for the Lynx).

MelodicWarrior

My first device I ever gamed on was a Purple GB Color. Between that and later on my GBA and an original DS, I enjoyed my time gaming on those devices. For my GBC I was given or owned at least 7 different titles. On my DS I had played at least 4 titles. Overall I never really cared for laptops at that time. The games that I wanted to play on windows usually required hardware that was desktop mid-tier or above. That meant most of the time I could not even consider a laptop. Plus at that time the price to performance on a laptop was way outside the family budget. Even though I spent the first 6 years of my gaming life on handheld devices, they at least provided a handful of games that in my opinion, were re-playable. I think the GBC and the GBA definitely were good devices in their own right, for me the DS was a major upgrade in hardware and experience. A lot of the games Nintendo made at that time were designed for TFT LCD screens that most of the GB's used. The DS brought something new to the table: backlighting on a mobile screen. The best part was that this screen, at that time, was energy efficient enough that you could game for at least 6-8hrs before having to recharge. [Charging also was somewhat new at that time.] For me the selection of games was enough until PC hardware could become affordable enough to game on without having to empty my wallet every time I wanted to play a new title. I think Nintendo did understand that a lot of kids wanted to game but didn't have a way to afford to do so. By tapping into this desire they essentially had found a way to draw into gaming a younger crowd. I know a lot of my friends who game on PC or console now can attest to having started their gaming journey on one of these handhelds. Sorry I made this terribly long. (Side note: One game on my DS holds the record for most time on a title: almost 5,500 hrs on Advanced Wars: Dual Strike.)

Anonymous

Why did Sony scrub there Psp handheld ? I personally had both a PSP and Gameboy color which were both awesome in there own right. Still to this day nintendo holds the handheld crown