Anyone used one of these before? I’ve heard really good things. Mostly looking to emulate PS1, dreamcast, n64, and PS2 and from what I’ve read the retroid 4 does a solid job with all of them.
My main question is: how easy is it to get up and going with emulation on a dedicated handheld? I’ve done some really light emulation in the past, but only on pc and that was years ago.
I got the Anbernic GBA SP style handheld and it worked straight out of the box. I put a different OS on another SD card and just moved the game library across and that worked fine too.
They generally just work but may require tinkering for more intricate things or systems that might require BIOS files. The updated OS on mine has Portmaster, which runs ports of a bunch of games instead of emulating them. The tinkering is generally copying Steam directory files across from your computer to your SD card. It’s a great way to get more out of your handheld because you don’t have the overhead of emulation involved. Like you could play Vice City through Portmaster instead of needing a handheld powerful enough to run PS2 emulation in a stable state.
Worth noting that portmaster specificly does not run on the 4 afaik, only the 5. If you want pc games on the 4 gamehub or winlator are probably options though.
Retroarch even has cores for some portmaster games. Like you can run quake and doom mods through both