Ampown MagicX Zero 40
Jul. 12th, 2025 07:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroThis is an Android-based handheld with a unique feature: A tall vertical screen. It’s clearly intended as a compact DS-emulator device, as it runs DraStic really well and the screen is the correct size to display both screens (with a bar in-between to represent the hinge space that most games accounted for) and it’s a touchscreen. It also works great for vertical arcade games originally intended for a tall screen.
It also runs the tier 2 retro games (up through SNES/Genesis/PS1) just fine; and has N64 and PSP available but isn’t particularly good at them. (And it has to cram the 16:9 PSP display into a tiny space for the low-end games it can run.) In terms of emulation performance, it’s on par with an R36S or anything of that ilk; don’t have any illusions that 3DS would ever be possible here. The problem with running most other systems, however, is you end up using less than half of the screen because it’s squashed into the top.
And that gets to the big issue: It’s a small non-folding handheld, and that means the screen is relatively small. The original DS had two 3” diagonal screens, each with a 3:2 ratio. This has a 4” diagonal screen, which means that to keep the ratios correct, you functionally only have a 2.5” diagonal space for each screen. (You have slightly more for systems that use a 4:3 ratio, like any of the consoles; and a 1:1 ratio like the Game Boy works pretty nicely as it uses more than half the screen.) The d-pad is a little small and the buttons feel a little “loose,” but they’re appropriately responsive and playable. This has a dedicated menu button, which I’m always a big fan of. The device is light and will fit in a cargo pants pocket no problem, but it’s not actually ideal to play on for long periods. And because it’s running Android instead of one of the specialty Linux frontends, it takes longer to load up and get you into a game. It’s the DS emulator equivalent of the 2.8” screen candy bar handhelds (Miyoo A30, Anbernic 28XX) where the best play experience is small-screen handhelds like Game Boy, Game Gear and Lynx.
The menu UI is mildly confusing right off the bat because it’s not clear which things are switched with the D-pad versus the triggers and it’s a little hard to maneuver. It does fully expose Retroarch and all of the usual configurations. DraStic is properly loaded with cheat codes and all the usual functionality works fine. The other systems all run through RetroArch by default, so you have the usual access to add cheats or change filters as you see fit. (By default, everything displays FPS, which is mildly annoying to have to remove.)
In theory you could use this for running other Android apps, but in practice I can’t think of much I’d want to play on it—the vertical screen is smaller than most phones so you don’t have a lot of real estate for tappy games; and virtually anything that wants a controller attached to your phone also wants it in landscape mode. So not a lot of value there. I did appreciate being able to plug it directly into my PC to add games rather than needing to pop the SD card. (And it came loaded with almost the entire DS library; all I needed to add were some hacks and fan translations.)
Overall: This ran me $93 after shipping and tariff costs; I specifically wanted to try it out because of the gimmick. Kinda like the Powkiddy V10, this has one specific use-case that it’s good at (compact DS emulation) and pretty much everything else…meh. So it’s only worth the money if you’re excited for that specific use-case.
It also runs the tier 2 retro games (up through SNES/Genesis/PS1) just fine; and has N64 and PSP available but isn’t particularly good at them. (And it has to cram the 16:9 PSP display into a tiny space for the low-end games it can run.) In terms of emulation performance, it’s on par with an R36S or anything of that ilk; don’t have any illusions that 3DS would ever be possible here. The problem with running most other systems, however, is you end up using less than half of the screen because it’s squashed into the top.
And that gets to the big issue: It’s a small non-folding handheld, and that means the screen is relatively small. The original DS had two 3” diagonal screens, each with a 3:2 ratio. This has a 4” diagonal screen, which means that to keep the ratios correct, you functionally only have a 2.5” diagonal space for each screen. (You have slightly more for systems that use a 4:3 ratio, like any of the consoles; and a 1:1 ratio like the Game Boy works pretty nicely as it uses more than half the screen.) The d-pad is a little small and the buttons feel a little “loose,” but they’re appropriately responsive and playable. This has a dedicated menu button, which I’m always a big fan of. The device is light and will fit in a cargo pants pocket no problem, but it’s not actually ideal to play on for long periods. And because it’s running Android instead of one of the specialty Linux frontends, it takes longer to load up and get you into a game. It’s the DS emulator equivalent of the 2.8” screen candy bar handhelds (Miyoo A30, Anbernic 28XX) where the best play experience is small-screen handhelds like Game Boy, Game Gear and Lynx.
The menu UI is mildly confusing right off the bat because it’s not clear which things are switched with the D-pad versus the triggers and it’s a little hard to maneuver. It does fully expose Retroarch and all of the usual configurations. DraStic is properly loaded with cheat codes and all the usual functionality works fine. The other systems all run through RetroArch by default, so you have the usual access to add cheats or change filters as you see fit. (By default, everything displays FPS, which is mildly annoying to have to remove.)
In theory you could use this for running other Android apps, but in practice I can’t think of much I’d want to play on it—the vertical screen is smaller than most phones so you don’t have a lot of real estate for tappy games; and virtually anything that wants a controller attached to your phone also wants it in landscape mode. So not a lot of value there. I did appreciate being able to plug it directly into my PC to add games rather than needing to pop the SD card. (And it came loaded with almost the entire DS library; all I needed to add were some hacks and fan translations.)
Overall: This ran me $93 after shipping and tariff costs; I specifically wanted to try it out because of the gimmick. Kinda like the Powkiddy V10, this has one specific use-case that it’s good at (compact DS emulation) and pretty much everything else…meh. So it’s only worth the money if you’re excited for that specific use-case.
