Retro gaming is a massively popular Raspberry Pi application, and while loading your favourite old video games onto an SD card is pretty straightforward, building the physical shell of a gaming system can be daunting for those of us without 3D printers or design skills of any kind. PiBoy Mini bridges that gap by providing partially-assembled devices to their customers. The rest is BYORP: bring your own Raspberry Pi.
These things are cool in theory, but $100 before the computer is past what I’d pay for a novelty.
So you like $200-150 for a working system. Then the steam deck is like hey im $400 and way more capable.
Sometimes the portability is nice.
There’s also a ton of emulation handhelds out there that can likely do the same thing with better firmware for around $100. Look at the RG35XX or the Miyoo Mini. Both devices can play up to PSX.
I see what your saying.
Its a cute device, but 90 bucks without a pi or sd card?
Here’s a photo taken from their website.
The triggers look like they would get very tiring to use. There’s also only two so you wouldn’t be able to play PSX.
Nice idea but I can’t remember the last time I saw a Pi for sale. Might as well be powered with unicorn dust.
They stopped or had severely limited production but I think they have started back up in the last few months.
I bought a piboy from the same company. It was hot garbage. Took forever to boot, fan whined like crazy things of problems.
I sent it on to be fixed and they told me nothing was wrong with it. Never again.
I don’t see how that could be a PiBoy issue (except for the fan, but that could be caused by high CPU usage).
Slow bootup could be an issue with the RPi or the microSD card, or most likely the OS that you chose run on it.
That’s rough.
I genuinely do understand the realities of manufacturing niche stuff making the high price kind of unavoidable, but you have to have high build quality to justify it to the consumer.
Yeah I got a dmg from them. I wouldn’t necessarily go as far as hot garbage. But I did end up being pretty disappointed with it. Communication was bad. The fan was awful. Constant screen tearing. Lots of issues overall. It was a really neat idea. And I’m sure they can/will improve. But now that I have an analogue pocket, and a steam deck, I feel no need for another one of these. And I can use my pi4 for other things now
The final cost of this device is a bit of a hard ask in a world where we have a lot of Android and Linux handhelds out there. It seems like this would only be a good idea for users who just really want a raspberry pi as their emulation device for the familiarity.
The main advantage is that this is upgradable. So when they come out with a new Pi, you don’t need to buy the whole kit, just swap out the Pi. The old Pi can be relegated to home automation tasks or resold.
I agree in theory. But most of us won’t do that because we aren’t familiar reusing things in this way. As in, it won’t be reused. Not because it’s hard, only because we won’t be arsed to. And it’s sad.
Aren’t there SBC handhelds with faster SoCs than a Pi though?
Of course. The main advantage of this is upgradability. Say you wanna play Gen 6 consoles in the future and there’s a Pi Zero 3 out, you could just swap out the Pi to upgrade your handheld. Or maybe someone comes out with a better shell, maybe even a different form factor with a 16:9 display or something, you could just swap out the bits instead of buying a whole new handheld.
Hmm, I’m just thinking it’s sto;; not really worth it, because for the value to be better the retro handhelds I think you need like quite a few upgrade cycles. which by then you might be outclassed in other areas like screen and what not; if I’m not wrong the Broadcom SoCs are really slow in comparison to what’s out there, or did I misjudge the processing power?
Also, here’s an alternative which uses a RPi Compute Module 4 instead, if you need more power.
My raspberry pi4 is collecting dust I dunno what to use it for 🤔
Magic mirror, pihole, lightweight media server, lightweight home assistant
