Bro, you are looking down into a deep deep deep rabbit hole.

What’s your budget and what do you want to play? I haven’t kept up with device reviews for a while, but here’s what I had in my mind at last reading:

FYI: if you’re destitute, then your smartphone and existing ancient PC will still be able to emulate more games than you know what to do with.

1. Budget: Mangmi Air X (up to PSP, gamecube and some 3DS)

2. financially comfortable: Retroid Pocket 6 (up to many modern PC games and most Switch emulation)

3. Trust fund: some top tier Ayn device

These devices have come a long way and come in every form factor and budget. There are loads of videos to watch. Don’t worry about pre-loaded games, you’ll be doing all that yourself. But that’s one of the things you have to enjoy: hours of setup and figuring stuff out.

Retro Game Corps is a great place to start and their device database will be the place to go to compare devices.

I did. So many tetris clones and mario bros clones

I purchased the Powkiddy RGB10Max back in 2021. I think it was something like $100 or $150 and came with a 128GB microsd card. That included and operating system plus tens of thousands of games.

Based on some recommendations online, I made my own SD card using RetroOz as the operating system instead. It is better, but i’m not sure if was a big enough improvement that it was worth the effort.

People also recommended that I find my own Roms elsewhere, but that really wasn’t necessary. Sure, some of them are Romhacks (modified versions of existing games that are obviously wrong, like Sonic64). But for thr most part they are just legitimate games for these old systems that you could have bought cartridges for in a store back in the 80’s and 90’s. The problem is the same problem we face today on tbe Switch eShop, PlayStation Store, and Steam: a lot of this is cheap junk.

Mine came with, as far as I can tell, the complete North American libraries for the Atari 2600, Master System, Genesis, NES, SNES, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance, and N64. It also came with smaller selections of games for PSP, PS1, Saturn, Dreamcast, GameGear and Nintendo DS. Plus a smattering of arcade games, and games for other systems i’m less familiar with (Intellivision, Colecovision, TurboGrafx, Wonderswan, SG-1000, PC-9800, MXS, etc).

By upgrading tk a 256gb card I was also able to add my own PS1 collection that I ripped from discs. I pirated a full collection of the Nintendo DS library, plus more games for Dreamcast, PSP, and Saturn. I added Phillips CDi and Atari Jaguar games too. I also used a second SD card to Ru LineageOS, a version of Android, which I used for Steam Link. This allowed me to stream from my desktop for pretty much any Steam game, plus non-steam games like emulators for PS2, PS3, WiiU, Switch, etc.

The whole experience was… Okay. The analog sticks were tiny. It only has 1 speaker. The shoulder buttons sucked. The screen was only 480p. Sleep mode didn’t really work, and it takes like 4 minutes to turn the system on. Eventually the Wi-Fi and one of thr USB ports stopped working.

I am sure things have improved since then. I got a Steam Deck and have barely touched my RGB10 since. I don’t regret the purchase though.

Just curate your own roms

Got me an Anbernic RGXX35 SP or whatever it’s called. The foldy gameboy. $70, came with an SD card with tons of games on it, only a few were good though. I got another SD card, threw MUOS on it, and grabbed the ROMs of the games I wanted. AI was actually fairly useful in discovering new titles that corresponded to PC games I liked (ex XCOM > Advance Wars). The system runs PS1 games easily. It’s been cool digging into older titles, as I didn’t play on handhelds/consoles much as a kid (born PC gamer). I think it should be priced closer to $50, but whatever. I get an occasional ooh and aah from nostalgic folks and it’s fun to show off. The main issues I have is that the standby feels more like a shutdown and it’s hard to quickly resume play if you have to close it, so it feels like more of a sit down and play console than a quick session like a phone provides; it’s good for places where you have to wait a while. Also the clicky buttons- I love the sound and feel but I get self conscious playing in a public space where there’s not enough noise to cover the sound. I like the idea of the Ayn Thor or whatever the system is called that is kind of like a retro steam deck that can play PC games but I’m not dropping 400+ atm on a system I won’t use as much as my PC probably. The SP was a great semi-low investment to dip my toes into the retro realm and I don’t regret it.

Edit: I have not tried the WiFi and streaming functionalities but it does have those.