feltmonkey

The RP5 does look good. What about a second hand Steam Deck?

I feel like we've had this conversation before. 😂

If you want something to run PS2, then the R36S is not going to be anywhere near good enough, and would probably be a downgrade on what you have. It belongs in the bracket of the Miyoo Mini etc. It's great for retro consoles and PS1, but as I say anything above that is hit and miss. It will play some PSP and Dreamcast, but not all games on those systems are equal, and performance ranges from "acceptable" to "nope." It sounds like the R40S is kind of similar performance, so it's probably the same chipset in a bigger shell, but I'm not sure.

The form factor isn't ideal, especially if you want to use the analogue sticks and shoulder buttons. I wouldn't have it as my main emulation device, but it is great as something you can chuck in your pocket and not worry about.

Yeah, I find that you have to only buy from the listings that say that thousands of the item have been sold. If it says "9 sold" there's a good chance it's a scam.

If anyone does buy an R36S, then I would say to throw the sd card that it come with in the bin and get a decent branded one instead. You can set up a card with ArkOS on pretty easily. If I can do it, anyone can. It's not as good as OnionOS but it works okay for the most part. It seems to be based around a clunky version of retroarch, from the menus.

Probably a question for Al, but this here:

https://try-retrolink.de/products/retroboy%E2%84%A2?variant=49772228084051

Not asking about the unit itself but the UI shown… what's this running on? Not Android, for sure. I have an old handheld which has a UI that has the same button icons across the bottom, but not the same other bits. Curious as I really like this clean style - I'd probably try to mess about with the old handheld if I knew what it was and where to start. I want to say… something about onions?

That's an R36S running Emulation Station through ArkOS. The R36S is a hugely underrated machine. It's slightly more powerful than the Miyoo Mini Plus and the RG35XX (it can run PS1 easily, and can even manage some PSP and Dreamcast stuff) and you can get one for about £25 on Ali Express.

It can also run the mind-boggling Portmaster, through which I have a flawless version of Super Mario 64 running on mine at 60fps.

Yeah, the way Nintendo consoles have been emulated has been an argument against emulation for a long time, in a way. I hate that Nintendo destroyed the venerable Vimm's Lair last year, a site that was focused on preservation and didn't host Switch or 3DS roms, but I can see why they did it.

It's obvious that a lot of the innovations Nintendo have made in their console designs over the years have been in part to the end of making piracy harder. They don't go for the bleeding edge power that makes PS5 emulation completely impossible, so their systems are often emulatable in their lifespan. Things like the Wii's motion controls and the two screens on the DS and 3DS make emulation awkward, but both have been done. The DS was a shitshow of piracy. You could and still can buy an R4 card with the entire console library of games on for less than £50. You can buy them on Amazon ffs. You can play any DS game on your phone, as all the innovations - touch screen, effectively portrait orientation, the microphone - are standard in a phone now.

I'm a fan of emulation, and I'm not sure if that makes me a historian or a dirty pirate. I've got a couple of those retro handheld machines and I can and do play PS2 games I never owned on them. I never had a SNES (although my son now owns one having had it for his birthday - he's a retro gamer) but I've got hundreds of SNES games on my Odin 2. My Odin 2 can emulate Switch games, but I generally don't, and not games I don't own. I have put Breath of the Wild on there to play through from the start again because I don't want to carry two devices about with me and have to choose between playing FFX or BOTW in a car park before I leave the house. Also the Switch is effectively my son's fiefdom now. It's just too easy. Yuzu still works, you can get drivers that make many games work well with it, and the BOTW rom was not hard to find.

I would hope that Switch 2 emulation is something that doesn't happen for many years, hopefully not until we're all arguing about the Switch 3.