I heard of game dad club this morning and I can't stop thinking about it. It's basically a fan site for handheld gaming device meant to run emulator around a price point of $100 or lower.

And they are basically small steamdeck. They run linux. They can probably install most game coming out of indipocalypse. They looks like really nice homebrew machine.

haha remember pokemon red/blue? remember when they made a 3DS port of it that had working link emulation?? well I do, and when that remake came out I invented a challenge run idea. I wanted to craft a save file where you could trade a pokemon in, teach it ANY combination of TMs, and trade it out again -- a move tutor, if you will. I'm sure there's hacks and stuff to do this more easily but I had this idea that, what if you collected every single TM legitimately, and then cloned them all with missingno at the very end?

it turns out this is a really interesting puzzle because pokemon 1 has godawful inventory management. you can only hold 20 items in your bag, and a further 50 items in your pc. There are 50 tms in the game, so, that leaves 20 slots for healing items and pokeballs and stuff right? Well, not exactly, because in pokemon 1, there is no "key items" pocket; key items take up the same inventory space as everything else. This means your inventory gradually shrinks over the course of the run.

With our 20 remaining inventory slots, we have to juggle (checks notes)... 19 key items.

But that's okay! A lot of those are skippable. We don't need the town map, we don't need the itemfinder, we can skip talking to the guys who give us the lesser fishing rods, we can even do that poke-doll trick to skip the silph scope... overall I think a reasonably "legit" run only needs to collect about 7 of these. That leaves 13 inventory spaces for all our pokeballs and potions. Easy peasy.

I never finished this run while the 3DS was supported though, and that's because of this one stupid-ass TM: number 15, Hyper Beam Foot Lettuce. Hyper Beam can only be purchased from the Game Corner, which both means we need to pick up the coin purse key item, it also means we need to either grind slot machines, or grind the Elite Four for endgame money, and in that case we also have to exchange cash for chips with the receptionist ten at a time up to a total of 5500 chips. That's a mad amount of grinding.

oh yeah we actually have to do that three times.

I think all told I ended the run with like 21 of the 50 TMs, I'll boot up my 3DS later and check. That grinding just killed it for me.