Emulation catch-all

After days of feverishly watching reviews and deep-dive videos, I gave in to the new-gadget bug and ordered an Anbernic RG351MP. It seems like that plus 351Elec will give me what I want, which is a device that can play games from roughly the NES to PS1 era in a pocketable form factor with a 4:3, 640x480 screen and a reasonable software / UI experience. I don't mind jumping through some hoops with setup and installing the custom firmware, but once I'm done, I want a system where I can plug the SD card into my computer, drag and drop ROM files into a folder, and have them just work with a minimum of fiddling.

It seems like N64 emulation isn't to a place where I can get that without spending a lot more money on a more powerful device and/or dealing with a lot more fiddling to get them running properly, which is unfortunate, but most of the N64 games I'd want to play on the go (OoT / MM / Starfox 64) have enhanced ports for the 3DS anyway. Dreamcast / PS2 / GCN emulation would similarly be nice, and it seems like some of the higher-end devices can handle them decently, but I'm just as fine waiting another couple years until more of the kinks have been worked out.

Also, the Switch-like form factor of large-display 16:9 handhelds isn't really great for me. Playing my 3DS more has reminded me how much nicer a true portable is. My 3DS XL can just barely fit in a pocket; I wouldn't want it kicking around there next to my cell phone all day, but being able to slip it in there for a second is nice. And it fits nicely in the front zipper pocket of a bag instead of needing to be in the main compartment. I wouldn't want to go much bigger than that.

It's gotten to the point that I never want to bring my Switch anywhere unless I KNOW I'm going to be playing it, but my 3DS can come with me and if I feel like playing a little, great, and if I don't, I don't feel like I just lugged this big stupid thing around all day for nothing.

Honestly I was sorely tempted by the even tinier RG280V, but that might be a little TOO small to comfortably hold in my hands. I might pick one up anyway and see if I can set it up as a gift for my 12-year-old nephew, he's wild about retro sh*t and gadgets.

pizzaddict wrote:

I'm looking at getting the Odin as a Geforece Now/Gamepass streaming machine so I can game in bed.

You can use Moonlight on your phone to do that (on either iOS on Android). Last year I got a simple $10 plastic thing that I can attach to a PS4 controller so that I can mount my phone on it, and it works great.

I have a phone clip thingy for my controller too. It works fine but I guess I'm intrigued by the convenience of having a handheld vs having to grab my phone, a controller, my clip thingy and connect everything together. On top of that the "feel" of it all isn't great since you are holding a controller with all the phone weight clipped onto the top.

Maybe this is a better compromise for me. It's probably a quicker setup and should feel better without having to spend $200 for a handheld.

https://www.amazon.com/Razer-Kishi-C...

@hbi2k
280v is good if you only use face buttons. Shoulder buttons suck. It has decent performance for PS1. I like it for what it is and you can go deep and customize it a bit with custom firmware.

hbi2k wrote:

After days of feverishly watching reviews and deep-dive videos, I gave in to the new-gadget bug and ordered an Anbernic RG351MP. It seems like that plus 351Elec will give me what I want, which is a device that can play games from roughly the NES to PS1 era in a pocketable form factor with a 4:3, 640x480 screen and a reasonable software / UI experience. I don't mind jumping through some hoops with setup and installing the custom firmware, but once I'm done, I want a system where I can plug the SD card into my computer, drag and drop ROM files into a folder, and have them just work with a minimum of fiddling.

Congrats. I'll be curious about what you think. I had the RG351MP briefly and loved it. I just decided it was too similar to my RG351V, which I didn't want to part with and I wanted at least 1 device with a larger screen, so I returned it for the PowKiddy.

hbi2k wrote:

It seems like N64 emulation isn't to a place where I can get that without spending a lot more money on a more powerful device and/or dealing with a lot more fiddling to get them running properly, which is unfortunate, but most of the N64 games I'd want to play on the go (OoT / MM / Starfox 64) have enhanced ports for the 3DS anyway. Dreamcast / PS2 / GCN emulation would similarly be nice, and it seems like some of the higher-end devices can handle them decently, but I'm just as fine waiting another couple years until more of the kinks have been worked out.

