The TrimUI Smart Pro handheld console.
Basically a perfect modern GBA/DS emulator. It can run N64 and PSP, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

Every couple of years, I’ll go on a handheld gaming bender where I eschew all responsibilities and spend as much time as possible with my head buried in a handheld console, playing a game that might have been released 20 years ago. For those couple of weeks, I’ll be a teenager again, on holidays and having nothing to do but play video games on a handheld.

By any measure, we’re long overdue for one of those times. While Covid and lockdowns might have been the ideal time to dust off one or more of my old handhelds, I think I was more concerned about surviving and avoiding Covid than I was with playing a handheld console.

One of the great things about handheld gaming consoles like the 3DS and Vita — and indeed, all consoles — is that you can expect them to work 100% reliably with every game that was released for them, because that’s just how consoles work. There’s no performance issues. No incompatibilities. If you have a copy of the game and a working console, they you can always expect to play it, whether that’s 20 years ago when the console was first released, now, or 20 years from now. I know that I’ll be able to pull out my 3DS or Vita, give it a charge, and be able to pick up right where I left off. And that’s the beauty of consoles; they just work.

But as much as I love the Game Boy Color that I grew up with, the Game Boy Advance SP I eventually received, and the Nintendo DS that ended up rounding out the handhelds of my youth, I know this isn’t sustainable indefinitely.

The main problem with the handhelds that I have is that they, like me, aren’t getting any younger. The battery it has now is likely the best battery it’s ever going to have, and while 3D scanning and printing has come a long way and you’ll probably be able to buy replacement plastic parts, that’s not necessarily guaranteed for anything else including screens or other electronics. They’re not making any new 3DSes or Vitas, so there’s no way to get a new one unless I’m willing to pay a premium for one on the second hand market. Which means it’s a one way street for these handhelds, unless I get lucky and find a good second hand model for a non-exorbitant price. So as much as I want to be able to play all my Vita games on my Vita, or play all my 3DS games on my 3DS, I know that one day, that isn’t going to be possible due to time marching ever forward. Parts will break. Batteries will wear out. And when that happens, there’s no guarantee I’ll be able to restore them to working condition. Even if I can guarantee access to games that I want to play, which in 2024 and the age of digital downloads is absolutely not a given seeing as Nintendo has already shut down the 3DS eShop and Sony was about to do the same thing with the Vita PlayStation Store until they received backlash and reneged, there’s no guarantee that the hardware is going to last. How many consoles from 20 years ago do you know of, much less working examples?

Obviously this isn’t an option for even older handhelds like the GBA; in those cases the ageing hardware is even more of a limitation, and getting worse and worse every day. So for the purposes of gaming on a retro handheld like the GBC, GBA, or even a DS, then emulation is really the best option, with all of the inherent advantages and disadvantages that brings.

The question is whether I’m willing to live with the tradeoffs of imperfect software emulation for the conveniences of modern hardware and software. Modern hardware in this case is things like hall-effect analog sticks and triggers, USB-C charging, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and displays with such contemporary technologies like IPS (or ideally OLED, like the Vita had all the way back in 2012) and actual pixel density far above the handful of pixels that older consoles used to have. I’ve been PC gaming at 4K since 2015 at a healthy, if not incredible, 163ppi, so going back to anything less than 720p on a 5 inch display (293ppi) seems like such a huge step backwards when you consider that even the very first Apple Watch had 326ppi in 2015. Which, I’ll remind you, was almost ten years ago.

Modern software, on the other hand, means I can use software to emulate whatever console I’m interested in, provided my device has enough power to run those games. Whether that’s an Android or Linux-based handheld, or something like the PC-based Steam Deck, mostly depends on what I’m interested in playing given the hardware is more or less the same. Android, for example, currently doesn’t have emulators for Wii U, PS3, Xbox, or Xbox 360, and while that might change in the future, that’s the way it is right now.

Conceptually, I think I’m OK with having a device that doesn’t run everything. I think it would be weird to play GBA games on 6 or 7 inch screen, for example, irrespective of how good the integer scaling is, but I think a device that runs GBC, GBA, and even DS games could work. Then if I wanted to, I’d either have 3DS games on my 3DS, Vita games on my Vita, and potentially have another device for 3DS, Vita, and every other 8th-generation console, including GameCube, PS2, and maybe even Switch. From a hardware console perspective, this sort of separation works great as well because retro handheld consoles fit into one of a handful of tiers of modern hardware, each with varying power and price to handle its own set of retro handhelds.

