at that price point, the R36S clones on Aliexpress, i got one on sale for ~€22. they play everything up to ps1/dreamcast, n64 not so much though. the romsets they come with and their metadata are really bad, and the sd card it comes with is prone to die spontaneously, so it requires some tinkering
grue@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Wait, but Dreamcast is newer than N64. Did you mean Saturn or 32X, or is N64 weirdly hard to emulate for some reason?
Is there anything to watch out for, other than price (and maybe avoiding paying extra for a bigger SD card, if they’re unreliable anyway)? Do ones from different sellers have different software? Should I worry about trying to avoid malware, or just assume I’m going to want to wipe the thing and re-flash as soon as I get it, or what?
xtools@programming.dev 1 day ago
what i did is going for the smallest sd card, and buy a proper bigger one, then clone the “stock” card, and copy over roms and metadata from my nicely curated Batocera drive.
it can be super tricky to get any OS that officially supports the R36S to run on the clones, so i run the OS it came with. the device isn’t connected to the Internet so i don’t worry too much about malware.
dreamcast is simpler to emulate, n64 notoriously isn’t, I’ve been struggling with this system during my Raspberry Pi 3 emulation era already. the “real” R36S apparently is a tad more powerful than the cheap knockoffs, but i can’t seem to find it anymore - the closest available official one would be the RG35XX for $55