Finally broke down and bought an Anbernic device, because I've been getting a Sega itch lately, so when I saw this thing I just could not resist. Most devices all go for the SNES/PS1 style layout and it never feels quite right with this era.
Thoughts so far:
- Screen is very nice. Bright and clear, though there seems to be no brightness control beyond a "night mode" that just makes the colors super dim.
- Performance is pretty much exactly what I wanted: Everything Sega up to 32X runs perfectly, and Saturn runs quite well but is still a little glitchy sometimes because it's Saturn emulation.
- Sound is shockingly pants. The speakers are nearly inaudible for me at anything less than around 90%, and for some reason the Saturn emulation is worse, being barely audible over a strong breeze even at 100%.
- Controls feel great though. It really does feel like they just stuck a screen in the middle of a Saturn controller, though the C button does run a bit too close to the edge of the grip for my tastes. Makes games like Virtua Racing and Daytona USA that use C as primary button feel a bit awkward.
- Build quality is ... hard to describe. It's clearly very solid, no flex or anything like that, but it feels so so light, in that way only a cheap knockoff console can. Still, at least that makes it an easy carry, and for the price its exactly what you'd expect.
- Setup was mostly painless. I didn't opt for a preloaded card because they're always a mess and I like to curate my collection, but if you pop a blank one in, on boot it'll automatically organize the folders how it likes and then you just bung them in.
- One wrinkle was how to handle Saturn and Sega CD games, which tend to come as .bin/.cue sets, and i had a bit of fiddling getting them organized in a way I liked, and that the Anbernic would see, but some of that's because of the messy files I get from my source.
- Scraping ... well it has wifi, for some reason, but it can't do it itself, and so far I've not found a tool that spits out images in a format it likes. So no pretty image previews for my games, which also makes most of the UI themes even uglier.
- Which brings me to the UI. You have a choice between 4 flavors of ugly, and incredibly basic. I stuck with the latter. It's more or less functional, you can get to your games list, and run a game. One weird quirk I don't like though is that for some reason it splits the systems into two different lists depending on whether it runs them in RetroArch or a standalone emulator. So most of my games are under the RA folder, except Saturn is all by itself next to an open source port of Prince of Persia that came preloaded for some reason.
- Speaking of RA, I do like that there's a dedicated button on the top of the system that just gets me to the menu, but tbh, I'd rather have a button that just goes back to the games menu. My ideal working relationship with RA is that I don't even know its installed, and I never have to see its awful menus even once. Instead I have to hit that button and then navigate to the "Quit Retroarch" option every time I wanna quit a game, which is a little annoying.
- Mind you, this is all talking about the stock Linux-based OS. I got the ARC-D, which also has the option of booting over to Android, and even includes a touch screen to make that a less painful experience. But it doesn't have Gapps, which means no Play Store, and I'm told that Saturn emulation performs very badly on the Android port on this device, so for now I'm sticking to the stock OS.
- Virtua Fighter 2 looks so good on this I genuinely suspect they've deliberately fiddled with the build.
Caveat emptor, it's another Anbernic console, but by all reports and my experience, one of the better ones at least, and it does the job I wanted it to so far.