you can do that? I wanna do that
1 Like
Depends on which emulation thing you have and the OS on it. Which one do you have?
1 Like
I have a Miyoo Mini plus with Onion OS
1 Like
Ah, no idea on Onion. I am using Spruce 4.0 and it’s pretty easy on there. It’s just an included app in the OS. It looks like for Onion, there is this:
No idea how easy that is to use, but doesn’t seem rough.
1 Like
Android emulation (don’t ask) is driving me insane. I don’t really care about front ends (I don’t want to populate and scrape these insane htdgb ROM sets, and while you can say “you don’t need all those ROMs Grandpa just delete some” - no, what if I do, what if I need Barney’s Hide & Seek at a moment’s notice), but I would like to play Dragon Warrior VII without the audio crackling and the game crashing on a processor that should be more than capable of handling it.
Apparently I should be using the Swanstation core, or Duckstation as a standalone, rather than Beetle or whatever in Retroarch. Why this shit is struggling when my little potato Anbernic can do it handily is baffling me.
I swear to god the best these things are and ever will be are the cheapo Linux handhelds. That shit just works!!
4 Likes
I think at the end of the day these things are at their best when they’re comfortable in the hand, and do the thing they’re meant to do easily without a ton of tweaking. That’s why I’m always recommending MinUI, though I guess that’s not getting updated anymore.
Afforded the option of endless tweaking and you just go insane. Well, maybe that’s just me. But it’s an avenue that opens, and it’s not good
Edit: saw it said somewhere that the reason all the little Linux handhelds run the same chips and cap out at “some Dreamcast and PSP” as capability goes is because most of the processors are meant for like, industrial scales and things like that, and can be ordered in bulk for cheap. Anything fancier than that and the price would go up significantly, which is why more capable handhelds just use Android, since phone processors are plentiful.
Makes sense, but one can dream…
6 Likes
At some point Google locked down Android file systems to an insane degree, so I couldn’t copy my Dragon Warrior VII save from my RG Cube XX and transplant it into the Duckstation file system, since Android claims it’s forbidden for… privacy reasons?
I tried like six different file managers and nothing worked, so I finally just plugged it into my computer and it turns out you can just access the whole dang thing that way.
Anyway it worked. Well, after I renamed the save file by adding a _1 to it. I guess that’s neat, beating your head against a thing til you finally find a solution.
8 Likes
For some reason I’m having a rough time getting 3DS emulation to work, namely finding the right files to install games. It’s not super important (I’ve got a perfectly good hacked New 3DS XL, hence why I didn’t opt for one of those expensive ass Thors), but I was able to get it work once before…what am I doing wrong now…
(I mostly want to see about patching the 3DS version of Dragon Quest VIII with HD textures, since you can run that game with a single screen anyway.)
Anyway I still think Android emulation is not as nice as what folks have cobbled together on the cheap handhelds, but the solution for me is to just use Nova Launcher or something and put all your emulator icons on your home screen in a tidy fashion and just launch them directly.
I can scroll through a list of files and folders a lot faster than I can mess with some fancy rolodex front end.
Anyway, time for me to finally mess with some Playstation 2 games I never got around to.
1 Like
Okay I’m gonna write this real quick (edit: this is a lie, this is long and ramble-y) and add pictures later, but here’s my quick (edit: long) review of the Mangmi Pocket Max:
It’s pretty good.
No but it is? It’s the same internal guts as the Retroid Pocket 5, but in a handheld that’s roughly Switch sized, maybe a little smaller. Nice big 7" or so OLED screen, came with interchangeable D-Pad and button modules so you can mix and match between rubber membrane and mechanical switches (I have not done this yet because the magnets that hold them in are very strong, and also there has been a case or two where the housing on the mechanical switch modules are a hair bigger and make them hard to remove). Mangmi has an air of mystery about them since they came outta nowhere and have made two pretty decent handhelds so far, but people reckon due to their conventional naming for their two units so far they’re likely spun off or a subsidiary of Ayaneo, which makes me…concerned, a bit.
Oh also it has full size thumb sticks, which is really nice, though they’re so close to the edge of the system that they kinda make my thumbs hurt? Like I’m having to really chicken wing my thumbs to get a good grip on 'em. Also for all the modularity with the buttons and D-Pad they missed the chance to do the same with the sticks. If this thing has the D-Pad up top it’d be dang neat perfect. Oh well!