So in my quest for modern hardware to use, that will emulate retro handheld consoles using software, I’ve found… far too many options, actually. I’ve been tangentially aware that retro handhelds using software emulation have been a thing for a while now, but for the longest time, your options were basically underpowered trash only capable of running classic consoles like GB/GBA/SNES etc; specialised, esoteric, hardware running FPGAs still only capable of running games from the anything prior to the 64-bit era; or what are essentially handheld gaming laptops, complete with AMD Ryzen CPUs capable of emulating whatever you wanted, but with a price tag and battery life to match. While ARM has been the CPU architecture du jour for retro handhelds for years now based on its suitability for phones and tablets, the problem with most of the ARM-based SoCs being used up until now is that they have historically been underpowered for software emulation of any 8th-generation handheld like the 3DS or Vita, never mind upscaling those devices to such modern resolutions like 1080p. After all, most of the higher-end retro handhelds are small Android phone/tablets with a controller attached, so it makes a lot of sense to have powerful and highly efficient chips. And where have those chips been? Mobiles and tablets!

So even if the hardware is now at a point where there are handhelds that can acceptably run everything released more than 10 years ago, the other side of the coin is that software emulation isn’t perfect either. Even if I find a device that has the power to run everything I want it to, it’s still possible that the emulator I’m using won’t be a perfect replica of what it would be like to run that game on the hardware it was intended to. Software emulation has come a long way, and I’d like to think that most games run acceptably, but the truth is that for anything released within the last 10-15 years, it’s not perfect. I might run into games that won’t launch, or have unacceptable performance if they do, as is the cost of software emulation. And even if the game starts up and runs fine, I might run into crashes or glitches that impact my gameplay experience. And even if the game starts, runs, and doesn’t crash often enough to impact gameplay, maybe it’ll have some other game breaking bug that I’ll only run into at the very end of a play through, negating all the progress I’ve made up until that point. But that’s imperfect software emulation for you, isn’t it? That’s the price you pay for not playing on the console that the game was designed for.

The other thing to consider is where I’m going to find the time to play all of these games. I already spend five to six hours a day on my phone, according to my iPhone’s Screen Time stats, and that’s not accounting for how much time I spend gaming on my PC. But maybe, like most things that happen when you’re an adult, it’ll be one of those things that you just have to make time for. You know, maybe I’ll spend an hour less watching YouTube every day, or get off the computer a little earlier and have a little handheld time before bed, or whatever.

And plus, I already have a DS, 3DS, and a Vita that sit in a drawer 95% of the time. I’m supposed to think that by buying something new, by having a potentially better experience than the stock hardware via the wonders of modern hardware combined with software emulation, that I’ll somehow be converted into a handheld gamer overnight? Let’s not kid ourselves. It’s this chicken and egg problem that makes me so hesitant about buying a modern handheld console for retro emulation. If I was more than curiously interested in playing GC and PS2, wouldn’t I have repurposed my gaming PC for that years ago? If playing PS2 and GC was something that truly I wanted to do, wouldn’t I have already explored every option, every opportunity, to play those titles on the hardware I have available to me? Because on Windows, Dolphin for GameCube emulation and PCSX2 for PS2 have both been good for plenty of years at this point, and all you really need is a controller.

Because something like a modern handheld console for retro emulation isn’t an inexpensive proposition, even if it will play everything I want it to play. Wouldn’t I rather put that money towards an eventual PC upgrade, which I’ve been putting off for almost ten years?

And after all this, you may be wondering: why? Why go to all this trouble? And the reason comes down to because I still want to play the games of my youth. Because I still want to S-rank every map in Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising. I still want to play through a modern Pokemon game to see if my expectations still hold up. While there are more and more PC remasters of old classics — hell, even Advance Wars 2 has a Switch remake now — sometimes there’s just nothing to equal playing the original thing, and nostalgia is a hell of a thing. And if I’ve waited 20 years to be able to be play GameCube and PS2 portably, then what’s another 1 or 2 years?

And so, that’s why I’m so on the fence about buying a modern handheld console for retro emulation today. While I think it would be nice to be able to play 3DS, Vita, GC, and PS2, and upscale them to 1080p on a handheld that has niceties like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB-C, and all-day battery life, that’s not something that I do today, nor is it something that I’m desperately chomping at the bit for. So I’m OK with waiting another year or two to see what new hardware is available that will be able to do all those things and more.

Maybe even with such futuristic technology as an OLED display.

We can only hope.