Ordered the RG351p on Amazon in lovely GBA indigo, should be here tommorow.
It arrived and is pretty nice for an impulse buy. It's light and comfortable, D-Pad is good, buttons feel nice, shoulder buttons could've been a bit bigger, the sticks aren't placed ideally but have no drift or anything. No biggie since I'm not using those a lot.
Overall I'm impressed with the build quailty.
It uses RetroArch and a 'shell' on top of that to load and boot the games. You can tinker with it or leave it as is.
Out of the box it all works well enough for most systems. But quitting and tinkering in system menu settings is just far less convenient than your conventional Nintendo handheld.
That and debug messages where you can't tell if it is loading or not.
Game collectionThis is where it gets weird, part of what you expect is there (Mario, Zelda, Metroid) but you also get a bunch of random shit. Tekken 3 but it's the Japanese version. Pikachu for Megadrive and a bunch of arcade games. All in all it probably has 20 versions of Street Fighter. I haven't found anything missing, except that it is just strange to have Mario 14(?) and not Ridge Racer Type 4 for the PS1. Apparently different resellers of this device sometimes have different games loaded and some remove all the games (for obvious legal reasons). I think the one I got from Amazon is as close to 'stock' as possible. Another thing that bothered me was that only the first 20 games for each system have a preview image. You can 'scrape' more images but you need to connect a USB wifi connector to do so (or by the M model with build-in Wifi). The images that are there out of the box again random af chinese bootleg stuff.
ScreenThe screen is very nice even though the resolution is low. Bright colors, no ghosting and properly backlit. I dare say this screen is better than the official screens Nintendo used for their DS line of systems.
Emulation (what I've tried so far)- NES (perfect)
- MegaDrive (perfect, same as NES, for some weird reason Genesis and Mega Drive are listed seperately)
- SNES (played some Rockman X, close to perfect, Dragonball Z Hyper Dimension didn't run so well but that was always a weird one to emulate)
Didn't find any issues with these systems but looking at the energy bar the aspect ratio is somewhat squished. Probably something that can be fixed in the settings.
- GBA (runs close to perfect, I noticed some slowdown in cutscenes in Gunstar Heroes but nothing in gameplay)
- PS1 (This impressed me, it ran well enough to play Tekken 3 at a near stable 60fps)
- N64 (not ideal and unstable like most N64 emulation with shimmering etc.)
- Dreamcast (DOA2 is basically unplayable with sound crackling and a low framerate)
- PSP (Ridge Racer basically unplayable for the same reason as Dreamcast)
- Various other things (Capcom 'something' I and II ran fine, as did other stuff like WonderSwan)
While I was constantly switching between systems and games it didn't crash on me, which surprised me.
Apparently there's a couple of folks who have made improved RetroArch configs and emulators for this device that might be worth checking out.
The community seems to have vastly improved Dreamcast emulation and added a bunch more systems like Atari, Saturn and Naomi.
All that is needed is an SD Card and an SD Card reader. There's also a couple of ports developed such as Minecraft, Half Life and Quake.
If you don't feel like messing around with customizing you can of course keep it as is. But it seems simple enough to do and you can't really 'break' it.
The included SD card isn't the best so loading games isn't as snappy as you might want. I'm thinking about getting a second faster SD to run the custom stuff.
Overall I like it a lot and it again raises the question why Nintendo won't release a digital only GameBoy Ultra with a virual console for $149.
