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Thirty Four

Something interesting that happens when you do a little introspection is that you start to realise how effective fate really is.

I’ve never really put much stock into fate. Instead, I’ve chosen to believe that everyone is a master of their own fate, and make their own fate through the decisions that they make in their lives. But as I’ve grown older and theoretically wiser, it’s become clear to me that both can be true; people can make their own fate, and fate can have an effect on their lives that they might not even be aware of. As we live our lives and make decisions, those decisions lead to more decisions, those decisions lead to even more decisions, and in amongst all that unbridled decision-making, fate comes out to play.

Because as much as we think we’re in control of our own lives, sometimes life has other plans. As much as we can decide to do one thing, or as much as we can decide to have control over the things we want to do, the kind of job we want, the people we make friends with, some of the time, it just doesn’t work out that way. And if that doesn’t perfectly describe fate, what else does?

I don’t think this is a bad thing, necessarily. Don’t you think it would be a little boring, if things always worked out exactly as you planned, exactly as you wanted?

When I think about what I do for work these days, the people I work with, the social activities I’m a participate in, I wonder about how different it would be if things worked out even slightly differently. I’ll never tell anyone I work with, but I applied for my job on little more than a whim, based on not getting offers in a different part of the org. I thought the role looked OK and interesting enough (obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t have applied), but it wasn’t my first choice, and honestly, wasn’t even my second. But looking back at it now, I have zero regrets and I’m infinitely glad things worked out as well as they have. I’m so grateful for the people and teams that I work with, the people I’ve met as part of my role, and all the friends I’ve made along the way. It sounds trite, but it’s true.

But every time I feel appreciative of where I’ve ended up, I can’t help but wonder how things would have worked out if, somewhere along the way, something had gone even slightly differently.

Because I can’t help but wonder what my life looks like if I had received and accepted an offer for the first position I applied for. What would I be doing if I had accepted an offer in a completely different department, doing completely different work? What does my life look like if I hadn’t ended up staying until the very end at Vita Group? What does my life look like if I ended up getting into my first preference at uni? Different, undoubtedly, but how so? Would I be married now? Or have kids of my own, like my parents did at my age?

But that’s playing the what-if game, and that only leads to more questions, and not answers. A fun thought experiment, but not something I should dwell on or take seriously.

So, what lessons can we learn here? What wisdom can I carry into the new year, given that I’m now a year older, and wiser is said to come with the territory? Am I supposed to understand that sometimes things don’t work out how I want them to, despite my best efforts? Is the universe telling me that things will work out, or they won’t, based entirely at random? Because I would like to think I’m already acutely aware of that fact, based on previous lived experience. I didn’t get into my first preference for uni, but maybe I was never supposed to. Fate, it seems, had other plans. Looking back at it now, I don’t think I could have done anything too differently. But given that I missed out by that much, maybe I didn’t need to, and all I needed was a little nudge from fate.

But again, how is this any different to everyone else? I don’t think I’m unique in this respect, or in many others. Everyone has decisions they’ve made to be where they are today, and everyone has had fate intervene in their lives in such complex, unimaginable ways that I can’t even begin to fathom how things would be different if things hadn’t gone exactly as they had. I think if there’s any lesson to be learned here, it’s that even the best laid plans can be completely upended by factors outside of your control. And as much as recency bias puts fate working in ways that negatively impact me and my life, it’s probably worked in just as many ways that have a positive impact, too. Fate works in mysterious ways, as they say.

To be clear, I’m not bitter about anything that’s happened. Just pensive, I guess. Introspective, of course — but it’s that time of year to be, as I look over the year gone by, and put another notch in the old belt.

And as I continue being an adult, whatever that entails, I’ll occasionally wonder about what fate has in store for me next.

You know, to keep things interesting.

