The Deck · Legion Go
Lenovo handled the power. We're handing it to you.
The Legion Go is a portable deck — a mini PC with a screen, a battery, and controllers that detach because Lenovo designed them to. That modularity was deliberate, and it points a long way past gaming. The software has not followed: almost everything built for these machines aims at games, and the rest of what they can do goes unused. The Deck is our work on that gap, across both the Legion Go and the Legion Go 2, starting with Tandem — an interconnectivity platform that needs no router, no internet and no account.
Tandem
Screen mirroring is the loudest feature, not the product.
The product is the link and the role model. Once two devices can find each other and trust each other with nothing else in the room, mirroring is one of several things you can run over that — alongside clipboard, files, storage and input.
No designated host
One binary runs identically on either generation, so any pairing of two units works the same way — two gen 1s, two gen 2s, or one of each. Either can claim mastership; neither is configured as the server. Both devices belong to you, so an arbitrary asymmetry would be a design smell.
Mastership expires
Control is a ten-second lease renewed every three, not a flag. A client that stops hearing from the master reverts to being an ordinary handheld on its own. That is the anti-freeze guarantee.
Yours wins
Releasing control is always available on the client without the master's cooperation. The device in your hands always gets the final say.
Paired once, trusted after
A six-digit code confirmed on both screens, an X25519 exchange, then each device pins the other's key. A Wi-Fi Direct group is a broadcast in a public room; shared ownership does not make the air private.
Why it doesn't already exist
Windows ships most of this. All of it assumes infrastructure.
The uncovered case is two handhelds on a plane, in a car, or on a couch with no access point — which is exactly where a handheld actually gets used.
Syncs through a Microsoft account over the internet. No internet, no clipboard.
Discovery brokering is unreliable without a shared network, and it falls back to Bluetooth speeds.
Internet-dependent by design.
Genuinely works offline — but it is mirror-only. No input, no files, no clipboard, and fussy about sinks.
Needs a LAN and the Steam client, and frames everything as gaming.
Modes
Four meanings of "master".
One button claims the role; a selector picks what the role does. Extend and Remote are compositions of the other two, so only two primitives get built.
Mirror
- Master
- Sends its display.
- Client
- Renders it full screen — a dumb sink.
Extend
- Master
- Gains a second monitor.
- Client
- Becomes that monitor.
Takeover
- Master
- Sends input only.
- Client
- Keeps its own screen, receives injected input.
Remote
- Master
- Sends input, receives video.
- Client
- Sends video, receives input.
Transports
Probed in order, at link-up.
The control plane does not care which one wins. This ranking is currently a prediction, not a measurement — correcting that is the whole point of Phase 0.
One cable, and video becomes almost free. Support is inconsistent on AMD controllers — if it is there, it reorders this entire table.
Used opportunistically when a network happens to be present. Never required.
One peer becomes group owner, the other joins, and a real IP interface appears on both. This is the reason the project exists — and the single largest risk.
Ugly but extremely reliable. Costs the host its station radio, so it is the plan B rather than the plan.
Presence, wake, and out-of-band pairing before any IP link exists.
Beyond gaming
Two decks are worth more than twice one.
Own both generations and you have two independent x86 machines, two screens, two batteries and four detachable controllers. Linked, that stops being a current device and a previous one and starts being a single modular system. Several small things sharing one link beat one big feature.
Offline clipboard
Copy on one, paste on the other, with no account and no internet. A genuine gap in Windows, and a small amount of code.
File beam
A drop zone that is resumable and hash-verified, moving at link speed rather than Bluetooth speed.
Library share
Expose one device's SSD or microSD to the other and play from it. No router involved.
Controller passthrough
The Go 1's detachable controllers become input for the Go 2. As far as we know, nothing else does this.
Second-screen panel
A map, a chat window, sim telemetry or documentation on one deck while the other does the work. Cheaper to build than mirroring and probably used more.
Virtual LAN
Forward broadcast and multicast across the link so local co-op games that discover peers by UDP actually find each other with no router.
Status
Nothing is built yet. Here is exactly where it stands.
Tandem is at Phase 0, which exists to answer one question before any daemon gets written. Publishing a design is not the same as shipping software, and this page would be worth less if it pretended otherwise.
Phase 0 — the link. Probe scripts are written in PowerShell precisely because they need no compiler: WinRT types load straight into Windows PowerShell 5.1, so the link layer can be measured before anything is built.
R1: does Wi-Fi Direct actually work on these two adapters? This is the assumption the zero-infrastructure premise rests on. If it fails, the default transport becomes Mobile Hotspot and the design changes shape. Unresolved.
USB4 host-to-host. Inconsistent on AMD controllers. Present would be transformative; absent changes nothing but the ceiling.
Pairing, secure channel, clipboard, file beam. All Phase 0 scope, none written. Deliberately: they are ordinary code, and none of them are worth writing until R1 says which transport they sit on.
Every mode. Mirror, Extend, Takeover and Remote are all designed and none are implemented.
A decision on the name. "Tandem" is a working title.