That's basically the size of it, unfortunately. And it seems like they're very close, but the chips they use just aren't there yet at the cost of the cheaper devices.

hbi2k wrote:

Also, the Switch-like form factor of large-display 16:9 handhelds isn't really great for me. Playing my 3DS more has reminded me how much nicer a true portable is. My 3DS XL can just barely fit in a pocket; I wouldn't want it kicking around there next to my cell phone all day, but being able to slip it in there for a second is nice. And it fits nicely in the front zipper pocket of a bag instead of needing to be in the main compartment. I wouldn't want to go much bigger than that.

I think that makes sense. As excited as I am about the Odin, I think there will always be a place in my life for a device the size of the RG351V.

hbi2k wrote:

It's gotten to the point that I never want to bring my Switch anywhere unless I KNOW I'm going to be playing it, but my 3DS can come with me and if I feel like playing a little, great, and if I don't, I don't feel like I just lugged this big stupid thing around all day for nothing.

That's where I got to, which is why I ended up with a Switch Lite. I still own a Switch, but it stays connected to my TV all the time. The Switch Lite is what I pack around and it's much more reasonable, because of its size.

hbi2k wrote:

Honestly I was sorely tempted by the even tinier RG280V, but that might be a little TOO small to comfortably hold in my hands. I might pick one up anyway and see if I can set it up as a gift for my 12-year-old nephew, he's wild about retro sh*t and gadgets.

Welcome to the addiction.

Anyone have opinions.experience with the retroid 2+? Looks pretty capable for such a low price, considering it for retro gaming on the go til the steam deck arrives

jonnypolite wrote:

Anyone have opinions.experience with the retroid 2+? Looks pretty capable for such a low price, considering it for retro gaming on the go til the steam deck arrives

Like you said, it's surprisingly powerful for its price, well made, and packs WiFi5, a touch screen, and the Google Play Store out of the box. I like mine, but I need to have a larger screen, and having the D-pad on the bottom means my hand cramps up a little using it for retro titles since that's not where you put the primary control. Ironically that makes it well suited for Dreamcast games, if you're ok with the screen size. Running Android 9, it's not a bad first machine at all, especially with the latest OTA update.

All that said, for the things that the RGB10MAX (that I already have) can handle, it's still the default for me. Plus, it has built-in WiFi and a SMB server that I can use to read and write saves wirelessly. The Retroid Pocket 2+ has an annoying rubber cover over its microSD slot, and I have yet to find the same kind of wireless server support for Android.

EDIT: of course, now is when I run across WiFi File Explorer.

My Anbernic RG351MP came in last night. Insanely long-winded first impressions:

The hardware is beautiful. Metal case, gorgeous metallic deep blue color. It has some weight in the hand, which could be a down side for some folks but is perfect for me. My dusty unused Retroid Pocket 2 looks and feels like a cheap toy, which isn't much of a knock because that's kind of what it is, but this feels like a piece of hardware that was made with care. It's about half again as thick as my 3DS XL and a little smaller in length and width, which is a really good size. Not so small that my hands dwarf it, not so big that it's uncomfortable to slip into a pocket. The horizontal form factor is really nice, I'd looked at vertical form factor devices like the RG351V but, despite having nostalgia for the gray brick Game Boy, I find that I don't like holding my hands that close together.

It has two SD card slots on the bottom, one for the firmware / OS, the other for ROMS. It's one of those things that's hardly necessary, but is a nice little touch. I suppose theoretically one could have a couple different SD cards loaded up with different firmwares for different use cases; I don't plan to do that. It came with a 16GB card loaded with an older version of the EmuElec firmware, and a 64GB card loaded with ROM files of the sort that a Western company would probably get in a lot of trouble for distributing.

I booted it up, interested to see what the out-of-the-box experience would be like, and it would probably be just fine. The stock firmware was responsive and easy-to-navigate. I guess it mostly uses Retroarch under the hood, but it obscures Retroarch's horrible, terrible, no-good very bad UI with one that was actually designed with human beings in mind. You could hand this device new in box to someone who had no intention of ever doing anything that would involve ejecting an SD card or connecting any part of it to a PC and they could have a pretty good time with it.

