Modded PS Vita, since upon modding, its scope of playable games becomes ridiculously high. Native games, PSP and PS1 games supported natively which can be expanded upon modding with homebrews and back ups of official releases you paid for, plenty of emulators for both the Vita and the PSP, wrappers for Android and PC games, as well as ports of game engines, getting released pretty much every week, and OS extensions for forwarding the Vita's screen to another device, making certain bluetooth controllers compatible, fixing/improving the system, and so on and so forth. It's a nice console. :3
Did you know you could make a dock to hook up the Vita to a TV? I tried it and it’s pretty impressive. Really shows you what life would be like in an alternate timeline where Sony actually knew how to market the Vita.
Steam deck, which gives access to a large subset of PC games and also just about every console up to the PS2/Gamecube/Xbox era plus the Wii via emulation (no jailbreaking required).
Switch, which gives access to a lot of the best WiiU games as expanded ports plus some spruced up versions of Nintendo’s back catalogue.
PS5, which gives access to most of the best PS3 and PS4 games via PS+.
Xbox Series S/X, which has backwards compatibility with the Xbox One and Xbox 360 for some (most?) games.
There will be some slight gaps in backwards compatibility/emulator compatibility for some games, but I suspect the biggest remaining gap will be PC games not capable of running on the Steam deck.
I do currently have a Switch hooked up, but I’m thinking of removing the dock since my partner exclusively plays it handheld and since getting my Steam Deck, I haven’t touched the Switch except to dump games I pick up to emulate elsewhere. I played all of Tears of the Kingdom emulated, though that had to be played on my main rig since the Steam Deck would dip under 30fps too much for my taste.
I wouldn’t buy any consoles, I would build (though you can buy) a really powerful gaming PC to plug up to my 4k TV. I’ve actually recently done just that and it works amazingly well.
Things to make it a good experience:
Make sure you have a 4k TV with HDMI 2.1 for 120hz gaming
Configure Windows to bypass the login screen on boot
Configure Steam to launch in Big Picture mode on startup
Buy an Xbox Controller and the little dongle for it (it works better than just bluetooth)
Buy a small wireless keyboard with built in trackpad for the odd occasion you need to use a mouse and keyboard (looking at you EA Play).
With that, you’ve got the best console ever. Huge backlog of games, games on steep discounts, a machine that has a much better experience outputting to a 4k TV than something like a Steamdeck or a console. I’ve tried the Steamdeck to a 4k TV and the quality was pretty awful; 720p does not upscale to 4k well at all. And if you wanted to, you could set it up with emulators using retroarch for any games you are missing.
My TVPC specs:
Ryzen 7800x
32GB DDR5-6000
2TB NVME SSD
RTX 4080
Fractal Design Torrent Nano
I picked that case specifically for the huge 180mm fan in the front, the fact it can fit a massive cooler like the Peerless Assassin and the GPU gets fresh air from the bottom. It’s not the smallest case, but it stays cool and super quiet.
I did try building a HTPC in the past, but it was just a headache to maintain. If didn’t use it for a few days, I found I was inundated by a bevy of updates. Kodi is a pretty powerful home theater software, but definitely not as simple as launching a Netflix app. My partner also had no idea how to operate it. Personally I prefer Moonlight streaming from my PC in my office. Once I get an ethernet port installed in the living room, it’ll have great picture quality and latency. Your build does sound pretty cool though.
Yeah it was a headache for me in the past too, but the latest Steam Big Picture which behaves more like a Steamdeck has made it pretty easy. Since it launches right away, I can easily launch and quit steam games with 0 issue and when I’m done I used big picture to just shut the PC down.
One issue I found was if I let the PC sleep, it always brings up the login screen on wake so I just shut it down everytime. NVME’s are so fast the boot up is whatevs. Non-steam games are also a little painful as sometimes it won’t switch active windows, or I have to login or something.
I only use this machine for games. Like you said, HTPC was a pain. I have a different server that I have Plex setup on and I use Apple TV’s / Roku’s for streaming.
Oh yea, Moonlight is really great if you already have a powerful PC.
I definitely will go with a PC for the living room, mostly because I don't want to use a smart TV's "smarts", but it'll be for streaming of all kinds, including Moonlight (or similar).
I’m happy to see Sony bring PS3 games to PS5, though it’s not how I would’ve wanted. You’ll have some of Sony’s best PS3 games for sure, but for those games like Folklore you’ll need a PS3 (or Steam Deck, I haven’t tried emulating my copy yet). I also don’t like paying a subscription service to play the games that are already sitting on my shelf, but I’m the minority here as a lot of people I talk to like NSO and PS+.