“Grandpa you said you hated Android and if you were going to get any Android handheld it was going to by an Ayn Thor Max, what happened?” What happened is I’m old and wanted a big screen and I wanted to play PS2 games after saying I didn’t and most importantly I did not have Almost Six Hundred Dollars, thanks for asking.
Anyway it turns out the thing I hated about Android handhelds was largely self-inflicted and some part internet peer pressure - I hate front ends. I hate the weird flashy menus that hodgepodge official art and bad fan art per console. I hate scraping box art and having half of it not work because my ROM is spelled slightly differently than whatever database it’s culling from. I hate most of these things being incapable looking two folders deep and expecting you to keep all your ROMs in a single console subfolder. I’m not gonna tilt the screen at the DMV and wiggle my eyebrows at the ladies nearby and be all “hey, check it out. That’s Unreal Engine Mario, indicating this is the N64 folder.” A front end just doesn’t do anything for me but create weird dumb anguish.
But! It turns out! You can just use Retroarch. You can just sift through your folders and boot things up as you would a PC. It’s fine. It works. It is, I would argue, a better experience, at least for me, the guy who goes nuts trying to make things look perfect for nobody.
The other thing I didn’t realize, and maybe the biggest advantage Android handhelds in general seem to have over their Linux counterparts (other than being more capable), is that they comparatively sip battery compared to your typical $60 Anbernic. I’ve played this thing a ton and have only had to charge it a few times. Obviously it’s gonna take more juice to play PS2 stuff, but you can slap this thing in airplane mode and low power mode and play 2D stuff forever on it.
So - I dunno if this thing is a better get than a Retroid Pocket 5. I mean for me it is. That OLED looks really nice and while the ergonomics aren’t perfect, it’s bigger and my old man eyes and hands appreciate the extra space. But I guess if you want something more proven, you’ve got the 5 and the Flip 2 with the same guts, and the G2 and the 6 for a little bit more with much better hardware (though small…good and bad, depending). You could also get that dual screen attachment for the 5 (it it ever comes back in stock) and play DS and 3DS on it…I mean I guess you can on my thing, too, but it would have to be side by side or stacked and cramped on the single screen. I still haven’t gotten 3DS to work on it yet.
But I’m happy with it. I put a ton of PS2 games on it. It runs all the ones I have tried well. I will likely die before I play a fifth of the stuff I got crammed onto this thing. As long as this thing holds up I can ride out the AI parts supply apocalypse playing stuff from 20-30-40 years ago. And that’s alright by me.
So I guess I’d update my recommendations and say that cheap Anbernics are good for most older stuff, but if you have the dough to throw a little more at it, you can get a pretty good experience with a mid-range Android handheld. I’m not sure how good Mangmi’s other handheld, the $100-ish Air X, is, but it’s supposedly OK, despite kinda capping out at Dreamcast and PSP. Given a 40XXH is like $85 on Amazon, you may as well spend $20 more, play some Elemental Gimmick Gear. Which might run on the 40XXH…I should try it on my Cube XX…I may need to do more research…
Oh plus I can play the Android version of Combat Master on this thing and get a guilt-free Call of Duty fix. I’m bad at it but that game is alright for being free.
I’ll tack some photos on here later but yeah, it’s alright.
5 Likes
100% agreed. The worst is my GBA folder full of Pokemon romhacks, and then a frontend arbitrarily decide it’s a completely different game ranging from 80s pc games to modern day titles based on the file name and assign terrible cover art. Why do they guess? Just say it’s a mystery instead of making me have to rename all of them, so frustrating and pointless.
5 Likes
8 Likes
i finally got a dock to properly hook my retroid pocket 5 up to the tv, and frankly it rules
1 Like
What dock did you get?
Ended up with this GuliKit one. It seems pretty good!
I, uh, also ended up with the Savage Raven/Skull & Co., but that was the Switch 2 model, which the Switch 1 doesn’t fit on, and I wanted one that would work for both. So now I also have one for my office TV, if I want one.
2 Likes
I had found some 640x480 overlays someone had made based on the Perfect Overlays but for Mega Duck, Watata Supervision, etc, does anyone happen to know what those were called and who made them?
Google is turning up nothing.
I haven’t used mine much yet, but I like it.
The miyoo mini plus is a good system to get.
1 Like
I sold a few of my handhelds and used the money to get a Retroid Pocket Classic and it took a whole goddamn month to show up but this is it. This is the one. This is the one.
