TRIMUI Smart Pro
Dec. 13th, 2023 03:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroI have a TRIMUI Mini that did a fantastic job of being a tiny, pick-up-and-play device with a UI I really liked. When I heard they were making a large handheld, I was very excited.
Right off the bat, this looks to be everything I expected from it: It plays everything on it (including N64, PSP, DS, and Sega Saturn) just beautifully. It’s similar in size to the Retroid Pocket 3, but a little flatter and just a hair heavier. The control pad, sticks and buttons are all a little on the small side, and the 5” screen is just enormous in proportion. (It’s a perfectly comfortable size for playing DS games with the screens side-by-side, and while it doesn’t have a touchscreen, it does map the left stick and R2 button to a virtual stylus so you can manage games that only need the touchscreen a little bit.)
The UI is, indeed, really great. It's got a dedicated menu button that brings up the custom menu with save/load state and a Netplay option, but from there you can get to a full RetroArch menu with all the settings. I’m a little annoyed that it’s the full desktop version of RetroArch (that I first encountered with Lakka and have never liked) rather than the compact one I’ve grown used to in the RG35XX and Miyoo Mini, but it’s still full access to all the settings including filters, remapping, cheats and the like. (And I think I should be able to switch it, I just haven’t managed that yet.)
It has a “best” section of roms, which contains custom groups that I find very entertaining: One is Vertical Arcade games, one is all Pokemon games (though there’s a lot of alternate-language duplicates), and one is all rom dumps of bootleg multicarts: So you can play the 500-in-1 handhelds from the comfort of this device. A fancy device with easy access to Nice Code and JungleTac hits; how ridiculous is that?
I can add roms to various folders without issue, though it isn’t set up with any additional cores (so I can’t play Game Gear or Lynx on it). I added the Liberto library of cheats, and I didn’t have any problems loading and activating them. I tried to set up new “best” folder, and irritatingly, you need to understand how the device is set up and write some rudimentary code to create a new “best” group. I managed to create one by duplicating the Pokemon folder, but then it would only recognize GBA and Game Boy roms that I dropped in, so I think I need to keep fiddling and editing. (I think it would be really neat to make custom groups of games from different systems, now that the possibility exists.)
This came with either box art or splash screens for pretty much every game; I actually copied the box art files for my other devices. I had no problems adding box art for new games that I added, either: Just snag the png file and it’s obvious where everything goes.
The $86 I paid for it was around what I paid for the Powkiddy X2 a year and change ago (which maxed out at PS1 games, couldn’t handle cheats, and couldn’t even rescale the screen)—this rivals everything the Anbernic RG552 could do, and that was one of the most expensive handhelds I’ve purchased at $250 just last year. It says a lot about where the market has gone in the interim.
Overall: I’m spoiled for good devices at this point, but this one is really close to my ideal, especially at a sub-$100 price point. It’s not perfect, but we’re to the point where that’s quibbling over details, because it runs Tier-3 perfectly and has a big enough screen for DS/PSP, supports all the functionality I typically want, and requires virtually no fiddling out of the box.
Right off the bat, this looks to be everything I expected from it: It plays everything on it (including N64, PSP, DS, and Sega Saturn) just beautifully. It’s similar in size to the Retroid Pocket 3, but a little flatter and just a hair heavier. The control pad, sticks and buttons are all a little on the small side, and the 5” screen is just enormous in proportion. (It’s a perfectly comfortable size for playing DS games with the screens side-by-side, and while it doesn’t have a touchscreen, it does map the left stick and R2 button to a virtual stylus so you can manage games that only need the touchscreen a little bit.)
The UI is, indeed, really great. It's got a dedicated menu button that brings up the custom menu with save/load state and a Netplay option, but from there you can get to a full RetroArch menu with all the settings. I’m a little annoyed that it’s the full desktop version of RetroArch (that I first encountered with Lakka and have never liked) rather than the compact one I’ve grown used to in the RG35XX and Miyoo Mini, but it’s still full access to all the settings including filters, remapping, cheats and the like. (And I think I should be able to switch it, I just haven’t managed that yet.)
It has a “best” section of roms, which contains custom groups that I find very entertaining: One is Vertical Arcade games, one is all Pokemon games (though there’s a lot of alternate-language duplicates), and one is all rom dumps of bootleg multicarts: So you can play the 500-in-1 handhelds from the comfort of this device. A fancy device with easy access to Nice Code and JungleTac hits; how ridiculous is that?
I can add roms to various folders without issue, though it isn’t set up with any additional cores (so I can’t play Game Gear or Lynx on it). I added the Liberto library of cheats, and I didn’t have any problems loading and activating them. I tried to set up new “best” folder, and irritatingly, you need to understand how the device is set up and write some rudimentary code to create a new “best” group. I managed to create one by duplicating the Pokemon folder, but then it would only recognize GBA and Game Boy roms that I dropped in, so I think I need to keep fiddling and editing. (I think it would be really neat to make custom groups of games from different systems, now that the possibility exists.)
This came with either box art or splash screens for pretty much every game; I actually copied the box art files for my other devices. I had no problems adding box art for new games that I added, either: Just snag the png file and it’s obvious where everything goes.
The $86 I paid for it was around what I paid for the Powkiddy X2 a year and change ago (which maxed out at PS1 games, couldn’t handle cheats, and couldn’t even rescale the screen)—this rivals everything the Anbernic RG552 could do, and that was one of the most expensive handhelds I’ve purchased at $250 just last year. It says a lot about where the market has gone in the interim.
Overall: I’m spoiled for good devices at this point, but this one is really close to my ideal, especially at a sub-$100 price point. It’s not perfect, but we’re to the point where that’s quibbling over details, because it runs Tier-3 perfectly and has a big enough screen for DS/PSP, supports all the functionality I typically want, and requires virtually no fiddling out of the box.
