Building EmuLnk: Turning the Second Screen Into Something More

If you’re anything like me, the recent wave of dual-screen retro handhelds feels like a return to the Nintendo DS era. You pick up something like the AYN Thor and, for a moment, it all clicks! Two displays, stacked, full of potential. But then you start using it for anything that isn’t a dual-screen system, and that second display ends up doing…almost nothing. Maybe it plays a YouTube video. Maybe it holds a guide. Maybe it just sits there.For Miso, the developer behind EmuLnk, that gap between what these devices could do and what they actually did became impossible to ignore. “After using it for a while, it started to bother me that the second screen was mostly unused,” they explain. What others saw as a novelty feature, Miso saw as wasted space, especially on hardware that seemed purpose-built for something more ambitious.What they wanted wasn’t a second screen as a passive display. It was something closer to a true dual-screen experience, the kind that defined an entire generation…