In retrospect, I should probably have consulted Talking Time about which emulator handheld was the best before I bought anything. (There’s a whole cottage industry of these things, ranging from $10 toys that have a few Chinese NES games on them to $500 Android devices with more power than a top-end cell phone, and everything in between. Heck, any Android phone is actually pretty good for the purpose, except for the lack of physical buttons.) I ended up with a 9X-S, which has versions produced by a number of different Chinese companies but is easily distinguished by the 5” screen.
It’s basically a PS Vita shell running a custom OS with a bunch of pre-loaded games and the ability to add more. It ostensibly runs NES, GB/GBA, Gens, SNES and various arcade games, and it claims to run PS1, though in practice that just means it can open Symphony of the Night without crashing. The NES and GBA emulation is perfectly cromulent (though to be frank, I’m not a purist when it comes to fidelity). The SNES emulation is mediocre at best, often speeding up or slowing down randomly; and the screen defaults to a stretched image that you need to fix every time.
The preloaded arcade games run just fine, though I didn’t try adding any others. In testing out the arcade games, I mostly played Knights of the Round, Capcom's coin-muncher beat-em-up. The X9-S emulates it just fine, and though I can only play single-player, I can toss in as many virtual quarters as I want. I do find it interesting that you gain levels that change your look, but don't seem to make you any stronger. My level 16 Lancelot was still dying in three hits from the enemies in the final area. Took me about an hour and around $5 to beat. I also spent some time with Magic Sword (a similar beat-em-up) and several shoot-em-up games.
Among the problems: It sometimes manages battery backups, but often seems to just wipe them. I had this problem with both GBA and SNES games. The save state system works fine, though. It also assigns buttons oddly, most notably assigning L and R to X and Y for GBA games (which isn't so much an issue) and select to the R trigger (which is a big problem for SNES games, because L and R don't seem to actually be available). The screen to remap keys is oddly designed; you need to use L and R to navigate that screen, oddly. I was able to remap some keys, but L and R remained ineffective for SNES games.
Battery life is decent, around 4 hours of play time, and you can play while charging from USB. The OS doesn't support cheat codes, which is mildly disappointing.
While we’re on the topic, the 6X emulator handheld is smaller, uses the same OS, and has the noteworthy problem of mapping the “system exit” button to the Select key, and not accept my attempts to change it. Which means you can’t play games that require the select key unless you remap it (a viable option for a system that doesn’t need all of the other buttons; SNES is still an issue).
(Should it interest anyone, the consensus is that the “best” emulator handheld is actually a hacked PSP, PS Vita or 3DS. But in terms of cost/quality for dedicated devices, the RG350 seems to be the winner. I’m also curious about the PocketGo and the GPD-XD; the former being a well-regarded low-end device, and the latter being the “best” that doesn’t involve hacking.)
Overall: I’m not sure I’d tell anyone to buy this thing, even though you can get it for $30-40 on eBay, but I have it and I’m enjoying it. When it dies, I’ll replace it with a better device and not mourn for long.
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