Retrogaming Hardware

[Kazin]

Actually @Beowulf I do have a question for you - for setting up these devices, is it advisable to set up a micro sd card in advance? I've got a 512gb microsd card and I'm moving stuff to it now since I've got quite a bit to move over. Should I just wait for the system to get here before bothering? It's been a long time since I've set one of these up, so I can't remember if the device itself has to format the micro sd card.

 

[Beowulf]

Actually @Beowulf I do have a question for you - for setting up these devices, is it advisable to set up a micro sd card in advance? I've got a 512gb microsd card and I'm moving stuff to it now since I've got quite a bit to move over. Should I just wait for the system to get here before bothering? It's been a long time since I've set one of these up, so I can't remember if the device itself has to format the micro sd card.

For Android devices, I generally let the device set up the card first--sometimes it'll work out of the box, but why take chances, y'know?

 

[Kazin]

Gotcha, okay - you are certainly the expert lmao

 

[Kazin]

So I got the Retroid Pocket Mini in the mail a few hours ago and have been messing around with it (I got the orange version with the incorrectly installed grey front panel mentioned here, so I'll get a $15 refund soon - it looks lovely in person, actually, so I'm gonna keep it). It feels great to use and games play well on it, once you have everything set up - and I still don't. Android is cumbersome to set up initially, and I have to manually set up each emulator the way I want, but I've largely got Gamecube and PS2 running good for now, though I haven't delved too deep into any game yet.

The OLED panel is gorgeous. Knuckles Chaotix pops in a way I've never seen it do before, as does every other game I've thrown at it. I'll post more once I've got a bunch of hours into this thing - a 1.5tb micro sd card should be getting here tomorrow, so I'm pretty much going to throw every rom and iso I have on it and put it through its paces.

Sure wish it'd charge with a fast charger, though. Ah well.

 

[Kazin]

1.5tb Sandisk micro sd card was dead on arrival, so that's great. Have a new one coming Tuesday, hopefully that one isn't. Anyway...

Played just shy of three hours of Digital Devil Saga 1 today without charging and the battery is down to just 49%, which is amazing. Game ran well, too - I believe I'm only at 1x resolution, but the screen is small enough you can't really tell. I also played like ten minutes of PS2 San Andreas, and I had to disable L3, because no matter what I did with it enabled, CJ would randomly crouch while walking or honk the horn while driving (I assure you I was not clicking the stick down). It was weird. Once I disabled L3 though, it was smooth sailing.

I still need to figure out how to tweak N64 a bit - I booted up Pilotwings 64 and there was the weird giant shadow on the bottom 1/3 of the screen under my hang-glider, no matter which emulator I used or whether I had Vulkan or whatever it's called. Mario Tennis 64 runs, and seems fine during normal gameplay, but the menus only show whatever icon is currently selected like in the character select screen, or whatever. I'm sure it's ignorance on my part, but if anyone has any tips to make those look proper, I'd appreciate it.

Dolphin seems good, though Rogue Squadron is a little choppy even at 1x resolution, though maybe playing for a bit so the shaders are loaded would alleviate that somewhat. Weirdly, the Pikmin title screen has some graphical glitching on it, but the game otherwise seems to play fine (not that I played very far in it, who knows, maybe there are other weird issues).

Wario Land: Shake It!! ran fine, though I need to figure out if I can emulate Wiimote tilting to aim throwing enemies, because I was stumped on that. The cutscenes ran a bit slow, but who cares, they're pretty crap anyway. Mega Man 9 and Castlevania Adventure Rebirth ran great as well, though both were pretty heavily windowed. I wonder if there's a way to tell Dolphin that the Wii internal resolution should be set to 4:3, rather than tweaking that setting in Dolphin - whatever option I chose, there was a pretty big black bezel, just in a different shape.

EDIT: I should mention all of this has been with max brightness, too. The colors pop on this OLED. I played a half hour of Skies of Arcadia Legends in Dolphin and only lost 5% battery. Pretty good...

 

[Kazin]

And if you mess with the emulator settings for N64 enough, every game will fail to boot until you manually go and delete the opt file in the Mupen64Next folder. So that's annoying, although N64 games are booting again.

I can't believe how scattershot N64 emulation still is after all this time. Majora's Mask is playable, but often ground textures in Clock Town won't load until you get close to them, making it look like NPCs are walking on top of nothing. Pilotwings 64 (a damn launch game!) still has that weird shadow issue. Is this just an android thing? I have what I'd like to think a high tolerance for emulation issues, but these are quite annoying.

 

[Beowulf]

I can't believe how scattershot N64 emulation still is after all this time. Majora's Mask is playable, but often ground textures in Clock Town won't load until you get close to them, making it look like NPCs are walking on top of nothing. Pilotwings 64 (a damn launch game!) still has that weird shadow issue. Is this just an android thing? I have what I'd like to think a high tolerance for emulation issues, but these are quite annoying.

