retro handhelds, talk about em

MoH

Southeastpaw ringing endorsement! even if the vampire survivors mention reminded me of the absolute bender i went on when it was released on switch 🥴

MovingCastles

I was looking into the Retro Pocket 3+ recently as well and it turns out the metallic version recently came back in stock. Looks cool.

Chopemon

I’ve just ordered a Retroid Pocket 3+ (clear blue).

After amassing about a thousand games in my collection, I am slowing moving towards ROM sets on SD cards. I have an ODE Dreamcast now and it has increased my play time on the console and enjoyment there of massively. I have been using a PS mini classic for my PS1 and older emulation but keep getting annoyed by the limitation of the USB stick size that it can manage. I don’t want to keep switching games on and off, I want them all there.

So the Retroid has hdmi out and I can stick huge SD cards in it. I don’t need an entire ROM set, just a bunch of cool games. The device looks lovely and the price is good. I’m looking forward to it arriving, getting it set up and being able to have it on the TV then just grab it to play in bed or whatevs.

MoH

my retroid pocket 3+ came in today! i went with the super famicom colors.

now time to go through setup and customization, which might be more fun than playing any games themselves.

Yim

I have a PocketGo V2 that I got as a present a few years ago. It’s not bad, I think, but I rarely use it because I have better options most of the time. I mainly use it now as my travel system - if I’m going away somewhere it’s small and lightweight and I won’t be too upset if I lose it. I’ve played Soul Blazer, El Viento, and King’s Field on it while away from home. I’ve also sometimes used it as my most convenient system with save states when old master system/mega drive games got too hard or I was tired of replaying early stages.

It’s got some of the most rapidly deteriorating buttons I’ve ever used, though. After some time between trips I got it out a while ago and could barely get a response to anything, so I pulled it apart and cleaned the contacts and it improved, but now it’s getting dodgy again. I’ve had this happen with other controllers over the years, but not at this rate. I don’t really want to pull it apart again (and also don’t currently have the resources to do so, two time zones away from home). Hopefully I can manage Illusion of Time with frequent dropped inputs.

MoH

spent a few days getting the roms i wanted, fine tuning each emulator to have the most ideal settings, and finding + perfecting my preferred front end.

after all that, the first thing i did was boot up yakuza 4 on playstation 😅

tokucowboy

Aside from trying to catch up on as much Yakuza as I can before Infinite Wealth (which would be cool to do during the zeitgeist), the Pocket 3+ is what I play most nowadays, so it’s cool to see so many others playing it, too . I didn’t know we had this thread and recently posted about how much I’ve been enjoying fiddling with it in the emulation thread – I know there are more sensible ways to do it, but I’m still enjoying the process of manually updating all of my artwork that didn’t scrape. Got all my art except for arcade, and I’m up to letter “C” there.

If this thing holds out, I think I’ll stick to it for a really long time. My biggest concern was the Switch-model analog sticks drifting eventually, but I don’t use those much anyway and I’ve recently found that they’re pretty easy to replace with Hall Effect sticks if need be. Slap Daijisho on that thing and it’s all I need – every dang thing up through Dreamcast playing wonderfully plus bonus PSP, GameCube/Wii and PS2 stuff that I haven’t even touched yet? I’m good to go

MoH

tokucowboy ah, i use daijisho with the same theme. i love how atmospheric it is. i also found the scraping tool to work pretty well, have you tried adding different tags before saving and syncing? that said–i spent a lot of time in college updating all the album artwork in my itunes library, so i understand it can be a meditative menial task.

i’ve since gone back and played through more than a few games. one of the problems with having everything at your fingertips is it’s hard to stick with one game. i played a few minutes of each initial d game across various systems, along with racing lagoon and ridge racer 4.

i’m excited to dive into japan-only games i never got to play for dreamcast + ps1. this also gives me motivation to continue studying japanese.

tokucowboy

MoH oh yeah, it’s totally a meditative menial task. Most systems scraped well and the additional tags often work for games that didn’t scrape, but for whatever reason my massive arcade romset is stuck with all of the abbreviated ROM names that don’t scrape – I’ve tried a few different XML files and such, but no dice. So I’m kinda just working through naming and assigning art to one row at a time out of enjoyment. It’s a fun process to search for art, and to pop into arcade games that don’t have “Details” sections to find out what they even are, or just play the interesting looking games along the way for a bit. It’s OK to do as a one-time thing if this little device ends up lasting for a good haul, and has become my going-to-sleep ritual

(I’ve also popped into Racing Lagoon and lots of Ridge Racer 4 – total goldmine for translated ROMs, just looking at all of the PC Engine CD and Saturn stuff and the glut of SNES RPGs that have been translated over the years is exciting. It’s hard to settle, but I’ve at least been doing a run of Baroque just about each night)

Chopemon

My 3+ is currently stuck at Heathrow, hoping it will start moving soon.

