RG36PRO Retro Handheld Game Console – Open Source System,3.5″IPS Screen,30,000+ Classic Games,64G TF card, 3000mAh Battery,Portable Console for Teen or Partner-Gift for Christmas -Purple

ArkOS with EmulationStation and RetroArch – Worth every penny, but be prepared to curate romlist
It is a well built open source RG36 handheld running ArkOS and EmulationStation on a Rokchip (afaik). I have very large hands and after finding a decent grip it fits the hands well. It handles PSX and PSP quite well, as well as N64 (which is notoriously unstable and slow). The three USB C ports are very useful, am getting a set of usbc headphones for it because the speaker is quite loud for what I expected.I have a messenger bag that I’ve taken to using for all my stuff and it fits well in there, along with my phone, keys, wallet, cigarettes and vape. The battery life is pretty good, a solid 4 hours of playtime which should suffice for most situations, so it’s pretty portable. Gonna grab my battery bank and take it camping and see how well I feel it lasts out in nature.As an avid jrpg player, this is perfect for nostalgic trips down memory lane. Regarding the game variety, however, it suffers the same problem that many goodsets suffer; for several systems it’s many, many duplicates of games. However, this is easily rectifiable as the game partition on the included SD card is in FATx, so you can pop it into a windows computer and don’t need to install any of the linux support software for windows to edit the roms (system partition is some linux filesystem, and I’ve not had the need to install any of the linux support software for mounting linux filesystem images so I don’t know which, proably ex4 or whatever). After a few hours of dealing with the roms, I freed up quite a bit of space and was able to populate the device with some of my own backups, and if you know jrpgs, we’re talking quite a few multi-disc roms. Generating the M3U playlist to consolidate them as whole games is trivial, and I’m hyped to have an excuse to play through the classics again.The OTHER benefit is that the installed doom engine for retroarch is LZDooM, so you can play limit removing wads that take advantage of the advanced features available to ZDooM ports. If you know, you know. I didn’t know what port it was running, so I haven’t put Legacy of Rust on it yet, but afaik ZDooM and LoR don’t play too well together, and I’m unsure if you can edit launch switches to set compatibility mode for the wad to mbf21 or not, and since I don’t usually mess with compatibility modes I’m not sure if you can use the menu to set it or not.I am interested to test PS2 and Xbox emulation on the device, I’m not hopeful, at least not with Xbox, but if PS2 emulation is even halfway decent, there are soooo many good PS2 jrpgs that are going to get slapped on this bad little boi. Seeing as how I lack a disc drive, ripping my own backups of ps2 and xbox games is not possible, so, I get to look for those and download them.Does NOT have wifi, and I’m assuming no BT but I don’t really use BT for much so I’ve had no cause to test it, so if you want to use RetroArch’s ability to scrape for game media (the boxart the screenshots and demo videos) you’ll need to hook up a wifi adapter through the USBC OTG port (it had a dedicated OTG usbc port, so if you have a USBC hub, you can hook up keyboard, mouse, thumbsticks/drive adapters, wifi/bt dongles, more sd cards, get hdmi at least theoretically, haven’t tested HDMI over the OTG USBC, partly because I lack a USBC dongle, partly because I just remembered my microusb hub has an HDMI port and then remembered that HDMI over USBC is a thing).Overall, I am SUPER happy with my purchase, especially since I got another $5 off, bringing the price down to $45. For the price, I don’t think you’re going to find better bang for your buck without significantly more work. The slapdash romlist was not a surprise, a LOT of chinese shovelware, but again, not a surprise. Just be prepared with your own roms, get them ready like you would for any other installation of retroarch, and you’re in for a nice little treat. I can’t wait to go early for a good parking spot to sit and wait for my kid to get out of school now lol, always a good excuse to boot up some random games.

Does not work.
Crashes constantly. Longest play session i could get is 10min. Half of the games are broke and won’t open a lot of the games are not named correctly. It is a waste of money. Would not mind how cheaply made it is if it actually worked.

The quality is very poor. I wasn’t expecting much, but in the month since getting it, the battery no longer holds charge, and the screen fell of the device. It still works, and we’re too far in the game to want to return for a new one. But we now only play it if we’re plugged into the charger, and had to glue the screen back on.If you are thinking of getting one, it’s not that straight forward to use, but there are YouTube videos to help.The only upside is that is cheap for the games you get.

Not too bad. Missing some of the main games I wanted and some won’t load like super mario. Plenty of old skool games to keep you busy when the kids are at school 😆