That ain't me, though, so after fooling around with the UI and loading up some games, I popped out the generic, no-name SD cards, copied anything that seemed worth keeping (mostly BIOS files for systems that require them like PSX and GBA and a few ROMs I didn't already have) to my PC's desktop, and followed the Retro Game Corps instruction video to install the latest version of AmberElec (formerly 351Elec, formerly EmuElec).

The process was pretty straightforward, just a matter of downloading an image file, using a small free Windows app to flash the name-brand 32GB SD card I'd bought for the purpose, inserting both it and the name-brand 128GB card I'd bought for ROMs into the handheld, booting it up, and waiting a couple minutes (couldn't have been more than 5) for it to configure some things. Then I popped out the ROM card, popped it into my PC, and dragged my ROM collection into the folder structure that AmberElec had set up. Drag-and-drop, easy-peasy. I had a browser tab open to the AmberElec site's page on supported systems and file types, but I might as well not have bothered. The folder system was perfectly intuitive-- SNES ROMs go in the "snes" folder, that sort of thing-- and it supported every file type I'd want, including running NES and SNES roms out of a .zip file, the way they're often distributed.

Booted back up. UI had some cosmetic changes, it looked maybe a little nicer than what came pre-installed, but not a "wow" difference. They clearly wanted the upgrade to feel familiar to folks who were used to older versions. Or maybe it's just a matter of "ain't broke, don't fix it." My understanding is that most of the improvements to the new firmware have to do with things like adding support for more different emulation cores for hard-to-emulate systems / games that might do better on one core than another, things like that.

Fooled around, loaded up different games and different systems. Once again, you could probably stop right here, hand it to someone who never intends to do anything with it but start a game and play it, and they'd have a great time.

I decided to dig a little deeper into what the device can do though. It doesn't have built-in WiFi, which is a bit of a dropped ball on what's otherwise a premium device in its processor / size / price category, but it does come with a little WiFi dongle that plugs and plays and just works. So I plugged it in and got it hooked up to my WiFi and made it do the thing where it downloads metadata, cover art, etc. for all my ROMs.

That was kind of a mixed bag; it renamed some of my games in weird ways I didn't anticipate or appreciate. Yeah, I know that Secret of Mana is actually Seiken Densetsu 2 and Earthbound is technically Mother 2. Don't care. Name them in English, please. It took some digging to find ways to fix that: I can either have it use the file name instead of the metadata system-wide, or I can go in and manually fix the metadata where it's messed up. Not sure which I'll do long-term yet.

Another kinda cool thing that you can do with the WiFi dongle is find the device on your home local area network on your PC and drag-and-drop files into your ROMs folders without having to plug it into the PC or even eject the SD card and insert it into your PC. It goes pretty fast, too. I wouldn't use it to load massive numbers of big files, but if there's that one title that you forgot to load up during your initial setup, it can be more convenient than swapping SD cards around.

After trying all that out, I got down to some games. The holy grail in a device like this for me would be a portable Link to the Past Randomizer machine. This is the closest I've come to that, but it's not quite there. I speedrun ALTTPR, and played at high levels there is lots of tech in that game that's very demanding both in terms of physical input and in terms of emulation accuracy. The emulation accuracy is amazing. It uses the snes9x core by default, which is a relatively demanding emulation core because it accurately emulates lag and slowdown that would happen on original hardware, which is obviously very important in speedrunning. AFAIK the powers that be in the racing community have never come down with a ruling on whether a device like this would count as "race-legal," more because it's never come up than anything else. But I'd be surprised if this wasn't ruled legal. It performs just as well as I'd expect from the Windows version of snes9x run on my beefy desktop PC, and noticeably better than on my Microsoft Surface. (To be fair to my poor old Surface, I've usually got it running a dozen Chrome tabs and other miscellaneous crapola at any given time on top of snes9x.) The only better SNES emulator I've encountered is the FPGA-based Analogue Super NT, which is a pricy piece of kit, frequently out of stock for months or years at a time, and, of course, not portable.

It's the physical buttons that make it not quite hold up to my (admittedly insanely demanding) standards. Even excepting those tricks that require holding the controller in a weird claw-grip that wouldn't be conducive to proper screen viewing-- there are only a couple of those-- the controls just plain don't hold up to the rigors of speedrunning. The dpad is the biggest culprit here. It's a little bit squishy in a way that I don't like. Too easy to accidentally hit a diagonal when you mean to hit a cardinal direction, the sort of thing that's easy to ignore when playing for funsies, but when speedrunning, the one accidental diagonal can futz up your whole multi-hour run. And the feel is different enough that I wouldn't even use this for practicing on the road. I'll stick with my old overworked Microsoft Surface and an 8bitdo Bluetooth controller for that.

