Back in the handheld emulator scene, a lot of people were obsessed with the idea of a “fighting handheld.” Mostly old-timers grinding KOF 97, pining for a handheld with good feel that could handle fighting games, or side-scrolling beat ’em ups and the like. And of course the god of the bootleg handheld world, Zhou Ge, answered their prayers with the Anbernic RG-Arc, a machine that’s blatantly modeled on the Saturn, complete with the standard six-button layout and that familiar disc-style D-pad. But once the thing came out, a bunch of old-timers weren’t happy, saying the design fell way short of the original Saturn, especially the D-pad feel, which was off by more than a little. They all insisted that only the original Saturn pad had that flavor, that perfect balance of firmness and give, that silky-smooth quarter-circle execution…

When I got sent to the quarantine facility, I brought my Switch, and that’s where I wrecked the sticks on the thing… The clips that hold the left and right sticks in place also went bad — the sticks wouldn’t stay put, one push and they’d pop up. So I figured I’d just replace them, and in for a penny, in for a pound: the left and right stick clips, the console’s own battery, and the sticks themselves all got swapped. You can buy all of this on Taobao: Rail clips — there are metal versions now, and I strongly recommend the metal ones, they’re just sturdier Sticks — there are second-gen ones, plus the newly released GuliKit Hall effect ones. If you’ve got the money I’d go Hall, but remember: the point of a Hall stick is that it massively cuts the odds of drift, not that it feels good Battery — I couldn’t tell which was the real “official” one, so I just bought the highest-selling listing The screwdrivers for teardown usually come free

Another exam came up in the first half of the year, so I’ve been in study mode again lately. I’ve been wanting to try the “all-digital” paperless study thing — reading PDFs, books, and magazines on a tablet. I’d been using a Lenovo Chromebook Duet, but the stylus on that thing is godawful, and the screen aspect ratio isn’t 4:3 either, which feels like a waste. Then I remembered the very chicken-rib Surface Pro 4 I had lying around. It’s got a 3:2 screen and a 12-inch size — just right for reading books and magazines. Let’s look at the basic specs first: CPU: Skylake i5-6300u RAM: 4GB Storage: 128GB NVMe SSD As you can see, here in 2022 a Windows machine with 4GB of RAM is basically unusable. The CPU feels salvageable — ancient, sure, but it’s battle-tested 14nm at this point. The drive is too small and probably needs fixing too. And this thing has been used for who knows how many years, so the battery’s down to about 60% capacity and needs replacing.

So I upgraded to a 2K HDR screen a while back, used it for a bit, and honestly the colors are a little too vivid, and even with 500 nits I never use the brightness. But the biggest thing: 2560 x 1440 is just stuck in an awkward middle ground. I’m a Linux user, and Linux has always been terrible at fractional scaling. People say Wayland supports it now, but one, my discrete GPU has no Wayland driver, and two, Wayland performance is a joke — the mouse stuttering in particular is absolutely maddening. Word is Wayland mouse handling goes through libinput, which shares a single thread with gnome-shell, so high system load equals stutter. Fucking stupid. In the end I couldn’t stand 2K’s nonsense scaling anymore and chose to “throw money at the problem” — went 4K.