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chuckroI dropped $40 on this knowing that it was a knockoff intended to capitalize on the success of Anbernic’s XX line (like when Powkiddy made the X350); I just wanted to see how bad it was. And it’s…mediocre hardware running really crap software. I’m strongly reminded of the M17, actually.
The device: It’s shaped and styled like a Switch Lite; I got one with a transparent blue shell. The screen is actually 5” (though the bezel is deceptively large), and nothing special. The body is a soft plastic, comfortable to hold, with a design etched into the back. The buttons light up (in static colors). The D-pad is four buttons rather than a single cross-key, which is suboptimal but playable; and in general the buttons are a little mushy but acceptable. There’s only one set of L and R buttons, despite this running PS1 games. There’s a dedicated menu button, which is always a positive in my book. The chip in this is actually half decent: This can run lower-end N64 and PSP games, and systems like SNES run fine. Not amazing but not bad, right?
Then we hit the bad stuff: The A and B buttons and X and Y buttons are flipped and mapped wrong in every system, and you can’t remap them. The screen is 16:9 and virtually every system is stretched, and you can’t change it. (The Retroarch menu that the menu button pulls up is thoroughly locked down and gives you save/load state only.) There are no real options available in the main menu. While there’s a search feature for the roms, they are an extensively random collection that are often mislabeled or with badly-translated names, and that search function only sometimes recognizes the mistranslations (searching for “Salda” still doesn’t turn up “Legend of Salda,” for instance). If this had proper, unlocked RetroArch like the R36S (even with the crappy frontend instead of, like, EmulationStation or something), then you could just adjust the settings and it would be a half-decent device. But the lock-in to stupid settings is really just awful.
Oh, and when I tried to add roms to it, it turns out there’s a static set of game list files, and no mechanism inside the OS to refresh it. So in order to add new roms, you need to edit the rom list files manually to include them. The retroarch core files seem to be visible and could potentially be edited/replaced, but I suspect that requires a greater level of programming skill than I possess.
Annoyed by how good this could have been versus what it was, I wandered back to the AliExpress listing for it (to see if what they advertised matched up to reality, and technically it does), and I noticed the “free returns” and thought maybe I could get my money back. Turns out that because it technically arrived late, “No longer needed” was an option, and when I submitted the return/refund, they just gave me back my money and said I didn’t need to return it. So I got this for free! It is absolutely not worth $40, but for free, I’m willing to spend some time going through the SD card and fiddling with things, because I don’t actually care if I accidentally brick this.
Overall: Absolute rip-off waste of money; glad I effectively got it for free.
The device: It’s shaped and styled like a Switch Lite; I got one with a transparent blue shell. The screen is actually 5” (though the bezel is deceptively large), and nothing special. The body is a soft plastic, comfortable to hold, with a design etched into the back. The buttons light up (in static colors). The D-pad is four buttons rather than a single cross-key, which is suboptimal but playable; and in general the buttons are a little mushy but acceptable. There’s only one set of L and R buttons, despite this running PS1 games. There’s a dedicated menu button, which is always a positive in my book. The chip in this is actually half decent: This can run lower-end N64 and PSP games, and systems like SNES run fine. Not amazing but not bad, right?
Then we hit the bad stuff: The A and B buttons and X and Y buttons are flipped and mapped wrong in every system, and you can’t remap them. The screen is 16:9 and virtually every system is stretched, and you can’t change it. (The Retroarch menu that the menu button pulls up is thoroughly locked down and gives you save/load state only.) There are no real options available in the main menu. While there’s a search feature for the roms, they are an extensively random collection that are often mislabeled or with badly-translated names, and that search function only sometimes recognizes the mistranslations (searching for “Salda” still doesn’t turn up “Legend of Salda,” for instance). If this had proper, unlocked RetroArch like the R36S (even with the crappy frontend instead of, like, EmulationStation or something), then you could just adjust the settings and it would be a half-decent device. But the lock-in to stupid settings is really just awful.
Oh, and when I tried to add roms to it, it turns out there’s a static set of game list files, and no mechanism inside the OS to refresh it. So in order to add new roms, you need to edit the rom list files manually to include them. The retroarch core files seem to be visible and could potentially be edited/replaced, but I suspect that requires a greater level of programming skill than I possess.
Annoyed by how good this could have been versus what it was, I wandered back to the AliExpress listing for it (to see if what they advertised matched up to reality, and technically it does), and I noticed the “free returns” and thought maybe I could get my money back. Turns out that because it technically arrived late, “No longer needed” was an option, and when I submitted the return/refund, they just gave me back my money and said I didn’t need to return it. So I got this for free! It is absolutely not worth $40, but for free, I’m willing to spend some time going through the SD card and fiddling with things, because I don’t actually care if I accidentally brick this.
Overall: Absolute rip-off waste of money; glad I effectively got it for free.
