I am still working through a covid fog, so concentration is poor and progress is arriving in short useful bursts instead of clean, sensible sessions. Still, late last night I finally got the PortMaster build to usable speeds on the Anbernic after all the GLES2 and render-queue work, and that changes the mood of the whole thing a bit: it no longer feels like a theoretical handheld port, it feels like something real enough to keep pushing.
Today feels like the point where I stop treating GLES2 as an experiment and start treating it as the PortMaster target. The reasoning is fairly plain: there is already a real direct GLES2 path here rather than just SDL’s backend doing the work for me, the device build wants that renderer to be the default path, and if I am going to get proper handheld performance it probably comes from pushing batching and draw ownership deeper into the renderer instead of staying close to the old immediate-style SDL flow.