It’s also extremely fucking sold out everywhere, so while I’d recommend it, you can’t actually buy it, unless you’re cool with the six button units (the almost-all black one looks sleek, personally not as warm to the JP Saturn styled one).
Anyway if they ever come back in stock and you can stomach that they jacked up the price on it like a week ago (again, big hypothetical at this point if it even comes back), it’s real good.
4 Likes
I think my undying lust for these things finally did actually die down now that I got them Retroid Pocket Classics (plural…I got the Sega style one too, before I got my teal one…).
But! Being a horrible nerd, I’ve been keeping tabs, so lemme think about what’s been happening in “the scene”:
- Everything is going up in price. Those Thors people love, the Retroid Pocket 6. The Retroid Pocket 6 12 GB was discontinued, and the G2 (the cheaper bump from the 5 but below the 6) got nixed entirely. They’re using the Switch Lite style shells of the G2 for newer Retroid Pocket 5s.
- Lotta QC issues popping up with these expensive things on reddit. Negatives are sometimes outliers, sure, but there seem to be an awful lot of RP6s with GPU failures and Thors with fucked up screens/ribbon cables.
- Accordingly, all the YouTube folk are now saying that, hey actually, we said the Thor Lite (RP5 chipset) sucked but it’s actually fine, it’s actually alright, you don’t need to spend $600, our bad.
- Anbernic seems to want to ride the trend of people using handhelds as DAPs with the RG Rotate, but didn’t put a 3.5mm jack on it, which seems dumb? The design also looks like it’s sure to be prone to failure, but who knows.
- Everyone seems to be buying a really shitty looking (but apparently mostly fine) no-name handheld called the R36S that has a weird spinny soccer ball in the middle of the controls. Seems to be a gamble as to whether you get a legit unit or not, bootlegs of bootlegs out there. People are soldering in WiFi chips and stuff into them? I dunno what’s going on there.
Seems like “the scene” is going real quiet, which, y’know, that’s fine? I mean, the apparent appeal of these $600 models are “you can sorta emulate Switch and run PC shit on low settings” which…OK? I guess? You can still knock out PS2 and below on a lot of these for around $200, which is probably as much as most people could need, I’d guess, but the FOMO of jankily running PS3 stuff on an experimental emulator has got people panic buying, so, uh, sure, whatever.
As for me! Still suffering in my playthrough of Zelda 2 (game’s cool, I’m bad at it) on my Retroid Pocket Classic and have been doing one Colossus a night in SOTC on my Mangmi Pocket Max.
I sometimes think “wow maybe a Thor Lite would be nice” and then slap my hand because I’ve got a hacked 3DS and a DS flash cart that do me fine. Did y’all know that Picross 3D rules? I think I like it better than the 3DS one…the extra color stuff was a little too much extra to toss in…
Edit: also have to remind myself that the stuff I like and want to play on a DS doesn’t work right on these dual screen handhelds - input lag and general lack of response of capacitive screens vs. the resistive originals. That’s kinda the whole draw, for dual screens, and ya beef it? C’mon…
14 Likes
I impulse bought an Anbernic RG34XXSP—the Linux machine shaped like a GB SP—some time last year, because I wanted something I could more easily carry in my actual pocket for emulation, since my Retroid Pocket 5 I keep in a rather bulky carrying case to protect it. It was Gamecube colored, and the 34 is the one that has twin analog sticks and a 16:9 screen.
I used it a few times, but suddenly found that it will not turn on a few weeks ago. I tried fixing a few of the things (new firmware, using the right voltage of charging brick, and detaching/reattaching the battery cable inside the unit). Nothing worked. So I went out looking for a replacement… maybe?
The prices on these things have really shot up! More reasons to grow my resentment for Trump and AI!
I barely used the old one, but I became obsessed with the fact I didn’t have a working one. I’d wanted one for a trip I took a couple weeks ago, but that’s passed, and now I wonder how often I’ll use this.
But for a bit over $50, I did find a silver RG35XXSP, which is the same form factor but without the analog sticks and a little less powerful, and with a 4x3 screen. Now I have it.
Was it silly to discover I had a broken, possibly faulty unit and then immediately go buy another unit from the same company? Yeah, maybe! Will I even use it? I don’t know! I hope so! I want to load this with some Zelda 2 romhacks and play those. I’ve been curious.
I’m also hoping I get around to tinkering with the old broken one and figure out how to make it work. But I’m also pretty clueless about that.
Anyway, here’s more in my saga of being tempted to and then giving into buying these things.
7 Likes