So okay, that was a bit of a pipe dream. Other than that, it's a great little machine to play games on. The dpad isn't perfect, but it's good enough for everyday use. The screen is gorgeous. NES, SNES, and PS1 games scale beautifully, taking up the entire display or as near as makes no difference. GBA games have small black letterboxing bars due to aspect ratio issues, but you have to squint to see that it IS letterboxing and not just the black bezel surrounding the display. GB / GBC games display smaller by default to avoid artifacts that creep in when scaling to something that's not a simple integer multiply (e.g. a clean x2 resolution), but those are games that were designed to be playable on small displays, so they still look great, and instead of black letter/pillarboxing, they get little graphical bezels to use up the rest of the screen real estate in a pleasing way. By default it's something that looks like the bezel around a screen of a classic gray brick Gameboy, but several games also have game-specific custom images that got scraped from the same database that had the box art and metadata.

There are shortcuts for things like saving and loading save states, and they all feel like second nature once you look them up once. Select + R to save state, Select + L to load state, Select + double-tap Start to exit the game and return to the system menu. It's all very intuitive.

All in all it's a fantastic little system, and best of all, the vast majority of it "just works." There is room for exactly as much tweaking as you want to do. The menus for things like graphical filters, nitty-gritty technical emulation settings, etc. etc. etc. are all there if you want them, and it can be intimidating because there are a LOT of things to tweak if you want to drill down. But most of the options you want are somewhere intuitive once you think to look for them, and the vast, vast majority of the time, you can just leave everything set to "default" or "auto" and get a good experience.

Very happy with my purchase so far. My big question mark at this point is going to be real-world battery life. Anbernic claims about 5-6 hours of battery life, but it's hard to know what that means in real-world terms when you're sleeping, resuming, giving it ten minutes of charge time before unplugging it and taking it with you, etc. One of the gripes I had with the Retroid Pocket 2 is that the sleep function wasn't very good, I was forever putting it to sleep only to find the battery dead when I picked it up the next day, and the boot time on that thing was such that you didn't really want to be shutting it down all the way either. Boot time on the RG351MP is about 18 seconds, not terrible all things considered, but if I can treat it like my 3DS and just sleep it most of the time and only turn it all the way off when I'm planning on putting it in a drawer for a while, so much the better.

...I just typed a lot of words. Whew!

I read all those words haha.

Mushy d-pad, so many controllers keep making that mistake

I don't understand why creating a decent d-pad is such an impossible challenge for so many otherwise incredible hardware makers. This is not some brand new innovation, they've been standard-issue on controllers for forty years.

The best solution I've found for SNES speedrunning purposes is SNES Classic controllers, which can be plugged into original hardware (or the Analogue Super NT, which uses the same plug) with a special little adapter.

Original SNES controllers can work too, but it's very difficult when buying them online to know whether what shows up will be an actual SNES controller or a bad knockoff.

Thanks hbi2k! All those words prompted me to order an RG351MP to fool around with til the steam deck ships, sounds like just what I want.

Glad my long, meandering words could be of help!

After spending a little more time with it, I'm finding that the ability to transfer files via the Wi-Fi dongle is a cute novelty, but it's just not fast or reliable enough to be worth doing with anything larger than a SNES ROM (so not worth it for PS1 games, in other words). I find myself wishing that I could just plug it into my PC via USB and have the ROMs card mount as a PC drive, which is something I've known similar devices to do, but if there's a way to do that with the AmberElec firmware, I haven't found it. And constantly removing and inserting the SD card is annoying, the slot is recessed so it's very difficult to do with your bare hands, which is good for not getting accidental ejects while it's bouncing around in my bag, but bad for quickly adding ROMs and getting back to playing.

