RETROID Pocket 2

I picked up the RP2+ to ease the wait for a Steam Deck. It's been a long time since I've tried a dedicated emulator handheld (since GP2X, Dingoo A320, OpenPandora and more recently the Revo K101), and I'm not totally convinced by the use of Android but it gets the job done and makes some standard things easy and familiar. Plus the Google Play software library is available.

The RP2+ builds upon the Android OS with a custom launcher and onboarding Wizard. These mostly handle installing and configuring the emulators you might want to use, though the emulator landscape changes often and some default choices are suboptimal.

Videos show the RP2+ running Wind Waker (Gamecube) which it... almost... manages, but the real ceiling is Nintendo DS, N64, PS1 and Dreamcast (which ReDream does exceptionally well).

For DS the recommended (paid) DraStic emulator hasn't been updated for a couple of years and seems abandoned (by last accounts the authors were working on an open-source Retroarch core to replace it) but melonDS in RetroArch works brilliantly once you get through the rigamarole of configuration. It hurts to say it, since DraStic takes me back to the OpenPandora days, but it's not worth your money. You can configure melonDS to use the right stick and buttons in portrait mode and have the two DS screens occupy almost the full RP2+ screen. It's a little awkward, but works well once it's set up. I could not rebind the controls in DraStic.

For the most part all "retro" games just work, and a few PS2 games (Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 for example) are playable.

Why four stars? As someone who's long lost the inclination to spend too much time tinkering with emulator config, it still has some friction to shed. Particular issues included having to manually copy BIOS files (since the auto copy available in the launcher did not seem to work), manually replace or set cover art for many games (particularly anything suffixed with (Europe) which breaks the title match), a weirdly high minimum screen brightness... obnoxiously bright in fact... and myriad other minor software issues.

Additionally the use of non-RetroArch standalone emulators means that shortcuts such as menu access, quicksave and so on are different between systems and can be tedious to remember. I'd recommend using a RetroArch core where possible. I don't know what the limitations might be, but it feels like the system is crying out for a dedicated hardware shortcut button.

The hardware is excellent. WiFi has been fine for the very limited things I've done over it. Copying even multi-gigabyte files over USB to the SD card worked well, though, so the trial and error of setting up wasn't too painful. I've even installed SmartTube Next and while it's awkward on a 640x480 pixel screen it works well.

I'm probably preaching to the choir, but be prepared to put in some effort to get things how you want and use in-game saves and save states liberally. Once you've got it set up it's mostly plain sailing and a truly fantastic little device.