The Best Part

Installing Microsoft Office 2011 on a MacBook Air

At its peak, the Australian Apple Premium Reseller known as Next Byte had more than 20 stores around the country, and I spent most of my earliest possible employment years at just one: Next Byte Hobart. Today, the Apple landscape in Australia is a lot different to what it was over a decade ago. Thanks mostly to the iPhone, Apple is the largest company in the world. Apple owned-and-operated retail locations don’t so much compete with general electronics retailers as much as they offer an experience of their own. But as any reseller will tell you, slim profits on Apple products means it’s extremely difficult, if not outright impossible, to match Apple when it comes to the unparalleled customer experience that Apple Retail can offer. Any third-party Apple presence is either small enough to fly under the radar, or niche enough to carve out a market of their own. For the rest of us, Apple retail stores in every capital city CBD besides Melbourne, Darwin, and Hobart means our in-person sales and service needs are fulfilled, with any gaps covered by Apple’s online store and mail-in repair programs. I have plenty of stories from my time at Next Byte. Maybe one day I’ll even write about a few of them, once I’m a little more comfortable the statute of limitations has passed. The one I’m telling you about today is not really about anything in particular, but it’s also about all the things I found great about working at Next Byte Hobart.

It’s January 2nd, 2025. Sometime around ten years ago, in December 2015, Vita Group announced the closure of Next Byte stores Australia-wide.

By that time, I was almost a year into my first real corporate job; an IT Service Desk gig where I was, theoretically, putting my degree to some use. At that stage, I had no real idea what I was doing, or how things would turn out, but I was helping! (I hope.)

During my time at Next Byte I was lucky enough to work in both sales and service. Both sides of the fence, so to speak; both figuratively and literally, as sales and service were physically separated by a dividing partition in our building. Sales and service were the two main pillars of the business, and because I was really the only person that worked in both parts, I was often asked which side I preferred. Sales, or service?

My answer, honestly, was both.

I liked sales because it put me in front of customers where I was given the opportunity to impart some Mac knowledge onto them, or help them find some kind of solution to their problems, and occasionally, if the situation called for it, maybe even make a sale. While service didn’t have as much of the face-to-face aspect of customer service, performing repairs on machines let me roll up my sleeves and get something done that benefitted everyone; the customer, the business, and the satisfaction I got from fixing hardware or software issues.

Because as much as I enjoyed talking with customers, it was just as satisfying to focus on one thing at a time and smash out some repairs. Just zone out, twiddle some screws, and get some repairs out of the way. Service was methodical, organised. Parts would come in the morning, we’d do the repairs during the day, and ship all the broken parts back at the end of the day. This routine was only interrupted by customers picking up their fixed machines, or customers bringing in their broken machines for us to repair.

Sales, by comparison, was anarchy. As anyone who has ever worked retail will tell you, it was entirely random whether it was busy or not. Sometimes it would be dead, with nary a soul to be seen. Sometimes it would be chaos, absolute bedlam, and you’d never know which was which until you were right in the thick of it.

But as much as I enjoyed working in both sales and service, if you asked me what the best part about working at Next Byte was, I’m not sure I could decide on one specific thing.

Because most of the time I worked weekends, some of the best times were when I was working full time. Usually in school holidays, or in between uni semesters. I liked being the full-time casual, and the permanent Saturday shifts were great, but with only sales staff working on the weekend, it often felt like part of the business was missing. Working during the week made me feel like I was part of a real team, doing real work, with everyone having their own responsibilities and their own work to do. Myself included.

One of my favourite things about Next Byte were the good times that we shared between colleagues. Whether it was inside joke, or just something funny someone had found on the internet — never mind that we weren’t, strictly speaking, supposed to use the internet for non-work purposes, a policy almost impossible to police — the best times were when we approached customers to ask them if they needed anything with tears in our eyes from laughing so hard. They say retail jobs are hard, but as a naïve teenager, I thought retail was great.

And it was those mood-setting moments, however fleeting, that made it the best part.

The Goruck GR1 — The Best Backpack

The Goruck GR1 backpack

The best backpack, the Goruck GR1

I’ve wanted a Goruck GR1 for a long, long time. The first mention of it on this very blog was all the way back in 2016, although at that time I had probably known about it for a year or two prior to that. It’s been a while.

