Retrogaming Hardware

[Kazin]

I don't know enough about how these cables work to say for certain, but it may be worth opening up your switcher and poking around a bit. If just one of the cables started failing, that'd be one thing, but for so many to stop working at once? Something sounds weird.

 

[Kazin]

Ah, fair enough. Hopefully a new one fixes your issues! That cart setup you have is cool.

 

[Beowulf]

RG35XX H
($60 on AliExpress.)

Folks, I'm not sure I dare to believe it, but I think we might have reached the end of the cheap retro handheld project, because I think I have everything I want.

This is amazing at the $60 price point. Similar size to the original RG350 (it’s slightly more squat), vertical design, 3.5” screen, good build quality, full set of buttons (including analog sticks and L3/R3). Headphone jack, two TF card slots, mini-HDMI out and an extra USB-C for controllers. It’s got favorites, recents and a search function. It has a toggle in the settings where you can switch from the quick menu (save states and screen adjustments only) to the full RetroArch menu—and in both cases, the Function button at the top is a dedicated menu button.

As is pretty standard, this comes fully loaded with roms; but it also is pre-loaded with the full cheats list, and cheats work for everything I tried. It runs all the usual systems beautifully (NES, SNES, GB, GBA, Genesis, PS1), but also has a lot of lesser-seen systems all set up and ready to go (Pico-8, Pokemini, Virtual Boy, Game & Watch, Sega Master System, Game Gear, PCEngine, Neo-Geo Pocket Color, Wonderswan, even Atomiswave!) The only lower-end system it was missing right out of the box was Lynx, and when I loaded in some roms that worked fine too. It came with Dreamcast, PSP and DS titles, too: Dreamcast looks good and runs well. PSP is a little jerky and cramped on the screen; I suspect it would be okay for lower-end games or slow-moving rpgs but not super-playable for higher-end stuff. DS has the virtual stylus mapped to the sticks and uses L2/R2 to change the screens, and runs just fine.

N64 was our tier-3 wildcard: It didn’t come with any roms preloaded. When I added some, Mario Kart 64 ran well; Smash Bros ran at full speed but with graphical glitches (mostly transparency problems). I suspect that fiddling with settings could get you a good-but-not-perfect play experience with N64. Not quite as good as the Trimui Smart Pro, but better than the unplayable N64 on the R36S.

And speaking of those comparisons: The R36S was almost exactly what I wanted software-wise, but the build quality was lousy and there was the issue with the damn fake menu button. I adore the Trimui Smart Pro, but I’ll admit it’s a bit large for carrying around. Especially in the official case (which is super-compact and barely fits the charger cable), this is extremely pocketable but still comfortable to hold. It loads fast and runs all the early systems smoothly—and I mean all of them, right out of the box.

There’s already plenty of custom firmware available. Apparently installing Batocera will give you better N64 and Dreamcast emulation, if that’s what you’re looking for; while muUI, minUI, and GarlicOS are all available for faster pick-up-and-play of the lower-end systems. I’m personally very happy with the capabilities of the stock OS here and don’t really see myself changing it out.

Overall: I really don’t know what else to ask for at this point. We’ve passed the point where there are systems out of reach that you’d want to play on this size screen—who wants to play PS2 or Gamecube on a 3.5” handheld? I think we’ve perfected the cheaper, smaller form-factor as the technology has caught up to it.

 

[Falselogic]

I've been thinking of picking one of these up. But I've got an Odin and a mini miyoo already and they mostly just sit in a drawer. I worry it'll just join them.

 

[Kirin]

In a similar boat here. This latest one sounds really tempting, but would I actually get around to using it much? Hmmmmm. Having so much pre-loaded out of the box does make it more likely though, since there’s no project involved to just get it set up well.

 

[Daikaiju]

 

[jpfriction]

Well it hit my impulse buy threshold. Pretty neat little thing! Even has some games preconfigured to run in TATE mode. I’m sure I’ll spend way too much time tinkering with the game list and then put it in a drawer forever, but that’s worth seventy bucks in my world.

 

[Falselogic]

I've been thinking of picking one of these up. But I've got an Odin and a mini miyoo already and they mostly just sit in a drawer. I worry it'll just join them.

I picked up one! Now I need to figure out if I can just pop the SIM out dump ROMs in to directories and then pop back in and it'll find them for me...

 

[Beowulf]

I picked up one! Now I need to figure out if I can just pop the SIM out dump ROMs in to directories and then pop back in and it'll find them for me...

You totally can. Just drop them in; it'll auto-detect them. You do need to add your own cover art files if you want that to populate, though.

 

[Falselogic]

You totally can. Just drop them in; it'll auto-detect them. You do need to add your own cover art files if you want that to populate, though.

Cool. Thanks for the info. Are the directories pretty clearly labelled? Would I be able to find the cover art folder and is the file format pretty standard? (file type, size, etc?)

Thanks for the help!

 

[Beowulf]

Cool. Thanks for the info. Are the directories pretty clearly labelled? Would I be able to find the cover art folder and is the file format pretty standard? (file type, size, etc?)

