In the Market for an 8/16-bit Retro ROM Handheld

[innerspaceboy]

Like the title says, I'm interested in picking up a classic gaming handheld device. There are hundreds of cheap Chinese devices preloaded with 10,000 titles but controller lag and poor frame rates and faulty microSD cards are the cost of their low price.

I did some research. Here's what I found -

1. I want a device with a 4:3 aspect ratio for arcade and 8-bit / 16-bit emulation.

2. I want it to be able to save states.

3. I want it to be able to read zipped ROMs

4. It appears that better quality legitimate devices don't come with ROMs. The Linux-based devices do ship with the emulators pre-installed.

5. I checked my library. I have what is still the most popular ROM library of 6,666 titles from 15 years ago including arcade and up to a handful of N64 titles. (I'll mostly be playing NES, SNES, Genesis, and MAME64 releases.) My ROM library is 20.1GB, so even the smallest microSD cards will be fine.

...

Based on those specs, the best device I found with a legitimate look is the Retroid Pocket Classic Handheld for $129.
https://www.goretroid.com/products/retroid-pocket-classic?variant=47633730994400

Google Gemini says:

The Retroid Pocket Classic is praised as a premium, compact vertical handheld for older retro systems (up to PS1/Dreamcast) due to its stunning 3.92-inch 1240x1080 OLED screen, excellent build quality, good controls, and the capable Snapdragon G1 Gen2 chip, making it an ideal device for its niche, Users love the beautiful display and strong performance for its target systems, often calling it an "endgame" device for 32-bit and earlier emulation.

My younger brother owned the Retroid Pocket 2+ model and enjoyed it which makes me hopeful that this is a good fit.

Let me know what you think. I'd love to kick back and play Tetris, the Capcom classics, and TMNT: the Arcade Game again. It could be a great way to occupy my free time which has been a critical factor of my mental health as I've often stated.

Thanks!

[innerspaceboy]

Research Day 2:

It looks like the project will not be without its challenges. The device I mentioned ships with Android 14. I'd have to install and configure the emulators, ROMs, frontend interface, and key mapping for all systems manually.

The ES-DE Frontend appears to be the most popular and sleek interface I've found. But I don't have a reader for the microSD card so I'd have to invest in a hardware adapter as well to load up the ROMs.

I've gone through hours of training videos on YouTube but each person has a different configuration process as there are many options available, so I really hope I can rise to this challenge.

After a day of research, I stumbled upon a potentially more simple and cost-effective solution. As the device I was considering is really just running Android, I could take any of my old phones that are laying around collecting dust and buy a telescoping Bluetooth gaming controller that grips the phone landscape in the center like the GameSir X5s for about $39 and install the Retroarch multi-core emulator from their website and copy the ROMs directly to the old phone. I found a tutorial that makes it look like a snap.

I still welcome anyone's input. Thanks.

[innerspaceboy]

Update: Purchase Made

I spent a week carefully considering my options and doing further research.

The issue with the Bluetooth controllers is that they suffer significant lag due to latency making many games unplayable.

And I feared that the manual configuration requirements of the Retroid Pocket Classic would be too difficult for me to accomplish.

So I revisited the concept of pre-loaded Linux-based gray market handhelds.

What I soon discovered was that the dozens of Chinese handhelds which appeared in my feed are all clones of one core handheld - the R36S.

The R36S is manufactured by BOYHOM and sold on AliExpress. It runs a Linux OS called ArkOS and comes pre-configured with tens of thousands of games with a clean multi-system browser interface.

Curiously, the R36S is priced at only one fifth the cost of all of its knock-offs, and is of superior build quality. There are just countless counterfeit models making it difficult to find an authentic unit.

I've found guides with photos showing how to deduce whether the model I receive is official. I ordered a new in box unit on eBay Saturday night which I hope will ship tomorrow.

There is one additional issue - that of the microSD card shipped with the unit. The cards are notoriously cheap and are prone to rapid failure. I found instructions on how to buy a reputable branded microSD card and clone the partitions to replace the card for greater shelf life. And it will feel good to have a disk image of the ROMs and the OS for my Archive.

I'll report my findings once it arrives.

In the interim, I'm putting together spreadsheets of the top 100 games of various categories.

Stay tuned!

[innerspaceboy]

Archival Project #1,256: 20,000+ classic video games at my fingertips!

I am now the proud owner of a retro handheld gaming console running over 20,000 vintage games for dozens of systems including the Atari systems, Apple II, arcade titles (MAME), Game and Watches, Commodore 64, MS-DOS, NES, Game Boy series, SNES, N64, Sega Master System, Genesis, Game Gear, Sega Saturn, Dreamcast, TurboGrafx-16, Neo Geo, PlayStation, PSP, ScummVM, and other classic consoles. And to answer the most common question... Yes, it runs Doom.

Best of all - it runs on Linux. <3

I've created a spreadsheet of hundreds of the best titles for each console, (of COURSE you have, ISB!), and look forward to diving into thousands of classic games.

[innerspaceboy]

It's been an incredibly stressful project but I believe that I've emerged triumphant.

The gaming system console's reddit community and wiki strongly recommend replacing the microSD cards that ship with these Chinese-manufactured devices as they are inexpensive generic cards which are prone to fail.

But my handheld is running a more advanced and polished front-end than the one that ships with most models, and the community has exhaustive guides on how to create a bootable multi-partitioned replacement branded microSD card with the ROMs and the emulators and the bootloader for the front-end to launch at boot. Unfortunately, none of those guides are for my advanced front-end nor for my Linux desktop environment to perform the task.

But undeterred, today I got a hold of a microSD card reader and the Linux Disk utility and successfully created an image of all 4 partitions on the card including the boot partition without any issue. I verified the bit-perfect copy and the disk had no errors. I test mounted the disk image and verified the files are all intact.

My plan now is to continue using the fully-functional microSD that shipped with the device. If it never fails on me, then fantastic. If it does fail down the line, I have a bit-perfect disk image with the boot partition intact that I can flash onto a compatible branded microSD in the future when necessary.

I should be all set.

What a relief!