But every time I was in the market for a new backpack — which, perhaps surprisingly, turned out to be a couple of times over the past 10 years or so — and my gaze once again fell on the GR1 as a potential candidate, I told myself that I didn’t need such an extreme durability backpack, given my generally less-extreme nature. Or that it was too expensive for what it was, or that the USD exchange rate was too awful right now. Or that it was crazy to spend that much on a backpack without having seen or touched it in person, despite being universally praised wherever and whenever I read about it online. All valid enough points, but for the longest time, it was easy to look past a Goruck GR1 for cheaper and more locally-available alternatives, even if they had other compromises and weren’t as durable. Even if I had to buy multiple backpacks after successively running each previous one into the ground, the chances were good that I’d still come out ahead than if I had picked up a GR1.

And as the years came and went, I still found myself glancing at the GR1 occasionally, like an old crush that I never quite got over. As much as Instagram tried to tempt me with “ultimate travel backpacks” or whatever other flavour of the month was being marketed by influencers, the GR1 lived entirely rent-free in my head. I might not have ever owned one, but I had never forgotten it, either.

And then I saw it. The first-ever Goruck GR1 I’ve seen in the flesh. It was in Tokyo, between the flagship 12-storey Uniqlo and heading back home for the night, a lovely Steel-coloured version that had a nice “this is fine” patch. In that moment, I decided that I needed to have one, and after many years spent coveting the most durable backpack, I purchased my first Goruck in November 2023: a GR1 in Wolf Grey and Black.

Only after waiting months for the darn thing to be in stock in a colour other than black. I don’t generally mind black backpacks. But if I was going to carry the backpack around for at least the next few decades, then I wanted something a little lighter in colour. I was tempted by the GR2 in a lighter colour while waiting for the GR1 to be restocked in a lighter colour, but stayed strong and made myself wait.

And wait I did while it was shipped from the USA. And while I waited for it to be shipped, doubt started to creep in. What if I had waited all this time, only for the backpack to be entirely mediocre? Or, worse, for it to not meet the exceptionally high standards I had placed upon it after so long? Would I have been better buying something locally for a third of the price that would last a few years? Or was the GR1 really going to the be-all, endgame backpack that I had wanted for years?

I was wrong to doubt. The GR1 is the best backpack I’ve owned, no doubt in my mind. I’m a year into GR1 ownership, have already taken it overseas, and customised it with my own Australian flag patch1. and it has been the ideal backpack in pretty much every situation. It’s not perfect, but it’s damn close.

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The Ayn Odin 2

The Ayn Odin 2 with some customisations

My Ayn Odin 2 with a few small customisations.
A higher right analog stick with Skull and Co thumb grip, and the 3D-printed grips that a friend of a friend gave to me.

In the past year or so, there have been one or two handhelds that have come out which have not only met that performance bar of upscaled GameCube and PS2, but can also come to the party for 3DS, Vita, and even Switch emulation. And between the Retroid Pocket 4 Pro and the Ayn Odin 2, the Odin 2 is the one to get because it runs everything flawlessly, has battery life appropriate for 2024, and very few faults overall. There’s no doubt in my mind that if you wanted a modern handheld console to emulate every system that’s possible to be emulated on Android, the Odin 2 should be your first and foremost choice unless you want something pocketable, or with an OLED screen, or you have a very specific budget.

So why haven’t I bought one?

Had I know about the Odin 2 this time last year, I probably would have. It ticks basically every box that I’m interested in, with perhaps the exception of running actual PC titles on it, even though streaming from my PC might be an acceptable compromise. But after looking into it, it just doesn’t make sense to buy one now, 9 months into its lifecycle. It’s like this: one year ago, there was nothing under $600 that could emulate Switch acceptably. But the handheld console landscape is moving so fast that who’s to say what options we’ll have in another 6-12 months? After all, technology moves at such a rapid pace these days that there’s always something better just around the corner. The fact that you can even consider installing and using fibre optics in your home network at something even close to resembling a reasonable cost — something previously unthinkable not that long ago — is proof of this.