I have hear not great things about the ROG Ally and its support from Asus. From my experience, the Steam Deck truly is the most pick up and play solution for PC gaming. Add in the best input options of any console (people complain about the trackpads making the Deck too big, but those people clearly haven’t used them) and I think it beats out a gaming laptop as a gaming device. If you’re proficient at minor disassembly and formatting an internal drive, you can pick up the base Steam Deck for $399 and then buy a 1TB-2TB drive for less than what the 512GB model would cost. Alternatively you can buy a 1TB if you don’t want to open the device up.
You can also just add a 512 or 1tb microsd card. Surprisingly the performance of the card hasn’t made a huge difference for me when playing games off of it
The SD card speeds are great. The only thing you need to keep in mind is when you’re doing something that requires managing file paths and isn’t designed specifically for the Steam Deck. I ran into some headaches figuring out how to install the Vortex Mod Manager and get it fully functional for modding Skyrim on my Steam Deck’s SD card. I’m sure things have improved since then, but for people new to Linux it can be a slight hurdle if they choose to go outside the scope of typical Deck stuff.
Since the Steam Deck is a PC and a console, I think there’s definitely an argument to call a PC is a console, so long as it’s designed like one. If not the Steam Deck, then a small form factor PC running something like ChimeraOS. Windows is just too cumbersome to use anywhere other than sitting at a desk, and even then I hate it so much.
Wii (which naturally includes Gamecube) Switch (with its N64, SNES, and NES emulation) XBox 360 Steam Deck (Steam and all other Pc games, including emulators)
Me personally, my go-to console at this point is the Steam Deck for its sheer versatility. I’ve got a dock with an 8Bitdo Ultimate Pro connected so it’s more or less plug and play. Since building my first PC in high school, I have a huge Steam library. EmuDeck is also amazing so with the exception of a Series X somehow running emulators, the Steam Deck is the best console for emulation.
I’ve had an Xbox One S as my 4K blu-ray player and have been digging the backwards compatibility, though there’s not enough OG Xbox support. I’m more than likely going to mod an OG Xbox with the Stellar chip/HD mod. I’ve considered a Series X, but unless it can replace my Nvidia Shield TV as an entertainment box, I’ll probably stick to my Onse S. I’ve also considered a PS5, but their games are coming to PC, albeit delayed, so I don’t really feel the need to pick one up.
The PS3 is a special beast as those games are seemingly trapped on the console unless ported (RIP Beenox Spider-Man games). When modded you have the ability to software emulate PS2 games (not as good at the launch PS3 but those things won’t last), but for me my TV still has a component connection so my cheat is having a PS2.
Nintendo has one of the most beloved library of games, but the Switch does not support much of said library unfortunately. The Wii U on the other hand had better compatibility especially if you modded in GameCube support which runs natively on the console.
The ability to pick something up easily, make some progress, pause it, and resume quickly at the next available window appears the best way to go.
Then you want the steam deck. This thing is powerful enough to run elden ring at a pretty stable 30 FPS, sometimes even up to 60, while being portable enough to fit in a backpack. I take it with me on business trips and it’s perfect for flying, bussing, wherever, with the caveat that you want it plugged in more often than not - the battery life is a little on the low side for those high-impact games.
My experience as someone who owns a HP Omen gaming laptop:
Not as portable and convenient as you may think. It weighs about 5 pounds, like a bag of potatoes. It uses a lot of power and needs to be plugged in if you want to play for longer than 45 minutes. The charger consists of a heavy cable a power block. I can however move it from the Study to the Living room if I wish to.
It boots up extremely quickly. I can go from power off to playing a game in about 5 minutes. I can exit a game and leave the power turned on, and then reopen the game and start playing within a minute.
It has a 2080 super graphics card which means I can play any game I want. I have never had any performance issues even playing games like Elden Ring on max settings.
It was expensive. Seriously look into refurbished options if possible. I got mine refurbished, works like brand new and have had no problems over the past 4 or so years. I saved about £3k doing this if I remember correctly.
Steam Deck seems to be a good fit. If you wanna get a gaming laptop, maybe wait until there’s one where you can easily swap out the batteries / components. I’ve seen videos about Framework laptop, and that does sound like a good investment for longer period.
I heard there were issues with ROG Ally, the device gets too hot, and the fan exhaust was near the SD card slot. So it frequently dislodges the SD cards from the slot because of the heat.
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