Promising EmuDeck Machine Declared Dead After Failing To Secure Funding

I already own one of these, it's called a steam deck, and it's great!

Sega licensed the looks of the Dreamcast out then ?

The console-like experience implies an ease of use that runs counter to everything about emulation, from how you get the games into the emulator to the weird bugs/crashes that weren't there on original hardware.

I think the Polymega is actually great and got most of the way there with the console-lile experience, but boy howdy there were significant costs associated with the effort.

You can recreate some of that with a slick front-end for emulators (Reset Collection is a great one in my experience) but even the best of those will still require a fair bit of user mucking about to make them work and look their best, and all of that hurts the "console-like experience."

It's a cool thing to aim for and I wish them luck, but I think there are reasons this is still a (partially) unaddressed need in the market.

Looks lovely.

Edit: I take that back, the ports on the front contain old school USB, and the additional renders has "Dreamcast controller plug" shaped surrounds upside down. And the device seems about 1.5 times as tall and not as good looking.

Also so many hardware versions at launch, and a dock, leaves me cold.

@KitsuneNight I would imagine after 25 years since the original patent went in it has also long since expired so Sega probably doesn't have any kind of rights to a similar designed system for a console they no longer produce. If it had Sega and Dreamcast branding all over it then that would be a different matter.

Yeah for that price just get a Steam Deck. Or get a RPi5 and do pretty much all the same emulator things (except Cemu) for a way cheaper price.

The Polymega has nailed a modern console like experience for retro, but there are a lot of barriers to entry (cost, must have a physical collection, low availability). This is an interesting project I'd like to see more of. More retro consoles focusing on UI/experience is great.

So it's basically a Steam Machine that allows you to play emulate games as well. Kinda odd that those are its selling point since you could basically do all of that on an actual Steam Machine, Atari VCS, portable PC, Steam Deck, etc.

Retroid with Dock

BAM Consolized Emulator and you can go fufu and game.

@Poodlestargenerica My thoughts exactly! It seems silly at that price point to not just use a docked steamdeck for the same functionality.

I've said this before, but how many retro consoles does there need to be? Are the same people buying all these retro consoles?

There will be at least one person who reads this comment who will have ten different consoles on which to play Super Mario Bros on.

@UK_Kev I think I have 8 different machines that play SMB as either native, a port or virtual console. Officially.

edit: 11

@LowDefAl
Any more unofficially?

@UK_Kev Of the 20 or more gaming devices I own, pretty much all of them apart from like 3 can run SMB in some form if I was desperate enough.

my X1, PC88 and FM-7 can play Super Mario bros Special, and my PC98 can emulate the 88 version of that, and X68k can emulate the Nes game.

Note: I don't own any emulation/fpga devices aside from my Analogue Pocket, and I'm only including its native playback not the third party cores.

@LowDefAl
I understand why retro gamers buy Analogue products as they are premium products.

But as far as emulation consoles go, anyone interested must surely already own one of the many emulation consoles already released. With the EmuDeck Machine failing to reach its funding target, maybe retro gamers are finally running out of shelf space for consoles they don't need.

@UK_Kev I agree, I've never seen market saturation as ludicrous as with retro gaming machines over the last 4-5 years. There's literally 10 new ones every month.

Had a feeling things would end this way. Instead of trying to be a proper mini-PC, this device should have aimed to be an emulation machine. Imagine if this thing has a focus on all of Sega's home consoles but also had the small bonus of being strong enough for some of Sega's more recent games all for 199. That would have been worth it. Couple this with a matching, optional disc drive for Sega CD, Saturn and Dreamcast repros, this would have been a killer device! It's a damn shame. Hopefully someone from China copies the Dreamcast style shell and sticks a mini-PC in it. It would make for a fun DIY "Super Sega" project.