Even if no better options appear by the end of the year, the thinking is I’ll still be able to pick up an Odin 2 and be happy. Hell, I could absolutely do that today. But at this late stage of the game, it would be better for me to exercise some patience and wait six months. I’ve been waiting 20 years to be able to play GameCube and PS2 portably, chances are I can absolutely wait another six months. While I’d love something to play GameCube and PS2 portably now, if I’ve waited this long, I can probably wait another year or two, especially if it’s going to be a significant and meaningful improvement over the Steam Deck/Odin 2. Of course, there’s always better tech just around the corner, but honestly, how much better can it get at the sub-$800 price point?

So my question is really: if I pick up an Odin 2 today, am I going to be missing out on something great that’s potentially just around the corner in the next 6/12/18 months? Because the Steam Deck was basically the precursor to this whole handheld renaissance that we seem to find ourselves in (maybe not for retro games specifically, but it seems to have affected retro games nonetheless), and the Steam Deck has only been around for two short years. Based on my own research, there hasn’t been anything that isn’t a handheld PC that had great GameCube, PS2, and Switch performance for under $800, until last year’s Odin 2 and to a similar degree, the Pocket 4 Pro. It just seems like prior to the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC, there just wasn’t anything good available at a reasonable price.

Like, the Odin 2 is already powerful enough, with maybe the exception of some Switch titles (and even then with NCE it may not be as big of an issue as it was), so maybe a more powerful chip isn’t that big of a draw card. Where do they go from here, and what other significant hardware changes can they make? The only potential improvements I can think they can make are having an OLED display, with potentially a higher refresh rate. How good a higher refresh rate for retro gaming is questionable, since 8th-generation and consoles typically target 30fps, and it’s not like you can get Switch games to run at 120fps, but this just serves to prove my point that there’s very little Ayn can do to improve the Odin 2.

But thanks to the header image on this post, you already know I ended up buying an Odin 2. I figure if I can get a few solid months out of it, emulating the GameCube and PS2 classics I grew up with, then flip it for close to what I paid, then that’s probably good enough.

Something I didn’t realise is when people talk about upscaling retro games, they mean actual upscaling. It’s not the kind of upscaling you get when you, say, convert a video to play at a higher resolution, because in those cases you’re just attempting to make something from nothing, and often you don’t get anything meaningfully better than the original.

No, video game upscaling is much better than that. Because the video game has access to the source data (the vertices and polygons which dictate how shapes should be rendered on screen), when you upscale a video game it looks incredible. It’s not perfect, because textures might still show their age even though the underlying models are tack sharp, and any pre-rendered assets like photos or videos that aren’t generated from in-game assets will still look blocky, but for the most part, upscaling games from the GameCube and PS2 era to 1080p looks great, and if you add in a HD texture pack, that’s about as close to a remaster as you can get, barring any actual quality-of-life improvements that an actual remaster might give you.

Or a Switch port, if your game is lucky enough to be in that camp.

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But what about the Steam Deck?

The keen-eyed amongst you will have noticed I failed to mention the the technically-handheld, borderline-portable, Steam Deck in my last retro handheld post. And it’s a curious omission of the handheld that arguably kicked off the portable-computer-as-handheld-gaming-console era that we have today. What makes it downright weird is that I’m arguably part of the ideal target market for the Steam Deck. I have a large, expansive Steam library that’s a mix of triple-A titles (although there’s much less of that these days), some of the most popular indie games, and plenty of releases from years gone by, and yet somehow, I haven’t picked up a Steam Deck in the two and a half years that’s it’s been on sale.

And while there are a couple of reasons for that, including how the Steam Deck isn’t officially available in Australia, so I’d have to import it myself, and if I’m not importing it myself, I’m paying a markup tax to the Australian company that is importing them, which adds to the already significant cost of the Steam Deck, I’m just not sure about the Steam Deck as a product I’m really interested in. The other major reason I don’t own a Steam Deck is that it’s kind of expensive for what it is. It’s a fairly serious investment on the same level as buying a new home appliance, a new graphics card, or even an iPad, all of which you would probably get more use from. If you already have a good-to-great gaming PC, the only drawcard the Steam Deck has for you is being able to play titles portably, and even away from your home.

