M17 Retro Handheld
($40 on AliExpress)
The one I got had the BOYHOM brand name on it, but there are bunch of manufactures churning out copies of the M17, a budget gaming handheld that superficially resembles a PSP crossed with a Switch Lite. It’s selling for $40 most of the places I saw it, but I’m not certain it’s really worth it.
It’s got a decent feel to it, a little heft, certainly not high-end but not super-cheap, either. It’s running a locked-down version of EmuElec, which loads and runs slowly; I suspect it’s a little underpowered and unoptimized. It doesn’t give you any options to change controls, set hotkeys, change the display (besides a brightness control) or use cheats. It doesn’t have a dedicated menu button (the + and – at the top are volume controls), so you have to press Start + Select to pull up the menu to use save states or exit a game. (And there’s only one save state per game!) The screen isn’t great, but it’s a respectable 4.3”, clearly designed for widescreen games. It has the common problem that it stretches all the 4:3 and 3:2 systems (that is, pretty much everything that this will play) to 16:9. And, as you might guess, you can’t change that. This came loaded with 20,000 games (sorted by system), and while you can assign favorites, it doesn’t have a “recent” folder or search system. And the A and B and X and Y button positions are swapped on the keypad!
In my review of the RG 351P, I talked about the tiers of emulator handhelds. We’ve entered a period where so-called “budget” handhelds (generally the sub-$100 category, which is amusing to me because the $100 RG350 was top of the line three years ago) are straddling between tier 2 and 3: The RG35XX and Miyoo Mini+, both currently selling for around $60, can play up to PS1 beautifully and there are tricks for getting them to manage some N64 and DS games. They’re also full featured, with all of RetroArch available and multiple custom firmwares you can use to customize them, which means they’re the systems to beat. (And you can still get a PowKiddy Q90 for a measly $30, which remains a low-end Tier 2.)
Anyway, this device has “PSP” all over the branding, but it doesn’t actually run PSP well. It comes loaded with low-end PSP games and when I loaded one it warned me that it was having performance issues and I should try frameskip (which it apparently enables automatically? It’s not clear). Well, I would fiddle with the settings, except that I can’t—that’s also not an available option. It can’t really handle N64 either; some games run okay, but they’re janky and the music is messed up—but besides the various issues this is definitively a “tier 2” system by my old rankings.
And boy, there’s plenty of weirdness as you go digging. I’m guessing it’s related to poorly-implemented software or, in some cases, things like undocumented hotkeys. Some PS1 games are missing background music; though I suspect that’s rom-specific. Atari Lynx games randomly rotate the screen when you enter and leave the game menu. SNES games randomly reset when you try to save states. Sram saves work for some systems but not for others; I have no idea how game-specific that is. The stretched screens makes it feel like you move much faster left and right than up and down in games that aren’t side-scrollers; which throws off gaming reflexes.
Apparently there’s some noise about cracking this and making custom firmware for it;
Taki Udon has a big video about the work he needed to do to crack open the system and improve all of the bad settings. He also posted his
replacement SD card image for the system. So I gave that a shot; I unpacked it onto a proper Sandisk SD card and copied over the rom lists.
The verdict? It’s definitely better overall. The good: The displays are no long stretched and the buttons are all configured properly, and the save/load screen is replaced with the RetroArch menu. (And that menu includes cheat options; I didn’t test them but adding cheat files should at least be possible.) PSP clearly runs better (Breath of Fire 3 was perfectly playable), though not perfectly and it’s not going to manage heavier-duty games. The bad: Several systems, including SNES and GBA, don’t scale perfectly, so letters come out jagged and hard to read. There are also some SNES emulation issues with weird graphical glitches, though the ones I saw were minor. N64 doesn’t particularly run better, and now half the screen is covered with an overlap of all the run stats so it’s hard to see, too. And though the settings are changed for the better, you can’t adjust them any further yourself. The neutral: The theme is different, and there aren’t pictures for a bunch of the systems. Eh, whatever. Also, I think you should be able to add systems like Pico-8 or Virtual Boy (it looks like the cores are in there), but I couldn’t figure out how to do it.
And as a last note, this burned through its battery fairly quickly, and though I didn’t do thorough testing it’s definitely got less than 4 hours of power.
Overall: I bought this on a whim because it was cheap and I wanted to try it out before giving it away. It’s not terrible (especially with a new $5 SD card and an hour of work), but it’s still not in the same weight class as the $60 handhelds for the lower-end systems, and the larger screen isn’t adding value when it’s either stretching the images or staying blank. I’m thinking of putting it up on eBay to get my money back.
gizmodo.com