Thanks for the help!

So, when you pop in the SD card (you probably only have one, though you can make a second card for just your roms), you'll see a folder called "Roms". In that will be a series of folders with obvious system names--the only thing that might be mildly confusing is that SNES is labeled "SFC" and Genesis is labeled "MD", etc. because they used Japanese system names. In each folder, you're going to see a nested folder called "Imgs" full of png files. Those are the box art files. You just need to drop pngs with the same names as your roms to match up the artwork. It's really user-friendly, I swear!

 

[Falselogic]

Excellent. That sounds very manageable and much more user friendly than some things I've had to do.

 

[Bongo]

The Anbernic RG35XXSP (the one with no sticks and a clamshell form factor) looks very appealing. I assume it has the same software as the RG35XX and RG35XXH?

The one thing I really want to know about these things is how prone they are to getting dirt under the shoulder buttons, or, failing that, how risky it is to open it up and swab it.

 

[Beowulf]

So, a warning: If you get an SD card from AliExpress that has no branding, just a size number (64, 128, etc), you should probably replace it with a name-brand one and dub everything over. I learned this the hard way, though much later than I might have expected. The card for my Trimui Smart Pro spontaneously wiped itself when I put it into my PC to rearrange files, and then the card for my RG35XX-H stopped reading in my PC (though it still played properly in the device) shortly thereafter.

It occurred to me to wonder why I hadn’t hit this problem before; the only bad card I had was the original one with the Miyoo Mini Plus, which worked but just loaded incredibly slowly. Then I realized that for the majority of my handhelds (that had SD cards) I either:

• Replaced the SD card so I could use a different OS (Q90, RG35XX)
• Had to buy my own SD card begin with (various Retroids, mostly)
• Didn’t swap out the SD card enough or didn’t use the system enough to detect this failure mode. (A dozen other devices)

Really, my original RG350 was the only device that I got super-lucky on in this regard. The Trimui Smart Pro and the RG35XX-H are the first two Linux devices in a long time that I want to use heavily but I wanted to keep the stock firmware to do it.

Anyway, I downloaded the Anbernic firmware package for the RG35XX-H and that was easy-peasy and even included the same rom list. But the Trimui firmware package didn’t, and I had to decide what to fill the card with. I ended up ordering another AliExpress card just to pull roms off of, because I was upset to lose the “Best” folder of 500-in-1 rips. But then I made a new Sandisk card with my curated “Ideal Roms Collection” that I’ve been working on for the last year or so.

But it didn’t have any mapped box art. And I remembered I kinda wanted mapped box art for the RG35XX, too. And the mapped set that came with the RG35XX-H didn’t match my ideal list (especially for SNES games, but it was missing all sorts of things). So for the past week, I’ve been doing the ridiculous task of mapping all of my roms (literally thousands of them) to box art from various collections, including the ones that came on the RG35XX-H, the R36S, and the Trimui Smart Pro; and various artwork I found online for romhacks. And I updated my collection along the way, clearing out a few duplicates and adding a few new hacks and translations. Then I put the new lists on the new Trimui Smart Pro card, updated the lists on the RG35XX-H, and updated both cards (GarlicOS and Koriki) for the RG35XX. And it is sweet, let me tell you.

This also just made me realize how I’ve been handling my rom collection: I’m actually more likely to keep every game for older systems I never played or played very little of (Master System, Genesis, Game Gear, Lynx, Neo-Geo Pocket Color, Arcade games), but be more choosy with older systems I played heavily (NES, SNES, GB, GBA, Atari 2600). And for newer systems, I’ll actually cull it down to exclusively the games I own/like/want to play again (DS, PSP, N64, PS1). Some of that is space concerns, but I think a lot of it is that you can play 5 minutes of anything in the Lynx catalogue and get a sense of how fun it is; and an hour of play is your money’s worth. For much of the PS1 catalogue, five minutes won’t even get you past the opening cinematic and into gameplay. Newer games are much more of a commitment and less useful for random pick-up-and-play. A 12 MB file for a game I might (or might not) play on the subway for ten minutes is worth keeping. There isn’t much point to keeping a half-gig disc rip of a 20-hour game I’m not actually interested in.

Anyway, long story short, I lost my saves for Breath of Fire 4 but reconstructed everything and hopefully I’m better protected now, and I have my fully rom collection with associated artwork that I can enjoy on all my devices.

 

[Patrick]

Yeah, box art is a pain to manage. I have Retroarch on Vita, and I changed the settings to show a list of titles only. There was an option to download a file with like every piece of box art in existence and just save it all to the system in case I ever use those games, but I really don't want to waste that much space. Plus, I'm still working off a 16GB card. I know, there are SD options, but I mostly use this device for 2D games, and that's plenty of space.

The other thing I could do is manually save copies of just the art I need. I've thought about it from time to time, but I'd rather leave things as is and spend that time playing games.

Sorry you lost your save file. That sounds really annoying.