#handheld

Anbernic sent me an RG DS to review. It’s a clamshell Android handheld designed to evoke the Nintendo DS, running Android 14 on a Rockchip RK3568 with dual 4-inch screens. At around $95 (roughly £75), it sits in the same budget bracket as the Mangmi Air X I reviewed last year, but where that was a capable general-purpose handheld, this one has a much narrower brief.

After reviewing the Mangmi Air X, I got curious about how the firmware updates worked. Mangmi have been pushing updates fairly regularly, which is great to see on a budget device. Officially they release full update packages via Google Drive links, but those have a tendency to disappear over time. I wanted to access the OTA update packages directly and back them up to archive.org alongside the original firmware.

Back in 2015 when I reviewed devices like the GPD XD and similar Android handhelds, the whole ecosystem felt half-baked. Emulation wasn’t particularly good yet, the devices came from obscure Chinese manufacturers, the ROMs were loaded with questionable apps, and the SOCs couldn’t handle much.

I bought a ClockworkPi GameShell back in October 2019. I’ve been playing with it a bit lately (in anticipation of the ClockworkPi DevTerm shipping!) and I realised I haven’t yet posted anything about it on here. Here’s some of the hardware mods I’ve made to my GameShell.

I finally got around to assembling this little Peanut kit that I bought from Tindie a couple of months ago. The kit comes with everything you need (except a battery) to build a tiny (50 x 35mm) Arduboy-compatible handheld game. The specs are as follows: Arduino Pro Micro 0.96” OLED screen Piezo speaker The build instructions were very simple to follow, requiring only basic soldering skills (and a tiny SMD resistor to change out). Uploading games to the Peanut is pretty straight-forward. On Windows there are a couple of applications available. On Linux the process is a little more involved but it works great once you’ve got it set up. The only thing to note – in my experience – the ATTRS{idProduct} for the udev rules is slightly different with the Arduino Pro Micro provided in the Peanut kit, but you can easily find the correct value by checking the output of lsusb. There’s a bunch of games available on the Arduboy forum and also a nice curated list of games that can be automatically uploaded with the desktop app.

I’ve been playing with this Pocket Sprite a bit lately. It’s a tiny ESP32-based device that can emulate Gameboy, NES and various other classic game systems.

The GPD Pocket is a 7” Ultra-mobile PC that at first glance resembles a shrunken Apple Laptop, but it’s metal unibody exterior is where the similarities end.

I’m back with another Android console out of China from GPD, the GPD XD. I’ve had the GPD XD for a couple of weeks now, and to be honest I’ve been unable to put it down! In short it’s a great device for portable gaming, and it also handles my media needs with ease. This device was generously provided by Geekbuying, so I’ll provide more information about where to buy the GPD XD from the Geekbuying store at the end of this review.

Today I’m refreshed to be reviewing a console that doesn’t try to cram too much in to the form factor, but instead tried to focus on doing one thing well.

I’ve got another Android gaming handheld to review, the GPD G5A from GamePad Digital. I’ve had this device for a little while now, and have played with it loads. This device was sent to my directly from GPD back in February, but I’ve been too busy with life to write up a review.

Hot on the heels of my last Android device review I’m back with another device: The GPD G7 Quad-core from GamePad Digital. The G7 is very similar to the JXD 7800B, but with a more ergonomic game-controller shape to it.

It has been a while since I’ve had a new portable console to play with (and I’m still waiting for my GCW to arrive!), so let’s ease back in to this stuff with an Android-powered console from JinXang Digital (JXD): The JXD 7800B.

I always find it hard to find things to write about when I have a blog. It’s not that I don’t have anything to say, it’s just I don’t like writing. I’ve been busy this past week, creating a new community for the Dingoo A320 portable game device. The community is called “Dingoonity” and is available at http://dingoonity.org I’ve been constantly working on improving Dingoonity since it launched on Friday at 7pm, and so I’ve had little time to work on much else. Dingoonity features a Simple Machines Forum powered BBS, and since today a SMF powered news page which I wrote using SMF’s SSI.php functions. Working on this project has been a great experience so far. The Dingoo community is very much alive and crunching out new homebrew releases for both the Dingoo official firmware, and the “Dingux” linux port for the Dingoo. I will probably post some more Dingoonity-related posts later, aswell as updating my portfolio with the Dingoonity designs when I finish the tweaks.