I’ve got all my ROMs ready to go. For fixing missing artwork, is it all done through the device or do you need to hook it up to a PC and manually find and assign image files?

tokucowboy

Chopemon if you use either the stock Retroid emulation fronted or go with Daijisho, it’ll automatically scrape for artwork and usually does a pretty good job, but for whatever ends up missing, you can scrape them individually or it’s really easy to find and assign image files on the device itself – since it’s an Android machine, you can just open up a browser, find the art you want, save it to the device, and assign it on the spot (the process varies a bit depending on the frontend you choose, but it’s pretty straightforward in any case)

Chopemon

tokucowboy perfect, thanks!

polm23

After I saw someone with a Miyoo Mini for Pico 8 games, I picked up the Miyoo Mini Plus and have been happy with it. The buttons feel really good.

antillese

Is PICO-8 emulation workable let alone on a Miyoo? I tried it once on PC in Fake8 (I think - it was inside Retroarch) and it didn’t run my own terribly basic game correctly.

tokucowboy

antillese I don’t know much about Pico emulation, but I did just see this video review of a newer, more niche handheld with an interesting aspect ratio and the reviewer specifically calls out Pico emulation as a good use case:

polm23

antillese The Miyoo uses Fake 8, and while I haven’t stress tested it, it’s been fine with the games I tried.

Ubernook

I got an RG351V last year and I’ve been really enjoying using it to play older JRPGs, but I’ve been struggling to understand shaders etc. Fairly inexperienced with this stuff and trying out the premade ones that come with RetroArk seems to either work okay, or just break the emulator. If anyone has any links etc where I can read up about this stuff I’d be really grateful!

sabertoothalex

Ubernook Here’s an explainer on some of them!

Shaders are weird for sure. I tried out a whole bunch of them on my 405M and like you said they’re only okay or these little handhelds are way underpowered to run them so they break everything. I’ve found the crt-blur shader and its variants to be good on the little screens.

antillese

So it turns out Dr. Cossack was being manipulated and Dr. Wiley was behind it the whole time.

This concludes my use case report.

eightcell

I have a stack of retro handhelds. GBA, GBA SP, GBA Micro, Neo Geo Pocket Color, Wonderswan Color… a bunch of stuff I am forgetting. Most of these are just on display or stored now. On my desk, within arms reach is a stand with a Playdate, an IPS modded GBA, and a 3DS. Docked nearby is an Analog Pocket. Somewhere, in a box below my desk is a Retroid Pocket 2.

I keep the other GBA on my desk because I do have an Everdrive-like cart for it and I do prefer the ergonomics of the classic GBA, so I’ll just bust that out and play some Kuru Kuru Kururin every once in a while.

I didn’t love the feel of the Retroid and wasn’t impressed with the software. My friend got one an bricked it in like the first week somehow. (I offered her mine and she was just over it).

I generally only commute or travel with the Pocket since it does so many things and does them well. Arcade games, Wonderswan, and all the other stuff you’d expect. It doesn’t need an Everdrive, in fact, I don’t keep a game in the cart slot at all. While it’s nice to have the option I keep one of those GBA vibration carts in there (they work with games that support vibration) and it’s a decent enough dust cover for the port.

Great screen, feels good, has solid battery life, and you could play it on your tv too.

A nice little quality-of-life thing I didn’t know about until I got it was that the controller can turn the docked system on remotely which is so nice.

My only complaint is that when you dock it you’re probably going to scratch the crap out of the bottom because it doesn’t always find the port nicely (versus something like the Switch which just docks in a second).

I had to wait a year or so for mine too but I think it was worth it. Alternatively, you could try to jump on one of these limited edition colors they keep dropping then cancel your other order.

MoH

eightcell all the analog stuff looks super nice. tbh i’ve never quite known how they worked (always assumed you needed actual carts) and they’ve always been too expensive/sold out for me to entertain the idea of figuring out otherwise.

i’m really impressed with how much i’m able to do with the retroid pocket for a relatively cheap price. as others have pointed out in this thread, the grey market for these pocket emulators keeps expanding, and i can see myself becoming an enthusiast of these “7/10 experience” systems. in the meantime, it’s been a real treat getting to play games i haven’t played in years/have never played at all.

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