Anbernic Retro Game 350 Handheld review
Mar. 8th, 2022 11:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroAbout two years ago, I tried a hacked PSP as an emulator handheld. The market for such things has changed so radically in that time that the RG350 I got to replace it is now completely out of date. (It was updated to the RG350MP almost immediately, then the the RG351P was out later than same year as well.) That said, it’s a solid handheld I’ve gotten 170+ hours of use out of, and it deserves a review.
Built like a squared-off PSP with a 3.5” screen, this has a USB-C charging port and 5-6 hours of effective battery life (like a proper portable should). It has two joysticks, though I generally prefer the D-pad, and a full set of L2/R2 triggers. It has a micro-HDMI output, but I never got that to work properly. It’s small, light and conveniently fits in my old smaller 3DS carrying case. (I also got the version with the black semitransparent shell, which I just think looks cool.)
This is a Linux-based handheld running an OS called OpenDingux. Maneuvering files around is a little complicated, but the roms all live on an SD card anyway, so despite not being able to connect it directly to my computer, I had an easy way to add or remove games. The emulators are all different programs, which makes saves and things inconsistent but makes things run better. None of the programs have a "most recent" option, which is irritating. I didn't realize how nice being able to quickly pick things back up is (the PSP equivalent was sleep mode). Also, virtually everything has start+select to bring up the emulator menu, which I can't seem to change, which is annoying when L2/R2 is sitting unused for most systems; and most of the emulators don't allow you to change key mapping. Every emulator has save state support (though it's more accessible in some than others), a few have fast forward, but very few easily support cheats, which I was disappointed by.
• Gambatte is the Game boy emulator, which does sensible things like mapping the L button to the menu. I initially had been dumb and hadn't realized that one of the two versions of Gambatte I had installed was the newer one that natively supports cheat codes and properly does SRAM saves. Replaying Game Boy games on this was a joy with those features and easy access to save states, and the screen size is a very comfortable upscale from the original Game Boy.
• The main GBA emulator is ReGBA. It upscales nicely, supported every game I tried with good emulation and save states, and saved SRAM properly.
• Upset that ReGBA didn’t support cheat codes, I found this guide, which was critically helpful. I was able to install the GPSP GBA emulator, then copy a number of .cht files onto the SD card, then use the internal file utility to move them to the correct directories so that GPSP and PSX4ALL would associate them with the right games. It worked! I'm not going to recommend GPSP for general gaming purposes because it handles scaling badly, so the games don't look nearly as good as ReGBA, but I was happy to be able to add the option. Also, GPSP sensibly maps the menu button to the otherwise-unused X button, rather than some Start+Select nonsense. Oddly, GPSP had a lot of trouble with Breath of Fire—jumpy music, laggy graphics, jerky scene changes. I swapped in to use a max money cheat code, then jumped back to ReGBA, which reads the same SRAM save files and plays it beautifully.
• This has both the PocketSNES and SNES9X emulators, but sram only seems to save in the former. Both have better emulation than anything else I tried, running at properly speed without slowdown or jerkiness issues and supporting every game I put in. (Lufia 2 had some issues with the internal clock not being accurate to my actual playtime, but that’s a very minor issue.) Neither emulator supports cheats and neither lets you remap the menu button, but I found my way around the cheat issue by making custom roms with GGBoy. In my idea world I think I’d want a larger screen for systems originally made for TVs, but this supports the correct aspect ratio and everything looks pretty.
• Oswan, the Wonderswan Color emulator, is fantastic. Select maps to the emulator controls, it supports save states and saves SRAM properly, the image scaling is good. I just wish there were more translated WSC color games to play.
• Fceux, the NES emulator, saves sram and also has a toggle for game genie, though I can't figure out how to make it do anything. NES games run fine, but they also run fine on a smart fridge.
• PSX4All is a perfectly solid PSX emulator, and unlike when you play PSX games on a PSP, this system has L2 and R2 buttons. I didn’t try any of the really heavy-duty processing actions games, but the jrpgs I like ran well and the cutscenes were appropriately pretty. The screen is a little small, but not problematically so.
• This runs Genesis games and Sonic seemed fine when I tried a few minutes of it, but I didn’t dedicate a lot of time to that system because I never owned one and don’t really have the nostalgia for it.
• There are an assortment of arcade emulators which, oddly, seemed like the system’s weak point: Lots of games only run on one emulator or throw up weird glitches in another; and the arcade games (more than any of the other systems) really want to be on a bigger screen.
