What type of internal memory does it use, and are the read/write speeds not faster on internal versus microSD?
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Valve released their public beta of Steam for Arm and someone got it running on a Switch:
This is exciting.
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Ok now I’m getting excited for experimenting with an ARM device.
@peter you’d recommend the Thor over Odin?
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My Thor has the UFS 4.0 speeds on the internal memory. I generally use the internal memory for Gamehub/Gamenative emulation stuff, and just have all of my old game ROMS on the SD card. Since the Thor chip isn’t playing huge AAA games, I don’t think you need a huge amount of internal space. Most of the PC games I’m playing on this thing are around 5 - 10 GB downloads.
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I’ve seen a couple people posting on Reddit saying they’ve tried this on their Retroid Pocket 4 Pro, which I have. I don’t really use it for anything right now, so I should I mess around with this. I wonder how well things will run compared to using Gamenative or any of the other Android emulation layers.
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That’s a good question. The chip in the Thor has been around a while (it’s the same one that’s in the Retroid Pocket 6 and the Odin 2), so a lot of these projects have already done all the compatibility work. The ROCKNIX distro works on the Thor, but not the Odin 3 (yet). I guess Ayn is working on Linux support for the Odin 3, and it’s supposed to be merged into the kernel soon? That will definitely be a better machine than the Thor to be a Steam deck replacement in terms of power. I love the Thor’s form factor, but I know you’re pretty tall and probably have bigger hands than me. I find it a little uncomfortable without grips sometimes, so you might have an issue with that.
My head’s spinning a little bit with all the stuff that’s been coming out the last couple of days. Steam is now officially supported on ROCKNIX, so I might actually just go ahead and install on that on my Thor and see how it goes.
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I think I’m less inclined to replace my Steam Deck than accentuate it. So maybe a different form factor is a good idea. Plus that translucent purple is nice!
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Haven’t watched this yet, but this MFer churns out videos pretty fast.
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Damn. I’ll watch when I get a chance. Super curious. I’ve wanted a non Steam Deck hand held that runs SteamOS for a bit now and this is cool.
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I did go through the install process and put ROCKNIX on an SD card and installed Steam on to it. You can do it where it wipes your device or just runs off an SD card, which is a lot slower. I chose the SD card. Getting it installed was fine enough (although it could be better). I couldn’t figure out why Steam wasn’t launching, and it’s because it never prompted me to get on my WiFi and it had no internet connection. No messages or anything. Once I had steam installed, I installed slay the spire, and launched it. I’m having the issue that I’m seeing a lot of people are having where the game launches behind Steam, and you can’t get to it because there’s no alt tab interface. Definitely not quite ready for daily use, but I suspect it’s not going to take long to get there. I’ll check in on it every week or so and see how it progresses.
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I watched the video and while I’m still just as excited, I am happy to wait it out until it’s further along in development.
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Am I right in saying the Retroid Pocket 6 and the Ayn Thor have the same ARM SoC?
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Yes, they’re the same. The Odin 2 also has that chip.
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I really like the Thor in translucent purple but the Retroid Pocket in purple with the symmetrical layout. I read the Retroid Pocket 6 benchmarks slightly higher than the Thor, possibly due to better thermals. It’s tempting for the price it’s at. But the dual screen of the Thor is also intriguing.
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I bet you the Retroid Pocket is more comfortable to hold too. The dual screen is pretty nice though. I’ve had websites up on the bottom screen to look up stuff for the game I’m playing on the top screen if I ever get stuck or something. I wonder if they’ll make the bottom screen usable in Linux. Right now the Linux builds that work on the Thor don’t utilize the bottom screen (that I know of anyway).
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You can use dual screen in desktop mode in SteamOS and when you emulate GCN games that have the GBA attachment functionality you can put it in the second screen. So I presume it’s possible to get it to work as long as SteamOS recognizes the second screen as exactly that.
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I got Steam games to launch on my Thor from ROCKNIX today! The original Slay the Spire still doesn’t work out of the box though 
I know it’s possible to get it to work in Gamenative, but I’ve never gone to figure it out. I thought maybe the FEX translation layer in Proton 11 would do it, but it doesn’t seem like it works out of the box.
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OK, last update on my ROCKNIX experiment. I took the boot loader off and put it back to the original Android bootloader and put my other SD card back in. I’ll check back in maybe in a few months, or the next time Retro Game Corps does a video telling me it’s a suitable OS to permanently run on the Thor. It just seems silly to keep messing with it when Gamehub/Game native work pretty damn well, and I mostly use this thing to run SNES and DS games.
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Part my interest is that I just like to tinker with devices and play around with OSes. So I totally get that from a practical standpoint it’s not providing you with anything useful in terms of emulation for you because if all I wanted to do is emulate I would also see no point messing with this until later. But the allure of formatting a device and installing a non-standard OS is always high for me, lol.
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Haha. I almost did the destructive method and formatted the thing and put ROCKNIX on the Thor. I enjoy tinkering, but I also didn’t want to put the device in a state where I couldn’t use it for what I wanted to. We should just start a YouTube channel so all these companies send us this stuff for free. Then I’ll go and break them all day.
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