And the crazy thing is, the specs aren’t even that good. Phones from the same era have high refresh rates 1080p displays, but the Steam Deck is stuck with an (admittedly larger than normal phone size) 7.4-inch, 800p display at 90Hz. But if you compare the Steam Deck to what it can do, then yes, maybe the cost is justified. Being able to play triple-A titles without shelling out for a complete gaming PC is a pretty impressive drawcard indeed.

The problem with doing this, particularly when you already have a great gaming PC, is that playing games portably sounds like a good idea until you realise it’s a compromise in basically every way. Playing away from home sounds like a good idea, at least for the few hours of battery life that you get if you’re playing heavier titles. Sure, you can extend your battery life by turning down the graphics options, but then it becomes a question of how much of a trade-off between battery life and graphical fidelity you’re willing to make. And while you can get perfectly fine battery life if you’re playing lighter, easier-to-run games, you’re really telling me you forked out for an entire Steam Deck so you could play Stardew Valley outside your house? I’m not one to yuck someone else’s yum, but that seems like a pretty wild decision to me.

But none of this is new if you’re a member of the PC master race. There’s always been this dichotomy of what you can run acceptably on your current hardware, and in particular what settings you can tweak to make it run at an acceptable frame rate versus still having enough graphical bells and whistles to make you feel immersed. If there’s one thing Valve really accomplished with the Steam Deck, it was that they put this power of choice in the palm of your hand. Well, hands, given how large the Steam Deck is.

While consoles have mostly been immune from this, in the past few years we’ve definitely seen games that have started giving console gamers the choice between lower resolution, less graphical effects, and a higher frame rate, or a higher resolution, more graphical effects, and a lower frame rate. It’s becoming increasingly more common to see games offer the choice between 4K at 30 fps, or something like 1440p but at 60 fps or more.

What’s interesting about all of this is that if it’s retro emulation I’m interested in, the Steam Deck has been able to play GameCube and PS2 portably since it launched, and I hear battery life when playing retro consoles is even acceptable. Not great, mind you, but acceptable. But one of the major draw cards of the Steam Deck, and why it commands such a high price in the first place, is because it can play PC games. Again, you can do what you like, but buying a Steam Deck for retro emulation seems like a strange decision when there are other devices that can emulate retro consoles just as well as it can with better battery life. Well, one or two, and only since the last year.

But as someone from the Game Boy Pocket generation (I never owned one personally, but friends did), the Steam Deck is huge and ungainly by comparison. Yes, all that gaming goodness has to go somewhere, not to mention the battery to power it all AND get acceptable battery life for what is essentially a smaller laptop, and a lot of the size is dictated by the screen size of the device. But there’s just no getting around just how cumbersome the Steam Deck, and most other PC-based handhelds including the ASUS ROG Ally, the Lenovo Legion Go, or the MSI Claw, really are. I don’t think handheld gaming consoles have to be pocketable, necessarily, but I don’t to want to draw attention unnecessarily in public by pulling out a Steam Deck and gaming on the bus/train/plane. It’d be like taking an iMac to a Starbucks. Sure you can, but do you really want to? Do you really want to be that guy?

So when you ask me “what about the Steam Deck?” I say that while it’s may be a reasonable product at a reasonable price, it’s not for me. It’s not even that I prefer playing most games with a keyboard and mouse, or that I don’t have any games that wouldn’t be suitable for playing on it, or even the fact that it’s large, bulky, and kind of pricey. It’s really all of those things, which make it unsuitable for what I’m looking for in a portable handheld console.

Now if and when Valve decide to release something like a Steam Deck mini, I would definitely be interested depending on the compromises that they decide to make for a smaller form factor. But for the time being, the search continues for my perfect handheld console.

The retro handheld console and software emulation rabbit hole

TrimUI Smart Pro

The TrimUI Smart Pro handheld console.
Basically a perfect modern GBA/DS emulator. It can run N64 and PSP, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

Every couple of years, I’ll go on a handheld gaming bender where I eschew all responsibilities and spend as much time as possible with my head buried in a handheld console, playing a game that might have been released 20 years ago. For those couple of weeks, I’ll be a teenager again, on holidays and having nothing to do but play video games on a handheld.