It's not a big deal, just a bit of a dropped ball. I'm also noticing that the battery meter might not be the most trustworthy: it tends to jump around within about a 15% range, sometimes deciding, j/k, I'm actually more charged than I thought I was, unless it turns out I'm less lol! But I set it on the nightstand in sleep mode last night reporting a ~70% charge to see what it would do, and it report ~55% this morning, which isn't terrible if accurate. Not great, but not terrible. We'll see.

I also realized I didn't touch much on N64 emulation above, and that's because it's exactly what I expected it to be: more of a novelty than anything else, not really worth bothering with.

Played some Twisted Metal 2 last night and I find that I really like the shoulder buttons. Russ on Retro Game Corps really laments anytime a portable lacks stacked shoulder buttons, but I really prefer something more compact in a small form-factor device like this one. TM2 is a game that uses all four shoulder buttons extensively, and it immediately felt natural to switch between using the crook of each finger to hit L1 and R1 and the tip to tap L2 and R2.

Also put a fair amount of time into Symphony of the Night, which is one of those classics I missed the boat on back in the day and always meant to go back to, and the emulation performed flawlessly to my untutored eye. I got a hard-lock in Soul Blade, so it seems like the PS1 emulation isn't quiiiiiite to "just works, don't even worry about it" territory yet, but it's close.

A new RG503 device with an OLED screen?!

Been reading a few more Ayn Odin reviews, I think I'm now pretty much sold on it. Just will wait for some of the kinks to be worked out.

JohnKillo wrote:

A new RG503 device with an OLED screen?!

Retro Game Corps' community tab wrote:

Hi everyone, Anbernic asked me to take down my RG503 impressions video, that it was too early. I made my case as to why it was a "first look" but in the end I am going to respect their wishes. I'll post it again as soon as I can.

hbi2k wrote:
JohnKillo wrote:

A new RG503 device with an OLED screen?!

Retro Game Corps' community tab wrote:

Hi everyone, Anbernic asked me to take down my RG503 impressions video, that it was too early. I made my case as to why it was a "first look" but in the end I am going to respect their wishes. I'll post it again as soon as I can.

Glad I pulled it up to watch it before all of this happened.

Just ordered a Powkiddy RGB10 Max 2 after seeing the good stuff about it here and elsewhere. Will this finally be the portable retro device that fills the portable retro device shaped hole in my life while also being comfortable enough for me to use for longer periods of time?

Really tempted again with the Odin. The reason why there is no lites/regulars is that they haven't shipped them yet.

JohnKillo wrote:

Really tempted again with the Odin. The reason why there is no lites/regulars is that they haven't shipped them yet.

That was a picture of my own Pro when I cast thread necromancy, so if you have questions, shoot.

How are you finding PS2 so far? And what's it like out of the box? Does the OS/environment seem mature enough on its own? Or do you expect 3rd parties to start releasing their own versions/configurations? What was your reasoning in getting the Pro over other models? Just the availability?

Mr GT Chris wrote:

How are you finding PS2 so far? And what's it like out of the box? Does the OS/environment seem mature enough on its own? Or do you expect 3rd parties to start releasing their own versions/configurations? What was your reasoning in getting the Pro over other models? Just the availability?

Out of the box you have a (repeatable) setup wizard for setting the basics like UI language, time zone, wifi, etc., and whether you want to use the Odin Launcher or the generic AOSP one. I picked AOSP, which means that any guidance or conveniences they offer in theirs is lost on me. After that, it doesn't guide you to installing emulators like the setup wizard of the RP2+, or even to sign into your Google Account. It's a pretty clean install, so I wouldn't expect anyone to bother with custom firmware when it's already on Android 10 and has built-in performance and fan speed controls, the swappable button layout, support for exFAT, WiFi 5, and software for the grip buttons. What's left to add, full RGB controls on the lighting?

I opted for the Pro purely to get the larger internal storage. It does grumble about any exFAT-formatted card it didn't format itself being unusable, so I had to use the trick of formatting a card for internal storage and then quickly reformatting as portable storage in order for it to store larger game images.

I only set up PS2 stuff today. Some of the auto-widescreen patching support in AetherSX2 doesn't work properly--so far more miss than hit--and while it detects that a controller is attached, I still have to map the controls since nothing seems to register right now. Intros at least seem to work at full speed without any fussing on my end, but I think I'll have to turn the fan on to actually play anything.

