I’ll have to read more about transflective LCDs! The bit about the OLPC definitely rings a bell now that you mention it, and that’s definitely the kind of power-conserving, rugged-y vibe I’m interested in.
I dont know why they don’t get used more actually for eReaders honestly. (transflective lcd). Like eInk propper is still more energy effecient. But you would think someone would try doing it instead of hyper expensive color eInk on occasion.
Last thing of note I noticed using it was the Pebble Smart Watch.
I actually have the Pebble Time, which is why I was interested in the e-ink idea since it was such a good experience. But yeah, if transflective displays hit that sweet spot of cost, color, low power, and good in the sun that’d be the way to go.
Other properties my dream console would have are basically most of the things the consoles of my youth got
right.
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Multiplayer Nintendo DS games could be played with friends even if they didn’t own a copy of the game. The console would beam the multiplayer form of the package to your friends at stand-in-a-circle distance and allow everybody to play together. This was great for lower-income neighborhoods where kids could play with each other without everybody having to have the same game
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As cool as being able to download your games directly from the cloud from anywhere is, I liked the physical media of the past, mostly cartridges. It means that kids who live in rural communities with very little internet access can get buy or trade or borrow games. Cartridges don’t get scratched like disks, can handle being jammed in a kid’s pocket from lunch til home time, and if they use a standard interface like USB or SD you also get kids being able to easily make their own games and distributing them to their friends
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Wow, everything here so far is basically about the original Nintendo DS, but having other small applications that can use the ability to communicate directly and locally with other systems in proximity was such a boon. The chat application was a lot of fun and allowed for spontaneous communication. Imagine it with a small scuttlebutt upgrade that could allow propogation of conversations.
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Okay, something from some older systems: state restore via password (or hash). Games that had progress behind them but without the ability to save your progress could render your current state as a password that allowed you to get back to where you were. With that, all of stadia’s hyped up state sharing could be reduced to sharing a note with your friends with a human-readable hash on it. "Aw man, that was such a fun race guys!, if you want to play it at home the state seed was, “Human Llama Monkey Bird Ox…” (Having fun with the idea of using Naruto hand seals to communicate save states from across the room)