By any measure, we’re long overdue for one of those times. While Covid and lockdowns might have been the ideal time to dust off one or more of my old handhelds, I think I was more concerned about surviving and avoiding Covid than I was with playing a handheld console.

One of the great things about handheld gaming consoles like the 3DS and Vita — and indeed, all consoles — is that you can expect them to work 100% reliably with every game that was released for them, because that’s just how consoles work. There’s no performance issues. No incompatibilities. If you have a copy of the game and a working console, they you can always expect to play it, whether that’s 20 years ago when the console was first released, now, or 20 years from now. I know that I’ll be able to pull out my 3DS or Vita, give it a charge, and be able to pick up right where I left off. And that’s the beauty of consoles; they just work.

But as much as I love the Game Boy Color that I grew up with, the Game Boy Advance SP I eventually received, and the Nintendo DS that ended up rounding out the handhelds of my youth, I know this isn’t sustainable indefinitely.

The main problem with the handhelds that I have is that they, like me, aren’t getting any younger. The battery it has now is likely the best battery it’s ever going to have, and while 3D scanning and printing has come a long way and you’ll probably be able to buy replacement plastic parts, that’s not necessarily guaranteed for anything else including screens or other electronics. They’re not making any new 3DSes or Vitas, so there’s no way to get a new one unless I’m willing to pay a premium for one on the second hand market. Which means it’s a one way street for these handhelds, unless I get lucky and find a good second hand model for a non-exorbitant price. So as much as I want to be able to play all my Vita games on my Vita, or play all my 3DS games on my 3DS, I know that one day, that isn’t going to be possible due to time marching ever forward. Parts will break. Batteries will wear out. And when that happens, there’s no guarantee I’ll be able to restore them to working condition. Even if I can guarantee access to games that I want to play, which in 2024 and the age of digital downloads is absolutely not a given seeing as Nintendo has already shut down the 3DS eShop and Sony was about to do the same thing with the Vita PlayStation Store until they received backlash and reneged, there’s no guarantee that the hardware is going to last. How many consoles from 20 years ago do you know of, much less working examples?

Obviously this isn’t an option for even older handhelds like the GBA; in those cases the ageing hardware is even more of a limitation, and getting worse and worse every day. So for the purposes of gaming on a retro handheld like the GBC, GBA, or even a DS, then emulation is really the best option, with all of the inherent advantages and disadvantages that brings.

The question is whether I’m willing to live with the tradeoffs of imperfect software emulation for the conveniences of modern hardware and software. Modern hardware in this case is things like hall-effect analog sticks and triggers, USB-C charging, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and displays with such contemporary technologies like IPS (or ideally OLED, like the Vita had all the way back in 2012) and actual pixel density far above the handful of pixels that older consoles used to have. I’ve been PC gaming at 4K since 2015 at a healthy, if not incredible, 163ppi, so going back to anything less than 720p on a 5 inch display (293ppi) seems like such a huge step backwards when you consider that even the very first Apple Watch had 326ppi in 2015. Which, I’ll remind you, was almost ten years ago.

Modern software, on the other hand, means I can use software to emulate whatever console I’m interested in, provided my device has enough power to run those games. Whether that’s an Android or Linux-based handheld, or something like the PC-based Steam Deck, mostly depends on what I’m interested in playing given the hardware is more or less the same. Android, for example, currently doesn’t have emulators for Wii U, PS3, Xbox, or Xbox 360, and while that might change in the future, that’s the way it is right now.

Conceptually, I think I’m OK with having a device that doesn’t run everything. I think it would be weird to play GBA games on 6 or 7 inch screen, for example, irrespective of how good the integer scaling is, but I think a device that runs GBC, GBA, and even DS games could work. Then if I wanted to, I’d either have 3DS games on my 3DS, Vita games on my Vita, and potentially have another device for 3DS, Vita, and every other 8th-generation console, including GameCube, PS2, and maybe even Switch. From a hardware console perspective, this sort of separation works great as well because retro handheld consoles fit into one of a handful of tiers of modern hardware, each with varying power and price to handle its own set of retro handhelds.

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