N64 is apparently shockingly hard to emulate perfectly, but I don't know enough about it to understand why. It's absolutely playable on the Retroid Pocket 3, but you'll still find weird glitches here and there; apparently that's a software issue that continues to the better hardware of the Mini.

 

[Kazin]

It's why I bought an Everdrive for 64 a couple years back - it just doesn't emulate well. I was hoping it'd be better by now. Ah well. I can play Gamecube PSO on a tiny device and put it to sleep and wake it up without issue which is wild to me.

 

[MCBanjoMike]

I don't know how accurate the N64 core on the MiSTer is, but that's my go-to now for the (relatively rare) occasions when I want to play some of those games.

 

[Kazin]

Probably more accurate than software emulation, I'd think, but until they make a portable, OLED-screened MiSTer, I'm not interested (I'm a huge portable loving weirdo lol)

 

[Kazin]

Although man, this Retroid Pocket Mini is making me want to buy an OLED flatscreen, which is an expense I don't need.

 

[MCBanjoMike]

There's supposedly going to be a portable console based on one of the recent MiSTer clones, but I doubt it will have an OLED screen.

But yes, OLED TVs are incredible for retro games. I especially love that the pillarboxes you get from playing 4:3 games are functionally invisible, since the black pixels are all completely off.

 

[ASandoval]

Probably more accurate than software emulation, I'd think, but until they make a portable, OLED-screened MiSTer, I'm not interested

This is happening from TakiUdon of RetroRemake, though not for a while as he's doing a ps1 style console first (which is also supposed tp have some kind of portable esque screen). Just fyi, though I shudder at what it might cost. I bought his cheap mister clone and am gonna stick with that.

And yeah, the N64 core is very good from what I can tell. Not perfect or 100% compatible, but nothing very noticable. Before that, I was also using the everdrive for basically the same reason.

 

[Kazin]

Huh, interesting, thanks for the heads up. Yeah, who knows how much that will cost, although so far the $200 I spent on the Retroid Pocket Mini has been justified given I can play up to PS2 and Gamecube with very few issues (weirdly, N64 seems to be in a far worse place than either of those systems in the games I've tested).

 

[Kazin]

Received my second 1.5tb micro sd card, this one works, thankfully. Copying over 1.29tb of files over to it, have about .07tb to spare lol. PC says it'll take 17 hours, so I'll have to share how well it works tomorrow!

 

[Kazin]

Okay I think I have everything set up the way I want it. When I plugged in the 1.5tb micro sd card and tested the games I'd been playing (PSO on Dolphin, Digital Devil Saga on AetherSX2, Sonic 3 & Knuckles on whatever Genesis emulator is default lol), all the saves carried over, which means they are saved to the device and not the micro sd card, which is lovely. I went in and turned off all the weird overlays that appear when you first start a game, so now when I launch something there's not a stupid touch interface on screen until I push a button like before. All my systems run through ES-DE (Emulation Station Desktop Edition, for which there's a one time fee that you pay, $5, after which you sideload the apk onto your device) other than PS2 and PSP, which is fine. Everything so far runs great, and I can finally settle in and actually play this thing.

Setting up Android kinda sucks and is tedious and takes a long while, but once you've got it going, this thing is fantastic.

 

[Kazin]

I know Dolphin is designed to run two systems with extremely different control inputs and is designed to run on a billion different systems, but how is there not like, a toggle for "I have a touchscreen and would like to use it for IR input for a Wii remote" instead of the three billion confusing options? Like let me select "touchscreen" and configure it and be done!

tl;dr how do I make my touchscreen the IR sensor for wii lol

 

[Sarge]

Whew, 1.5TB of space! Kind of ridiculous to think about. I'm wanting a smaller PS2-capable handheld myself at some point. The Steam Deck is fine, but I think I'd like something a bit smaller.

 

[Kazin]

@Sarge I've only got about 120 gigs to spare, once I deleted some stuff I didn't need on there (Wii Sports is not really gonna be playable or at the very least, fun, on this little thing, so it's gone). And yeah, that's why I wanted this thing - I don't have the OLED Steam Deck, and this is nice and tiny, but I have good eyesight and have had no issues being able to read small text so it's kinda perfect. It also has motion controls/an accelerometer, which I didn't know about, so I can tilt those platforms in New Super Mario Bros and aim my throws in Wario Land: Shake It!!.

I grabbed "uzuy" and tried Pokemon Legends Arceus on it (just to see if it'd run), and, while it does, it doesn't seem to properly load and/or display any textures, so it's unplayable, sadly. I own it on cartridge and have an OLED Switch, so it's fine, but it'd have been neat, at least. Oh well!

 

[Sarge]

Oh, so that's pretty neat that it has tilt controls. Dang, I'll have to keep it in mind.

I'm surprised it would run any Switch stuff, but maybe I shouldn't be. Sounds like it's got good PS2 performance on all but the most demanding games (which the Steam Deck also has, to be fair).