Overall: I suspect the RG350MP fixes a bunch of the more glaring issues with this, but it’s a really solid pick-up-and-play system that, emulation-wise, was light-years ahead of the crap I was trying in 2019, and has been really convenient for replaying a lot of my Game Boy, GBA, Super Nintendo and PSX favorites.
Built like a squared-off PSP with a 3.5” screen, this has a USB-C charging port and 5-6 hours of effective battery life (like a proper portable should). It has two joysticks, though I generally prefer the D-pad, and a full set of L2/R2 triggers. It has a micro-HDMI output, but I never got that to work properly. It’s small, light and conveniently fits in my old smaller 3DS carrying case. (I also got the version with the black semitransparent shell, which I just think looks cool.)
This is a Linux-based handheld running an OS called OpenDingux. Maneuvering files around is a little complicated, but the roms all live on an SD card anyway, so despite not being able to connect it directly to my computer, I had an easy way to add or remove games. The emulators are all different programs, which makes saves and things inconsistent but makes things run better. None of the programs have a "most recent" option, which is irritating. I didn't realize how nice being able to quickly pick things back up is (the PSP equivalent was sleep mode). Also, virtually everything has start+select to bring up the emulator menu, which I can't seem to change, which is annoying when L2/R2 is sitting unused for most systems; and most of the emulators don't allow you to change key mapping. Every emulator has save state support (though it's more accessible in some than others), a few have fast forward, but very few easily support cheats, which I was disappointed by.
• Gambatte is the Game boy emulator, which does sensible things like mapping the L button to the menu. I initially had been dumb and hadn't realized that one of the two versions of Gambatte I had installed was the newer one that natively supports cheat codes and properly does SRAM saves. Replaying Game Boy games on this was a joy with those features and easy access to save states, and the screen size is a very comfortable upscale from the original Game Boy.
• The main GBA emulator is ReGBA. It upscales nicely, supported every game I tried with good emulation and save states, and saved SRAM properly.
• Upset that ReGBA didn’t support cheat codes, I found this guide, which was critically helpful. I was able to install the GPSP GBA emulator, then copy a number of .cht files onto the SD card, then use the internal file utility to move them to the correct directories so that GPSP and PSX4ALL would associate them with the right games. It worked! I'm not going to recommend GPSP for general gaming purposes because it handles scaling badly, so the games don't look nearly as good as ReGBA, but I was happy to be able to add the option. Also, GPSP sensibly maps the menu button to the otherwise-unused X button, rather than some Start+Select nonsense. Oddly, GPSP had a lot of trouble with Breath of Fire—jumpy music, laggy graphics, jerky scene changes. I swapped in to use a max money cheat code, then jumped back to ReGBA, which reads the same SRAM save files and plays it beautifully.
• This has both the PocketSNES and SNES9X emulators, but sram only seems to save in the former. Both have better emulation than anything else I tried, running at properly speed without slowdown or jerkiness issues and supporting every game I put in. (Lufia 2 had some issues with the internal clock not being accurate to my actual playtime, but that’s a very minor issue.) Neither emulator supports cheats and neither lets you remap the menu button, but I found my way around the cheat issue by making custom roms with GGBoy. In my idea world I think I’d want a larger screen for systems originally made for TVs, but this supports the correct aspect ratio and everything looks pretty.
• Oswan, the Wonderswan Color emulator, is fantastic. Select maps to the emulator controls, it supports save states and saves SRAM properly, the image scaling is good. I just wish there were more translated WSC color games to play.
• Fceux, the NES emulator, saves sram and also has a toggle for game genie, though I can't figure out how to make it do anything. NES games run fine, but they also run fine on a smart fridge.
• PSX4All is a perfectly solid PSX emulator, and unlike when you play PSX games on a PSP, this system has L2 and R2 buttons. I didn’t try any of the really heavy-duty processing actions games, but the jrpgs I like ran well and the cutscenes were appropriately pretty. The screen is a little small, but not problematically so.
• This runs Genesis games and Sonic seemed fine when I tried a few minutes of it, but I didn’t dedicate a lot of time to that system because I never owned one and don’t really have the nostalgia for it.
• There are an assortment of arcade emulators which, oddly, seemed like the system’s weak point: Lots of games only run on one emulator or throw up weird glitches in another; and the arcade games (more than any of the other systems) really want to be on a bigger screen.
Overall: I suspect the RG350MP fixes a bunch of the more glaring issues with this, but it’s a really solid pick-up-and-play system that, emulation-wise, was light-years ahead of the crap I was trying in 2019, and has been really convenient for replaying a lot of my Game Boy, GBA, Super Nintendo and PSX favorites.
