After saving up for this handheld, I pulled the trigger on this recently and have been pretty impressed overall. The system runs buttery smooth, comes preconfigured with a large number of emulators and ROMs and just generally feels like a solid little handheld from the hay-day of Gameboy goodness.
Running at 100 bucks with a micro-SD card, the system isn’t super expensive when compared to my Nintendo DS with a custom Kart to run roms (about 90 bucks total and much more limited in what it can do in comparison). This handheld even plays PSX roms without issue and has excellent loading times when compared to my playing times as a child.
Things of note:
- Quick to boot. Plays games very well once you find the right roms. Surprised it plays PSX roms as well as it does (Vigilante 8, Driver, Crash Team Racing each for 30 mins or more without issue).
- The system will randomly not boot (stuck on black screen) but hitting the reset button immediately resets and fixes it.
- Came with 32GB MicroSD card loaded with ROMS which makes managing them much easier. Comes with a bunch of emulators (including DOSBOX which is neat) and all are preconfigured and just work which is excellent.
- Lots of menu options that make it pretty solid to use. Can also save game states to come back to them if the games don’t support saving (very neat feature).
- Worth 100 bucks? I’d say so for sure, especially with the loaded SD card.
I’m going to be spending a lot of time tinkering with this. It appears it supports networking (guessing via one of the two USB-C ports) so will need to check that out for easier ROM management off my internal SFTP server. In the meantime, I’ll be reliving my childhood on a 4 inch screen.