How much do you notice the active cooling? Is it pretty quiet? That might be my biggest gripe about the Deck - I have an early model and it can get pretty loud/high-pitched.

 

[Kazin]

I have not had to use high performance mode yet, so the fan has been silent. I haven't ran the SUPER hard to run games, and what I have run hasn't needed it. If you do turn the fan on full blast, it is ridiculously loud.

Trails from Zero will not launch at all in uzuy, it just has a black screen while the music plays. The Pixel Remasters seem fine with a bit of audio crackling. Ah well, there's always Steam Link for those (which seems to work well, the little I've tried it thus far).

 

[Sarge]

I gotta do some Steam Link eventually, once I finally upgrade my home computer.

Hopefully some folks will figure out a way to avoid Nintendo's ire and get some more stuff working - I don't pirate any Switch games, and I'd still love to emulate somewhere with some performance boosts. (Or I'll be playing on the Switch 2, haha.)

 

[Kazin]

I've really been trying to push the Retroid Pocket Mini as far as it can go - I want to see what it struggles with. Honestly, most of what I've thrown at it has been fine, I think a lot of the issues are emulation related, not hardware. For example, I installed Winlator and Fallout: New Vegas, and I'm pretty sure this chipset could handle the game just fine - as it is, it does run at nearly full speed with low settings. The problem seems to be Winlator - there is some super weird screen tearing on every game I've thrown at it, including Ys Origin, which is essentially a PSP game (and PSP games run flawlessly on this thing as far as I've seen - certainly every Ys game I have on it has been great). I'm not sure if there's a fix out there for this, or if I need to wait for a Winlator update or something. It's a shame, because being able to play New Vegas on a device as small as this is so cool...! If anyone has any tips, I'd appreciate them.

I've played through about half of New Super Mario Bros. Wii and Sonic Mania (the former via Dolphin, the latter via Switch emulation via uzuy - why there is no Android port of Mania is beyond me. There appears to be one on the Play store that is sponsored by Netflix or something? It crashes at the title screen for me), both of which run and control great. Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne looks and runs great at 2x resolution in AetherSX2, which is kinda interesting since I had to go 1x to get fullspeed on Digital Devil Saga. Ah well.

 

[Kazin]

Ended up playing all the way through beating the giant bird boss halfway through Wind Waker today on the Retroid Pocket Mini, and only burned 60% of the battery (which is wild - I played it all day). This thing is incredible. Wind Waker runs and looks great, too - I'm at 2x resolution which ends up being 720p. It is sharp on this small screen.

Honestly I'm tempted to buy a Retroid Pocket 5 for the widescreen systems, but maybe I'll just wait for the inevitable 6. At this point, the Mini can run all the 4:3 content I want damn near flawlessly.

 

[Sarge]

I personally would like something passively-cooled, but I also know that might be a while. The Steam Deck is certainly very capable, but one of these smaller devices feels like it'd be way better for road trips... like the one I'm on now, haha.

That battery life is nutso, though. The amount of computing power and efficiencies we're starting to get in these devices is mind-boggling.

 

[Beowulf]

That battery life is nutso, though. The amount of computing power and efficiencies we're starting to get in these devices is mind-boggling.

Retroid has definitely been the best of the brands for battery life. I got 7 hours of SNES time out of my Retroid Pocket 2 when I first tested it, and the Retroid Pocket 3 has consistently been good for 6 hours of mixed-use.

 

[Patrick]

Retroid Pocket 5 looks like it hits a really good mix of performance and size. I don't think I want to spend $200+ on a new handheld device right now, but that looks like the go-to once my Vita gives up the ghost. A device just a bit bigger than Vita that could handle Gamecube and PS2 games would be a dream.

 

[Kazin]

I personally would like something passively-cooled

Other than when I explicitly turn on "high performance mode" - which has been for like, maybe ten minutes total - the fan is silent/off, including when I've played the system muted, even during Gamecube, Wii, or PS2 gameplay. I haven't run into a game that plays poorly yet this way (outside of higher end Switch emulation which is beyond what I'd expect to run well anyway), and the system hasn't even been warm to the touch, including my all day marathon of GCN Wind Waker.

Being able to put a Gamecube game such as WW to sleep and have it run with no issues upon waking it up has been fantastic. I love this thing.

 

[Sarge]

Oh, wow, that's pretty dang impressive, then. Maaaaaaybe I'll look at getting the inevitable RP6 or something, but it sounds like we're already there. Handheld PS2/GC/Wii that's quiet and a more portable form factor sounds amazing.

 

[Kazin]

The RP6 might be a good one to wait for - there are supposedly some higher end PS2 games that hiccup on the Mini/5, but I haven't played them (some racing game, and, irrc, Jak 3 and Okage Shadow King or something). But San Andreas, Vice City, and every RPG I've thrown at it so far have run great.