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Asus ROG Ally - Day Two Thoughts Blog
22nd November 2024
Day Two was mostly frustrations. Not of the hardware or technology, but of Windows.

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It's been a good few years since I had to deal with Windows as a "Something I need to keep working" device.
Sure, I've used plenty of Virtualised Windows's'ies since switching to MacOS as my Primary OS, but any time a Virtual Windows goes awry, you delete the virtual file, copy over the backup, and you're off where you were ten minutes ago.
Here, not so much.

I'm having to deal with driver woes. Like how, at some point since yesterday, Windows installed a graphics driver that caused all manner of glitches.
I had to uninstall the new driver, download the driver package from AMD, install THAT version, and then things worked fine again.

24 hours and I'm already dealing with this sort of frustration. Grrr
And the "1920x1080 screen with tiny fonts on a little 7-inch screen" issue.. Good grief.
My eyes have had an epic workout these past couple of days.

Game-wise, still haven't diverged much from the games I was playing yesterday.
Audiosurf was the first game I tried, this morning, and it plummeted to about 10 fps. "WTF" says I, and after some digging, the graphics driver thing became obvious, so then I spent about half an hour giving that.

I popped Flappadiddle Doo onto the device, and it ran silky smooth, except for the fact that the game started off smushed into a corner of the screen, and I needed to hit F11 to make it fullscreen, but .. no physical keyboard, so I had to make the Y button on the controller a shortcut to F11 in the Launcher menu.]

Two things spring to mind.
1. I'll have to do that for ALL my Windows games, since each game has its own saved controller setup in the launcher.
and
2. .. Did I add a "Launch in fullscreen" option to my engine? I feel I probably should've done. I might have to look into that.

But it ran smoothly enough once Fullscreened. In fact it ran smoothly enough in Windowed, too, but the lower 3/4 of the screen were hidden because of where the window launched, and .. for reasons I'm not 100% sure of, I couldn't seem to move the window.
Hmmm..

It really is a learning experience, this!!!

Meanwhile, then, Browsercade seems to run just fine. Shoebox, nice and smooth. JNKPlat, super silky smooth!
In GotoJSE, things are still about 1/2 the speed of my iPad and MacBook, so.. At the very least, this'll be good for limiting what I do with future games, testing them to a certain degree.

I tried Unreal Tournament, but that didn't like the lack of keyboard and mouse, and the thing seemed to run at about 2fps in DirectX mode, so that got deleted fairly quickly.
In its place, I download the Xbox GamePass edition of Quake III Arena, but that ran in Fullscreen DOS, and without a keyboard attached to GTFO of Dos, and in fact even interact with the game, the whole thing became an entirely fruitless endeavour, and a forced reboot later, got deleted, too.
Bah, humbug.

So, I played a bit of Fallout4, and that was quite nice. Lovely high-resolution, silky smooth gameplay, and .. yeah, nice!
I haven't gamed like that for quite a while, if I'm honest, and that's really what this device what meant for.
I might continue with that game. Seems like something I'll enjoy, though I am worried about combat, spinning around, and that causing motion issues. I'll need to be careful!


Meanwhile...



I at least got a bit of coding done, yesterday. Not an awful amount, but enough to keep things going in the right direction.
.. But don't ask me to try playing a typing tutor on a handheld gaming device!!!

Especially when the onscreen keyboard's as lousy as the Windows one is!

Code : 2/5
Worked : 3/5 Not as expected. More work needs to be done.
Fun : 2/5.. Again, not as expected.

A.I. Corner



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