You know the ones. Ambernic, Retroid, Miyoo, and the like. I swear they come out with a new handheld every 5 minutes. You can’t even research the damn things before 3 more latest and greatest come out.
Anyways. I bought a Miyoo Mini. Love it. Hands hate it. Thought "This would be way better if it were bigger. Duuuuh, I’m an idiot right? Well 5 minutes after I bought the damn thing, they release the Miyoo Mini Plus. Which is just a Miyoo Mini, but bigger. So apperently I’m not alone.
Then I started playing my DS Lite with a flash cart, and loved THAT form factor.
Then they came out with Retroid Pocket 5. And I was in love. I had my hand on the buy button. And remembered how the Miyoo Mini played out.
So I said “If I still love it in 6 months, I’ll buy it.” Literally 1 month later after I saw that, they announce the Retroid Pocket Flip 2. Which is just the Retroid Pocket 5, in a DS style case, but only 1 screen. Which is fine by me. I never cared about the dual screen gimmick.
So I said “Ok, if I still love THIS in 6 months, I’ll buy it.”
Welp. 6 months passed, and last week I got my Flip 2. Now I’m in the process of setting it all up. And hooboy do I have all the questions.
I watched Retro Game Corps guide on setting it up, and thats great, but I also want discussion, and advice, and to share what I learn over time.
But if there is a community for these things, I’m unaware. This is the closest thing to an active community that I know of.
So. Who wants to talk shop?
I like the BSP-D8
Is that R2D2s cousin?
Yes, and this model has vibrate
You sure gots money to spend 😅
To the extent that a retro handheld community exists on Lemmy, this is it.
I’ve bought a lot of these things. RG35XXSP, Miyoo Mini Plus, Retroid Pocket 3+, Retroid Pocket 5, DataFrog SF2000. Some random $5 bullshits off AliExpress for a toddler to destroy.
I’ve given out a few Miyoo Mini Plusses as gifts. They’re really the perfect balance of comfort and portability. They’re performant enough to do everything you’d want to do in that form factor, but cheap enough that I don’t mind keeping it in my backpack 24/7. The stock firmware is fine, and Onion is excellent.
Nothing really seemed to fit for me, there were always compromises. But it turns out that I already owned the perfect device, and I carry it in my pocket everywhere.
I have a pretty good phone (S24+) and I paired it with an amazing controller (Gamesir G8 USB-C Edition)
It has hall effect thumbsticks and triggers, and connects directly to my phone via USB-C, so no latency.
I even setup Tasker to recognize when the controller is connected, so it locks in landscape mode, changes the keyboard to LeanKeyboard (controller friendly), and launches into my frontend, which was Daijisho but is now ES-DE. Then reverts to regular phone mode once the controller disconnects.
I loosely followed this guide from TechDweeb to setup ES-DE, if you’re interested.
With this setup I can play everything up to and including Switch games, not to mention native Android games, as well as streaming games from Sunshine on my PC.
Seriously, with a little bit of configuration and this ~$100 controller, I have no desire to get a steamdeck or anything similar.
That looks great, I have to give it a try
I like the idea of a retro handheld. i would like something with a large screen, landscape form factor, and able to play up to, perhaps, gamecube or weee
Yeah it’s ridiculous how fast they pump out new devices (looking at you anbernic) without changing much. The capabilities are expanding at a snails pace (we are that the some PS2, semi good GameCube stage for how long?)
I have an RG Cube and a RG H something XX and they are quite comfortable.
And I loooove retroachievements, spicing up the game :)
That’s the other thing. WHO is coming up with these names???
Playstation has a reasonable naming scheme. Nintendo usually has a fun naming scheme, switch 2 aside. Xbox is just all over the road.
But Xbox seems real easy to learn compared to the Ambernic X5842R. Hooooo boy, that’s a catchy name!
I guess Nvidia, Intel and AMD do also come up with those names. Those names are purely specification. Either Techdweeb or Russ from Retro Game Corp explained the schema. It’s a mix of the CPU generation, the screen size and when it’s Linux based the name is suffixed with XX.
I bought the Anbernic RG 40XXV and I love it.
Cheap, easy to use and classic form factor.
There’s !retrohandhelds@sh.itjust.works but it’s pretty dead over there. Then again, that won’t change unless someone starts posting!
I’ve got the retroid flip 2, and really enjoying tinkering with it more than I expected! (need to plug my wip postmarket os port: https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/oopsallnaps/pmaports/-/commits/rpflip2)
I must say though it feels so…cheap to hold. I don’t know what it is about the plastic body 😅)
Otherwise really enjoying a separate sdcard with rocknix loaded and balatro ported.
Discussing emulators on Lemmy.world may be problematic. You’d be better off on a lemmy.dbzer0.com account.
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The retro handheld Discord. A couple retro YouTube reviewers have channels there, including Retro Game Corps.
Discord is where information goes to die. Stop spreading that corporate plague of a platform.
Discord won’t let me log in because my account is tied to hotmail, and hotmail sent me a security verification 2 years ago to log into my yahoo account, and since I never log into yahoo, they sent me a security verification which is linked to…my hotmail account.
I want something on Lemmy. I do appriciate the info though.