Kurrelgyre wrote:
Mr GT Chris wrote:

How are you finding PS2 so far? And what's it like out of the box? Does the OS/environment seem mature enough on its own? Or do you expect 3rd parties to start releasing their own versions/configurations? What was your reasoning in getting the Pro over other models? Just the availability?

Out of the box you have a (repeatable) setup wizard for setting the basics like UI language, time zone, wifi, etc., and whether you want to use the Odin Launcher or the generic AOSP one. I picked AOSP, which means that any guidance or conveniences they offer in theirs is lost on me. After that, it doesn't guide you to installing emulators like the setup wizard of the RP2+, or even to sign into your Google Account. It's a pretty clean install, so I wouldn't expect anyone to bother with custom firmware when it's already on Android 10 and has built-in performance and fan speed controls, the swappable button layout, support for exFAT, WiFi 5, and software for the grip buttons. What's left to add, full RGB controls on the lighting?

I opted for the Pro purely to get the larger internal storage. It does grumble about any exFAT-formatted card it didn't format itself being unusable, so I had to use the trick of formatting a card for internal storage and then quickly reformatting as portable storage in order for it to store larger game images. I only set up PS2 stuff today. Some of the auto-widescreen patching support in AetherSX2 doesn't work properly--so far more miss than hit--and while it detects that a controller is attached, I still have to map the controls since nothing seems to register right now. Intros at least seem to work at full speed without any fussing on my end, but I think I'll have to turn the fan on to actually play anything.

That kind of negates my interest a little. How is GameCube?

I'm not sure I understand the reaction. This is still several steps below the performance you'd get from a PC handheld, but it's still considerably more compact and cool running.

That's interesting. I watched the posted video review which made it sound good but a bit spotty in some games, but then read a couple more reviews that put it closer to flawless. Anyway, interested to hear how your impressions develop.

I find that my standards for "playable" emulation are pretty different from a lot of reviewers.

They say: It will play [some number between 25% and 75%] of [system]'s library acceptably, with some tweaking.

I hear: Do not even bother trying to play [system] on this device, you're gonna have a bad time.

They say: It will play the majority of [system]'s library with only a few hitches here and there.

I hear: It will boot up [system]'s games to the title screen as a cute novelty, and occasionally you'll get into the actual gameplay with a double-digit frame rate. Don't play anything that you're going to get invested in, because you'll probably hit some weird game-breaking issue twenty hours in.

They say: It handles [system] flawlessly.

I hear: It handles [system] acceptably. Most of the emulation issues will be merely annoying as opposed to game-breaking.

Kurrelgyre wrote:

I'm not sure I understand the reaction. This is still several steps below the performance you'd get from a PC handheld, but it's still considerably more compact and cool running.

Its not the performance. It is the not recongizing the controller part. I would be playing rpgs more.

hbi2k wrote:

I find that my standards for "playable" emulation are pretty different from a lot of reviewers.

Ugh, 100% this. I'm always shocked at what some people call "playable".

It's one of the reasons I was so hyped for the Steam Deck. I've been eyeballing options for a handheld emulation device for years now, and considered pretty much all of them too underpowered. I only really like playing emulated games on overkill-level hardware. The Deck gives me that for Dreamcast/PSP and below.

All interesting takes, thanks. I’m probably somewhere in the middle. I’ve been playing some Chrono Cross on my Pocket Go 2. The problems are slowdown when the camera pans into a new encounter, and some strange palette glitches in the menus (happens randomly after an hour or so). The second problem you can either ignore or reboot the game. On the plus side, better load times, save state support, and the 3D models look a bit nicer than on native hardware. That’s all on a $60 device so I consider it an overall satisfactory outcome.

Looks like I should wait and see on the Odin, maybe performance will improve with updates or reports will come in on the specific games I want to play.

JohnKillo wrote:
Kurrelgyre wrote:

I'm not sure I understand the reaction. This is still several steps below the performance you'd get from a PC handheld, but it's still considerably more compact and cool running.

Its not the performance. It is the not recongizing the controller part. I would be playing rpgs more.

Ohhh. Since the app knows there's a controller, the hard part's done. AetherSX2's automatic mapping attempt just fails. It took maybe a minute to map all of the buttons and sticks inside of it.