What Retro Handhelds Can Actually Emulate
Buy the tier below the one you think you need. That is the single most useful piece of advice in this category, because the emulation market sells on the highest console a device can theoretically run, and almost nobody spends their time playing that console.
The honest breakdown is this: a cheap handheld runs everything up to PlayStation 1 perfectly, a mid handheld adds Dreamcast, PSP and Nintendo 64, and only the expensive flagship-class hardware handles GameCube and PlayStation 2 properly. Where you land depends on which of those three sentences describes your actual library, and for most people it is the first one.
The tiers, by chip
Marketing names change every six months. The silicon does not, and it is the only thing that determines what runs. Four tiers cover the whole market.
Tier 1: Rockchip RK3326 and Allwinner H700
This is the bottom of the range and where the volume sales are. The RK3326 has been in Anbernic devices since the RG351 series, and the H700 powers the newer RG35XX family. Performance between them is close enough that they belong in the same bracket.
What runs at full speed: NES, SNES, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Master System, Mega Drive, Neo Geo, PC Engine, arcade up to CPS3, and PlayStation 1. That last one surprises people who assume PS1 needs power. It does not, and these chips run it with headroom.
What does not run: Nintendo 64 is a coin flip that depends entirely on the game, Dreamcast is out, PSP manages a handful of 2D titles and nothing else, and Nintendo DS suffers because of the second screen more than the CPU. Anything above that is not worth discussing.
The Anbernic RG351P sits squarely in this bracket, and it is genuinely all the device most buyers need. If your nostalgia stops at the PlayStation, this tier ends the conversation.
Tier 2: Unisoc T618
The T618 is the workhorse of the middle market and has been for a couple of years, appearing in Retroid and Anbernic devices alike. It is an Android chip, which changes the experience as much as the performance does.
It adds Dreamcast at full speed, PSP at full speed including the demanding 3D titles, Nintendo 64 with far better consistency than the tier below, and Saturn on a game-by-game basis because Saturn emulation is difficult for reasons that have nothing to do with raw power.
GameCube is where the honesty matters. The T618 will boot GameCube games and run the simpler ones acceptably, which is enough for a demo video and not enough for a playthrough. The moment you load anything with heavy effects, the frame rate collapses. PlayStation 2 is the same story with worse odds.
This tier is the right answer if your list is PSP and Dreamcast heavy. It is the wrong answer if you bought it for GameCube.
Tier 3: flagship-class Android
Snapdragon 8-series and equivalent chips, found in the premium Retroid and Ayn devices. This is where GameCube runs properly, where PlayStation 2 becomes genuinely playable across most of the library, and where Wii becomes an option if you can live with the control mapping.
The price jump is significant, often double or triple the middle tier. It is justified only if GameCube and PS2 are the point. If you are buying this hardware to play Game Boy Advance games in bed, you have bought a very expensive Game Boy Advance.
Tier 4: x86 handhelds
The Steam Deck and its competitors are PCs, so they run every emulator that exists on the desktop plus the actual PC game library. They are also heavier, thirstier and several times the price of a dedicated retro device.
For emulation alone they are overkill, and the weight matters more than the spec sheet suggests when you are holding the thing for an hour. Where they earn their place is as a single device that replaces both the handheld and the gaming laptop, which is a different purchase decision. We covered that shift toward portable PC gaming in the mobile gaming revolution piece.
What the spec sheet does not tell you
Two devices with the same chip can be completely different to live with, and the differences are almost never in the marketing material.
The D-pad. This is the control you will use for ninety percent of your playtime and it varies wildly between manufacturers and even between generations of the same brand. A mushy D-pad ruins Mega Drive fighting games and makes precision platformers miserable. There is no spec for this, only user reports, and it is worth reading them before buying.
The screen aspect ratio. A 4:3 screen displays almost every retro system natively. A 16:9 screen either stretches the image or leaves black bars down both sides, which wastes the panel you paid for. Widescreen makes sense on devices meant for PSP and PS2, where games were designed for it. It is the wrong choice for a device you bought for SNES.
The operating system. Linux-based stock firmware boots into a game list in eight seconds and does one job well. Android takes longer, needs configuration, and gives you standalone emulators that are consistently better than the ones bundled in Linux builds. For the cheap tier, Linux simplicity wins. For the expensive tier, Android is the only real option because that is where GameCube and PS2 emulator development happens.
Battery under load. Advertised battery figures are measured running Game Boy games. Run PSP or Dreamcast on the same device and you can halve the number. If you are buying for long sessions away from a charger, look for tested figures on the systems you actually play.
Stick drift. Potentiometer sticks wear out and start drifting, usually within a year of regular use. Hall effect sensors solve this permanently and are increasingly common. Whether it justifies a price premium depends entirely on whether your library uses the sticks at all.
The library reality check
Here is the uncomfortable part. People buy these devices imagining a curated collection of the best games ever made, and then discover that the experience of scrolling through eight thousand ROMs is paralysing rather than exciting. The devices that get used long term belong to people who loaded thirty games they actually intend to finish.
There is also a compatibility trap in the mid tier specifically. A device that runs a system “at 80 percent” is not a device that runs that system. It is a device that runs some games and stutters through others, and you will spend more time testing than playing. Full speed or do not bother is the right standard.
And the legal position is worth stating plainly: emulators themselves are legal, the games are not yours unless you own them, and the sensible route is dumping your own cartridges and discs. The comparison between the RG351P and the Retroid Pocket 2 Plus goes further into how the two ecosystems handle their libraries.
Matching the device to the library
The decision gets much easier when you write down what you actually want to play, in order, before you shop.
If your list is NES, SNES, Mega Drive, Game Boy and Game Boy Advance, buy the cheapest well-built device with a good D-pad and a 4:3 screen. Anything else is wasted. This describes the majority of buyers and almost none of them believe it before they buy.
If your list includes PlayStation 1, the answer does not change. The bottom tier handles PS1 comfortably, and the extra money buys you nothing for that library.
If your list is PSP, Dreamcast or Nintendo 64 heavy, step up to the T618 tier. This is the genuine sweet spot for anyone whose formative gaming years were the late nineties and early two thousands, and the price gap over the bottom tier is modest.
If your list is GameCube, Wii or PlayStation 2, you need the flagship tier and there is no way around it. Do not let a mid-tier device tempt you with a video of a first-level demo running smoothly.
If your list includes modern PC games, you are not shopping for a retro handheld, you are shopping for a portable PC, and the comparison set is completely different.
What I would buy
For most people: the cheapest solidly built device in the bottom tier, with a 4:3 screen, and the money saved spent on nothing at all. The library that gets played on these devices is overwhelmingly 8 and 16 bit, and the hardware to run it costs very little.
For the person who genuinely lived through the PSP and Dreamcast era and wants those games portable, the middle tier is worth the step up, and Android is worth the extra setup friction for the emulator quality alone.
The flagship tier is a specialist purchase. It is the right call for a specific library and a poor one for everything else, and the number of people who buy it and then play Game Boy Advance on it is much higher than anyone in the hobby likes to admit.
Work out your library first. The device follows from it, and the answer is usually cheaper than you expected.
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