Miyoo CFW handhelds: are they worth USD 40+?
I used to really like the Dingoo A320. Well, I still do, but I wonder if anything has gotten better at the extreme low end of handheld console gaming in slightly over a decade. So I got a BittBoy 3.5, a Pocket Go, and a Powkiddy V90. btw, what is it with Chinese product name euphony? Are they actually trying to sound like rubbish? Or just being sarcastic?
All three devices use the same custom firmware "Miyoo". I tested this by swapping SD cards with all three and pretty much the only thing that was amiss was the boot splash screen: For example, if you put the V90 SD card in a Pocket Go, it boots up fine but still shows that "Powkiddy" splash logo.
The Powkiddy, which looks very much like a Gameboy Advance SP, has the biggest screen so I'll concentrate on it from here on. Most OpenDingux stuff has been ported and works fine. Gameboy Advance still seems a little slow and many PSX games are still unplayable. Emulators of obscure systems (TI 99/4A, Atari 800/5200) appear to have not been updated at all--just ported--since the death of the Dingoo: the same problematic games still look messed up or crash. Most of the old native OD games are available and work. Capcom--mostly stupid whack-whack-whack, button-mashing fighting arcade games with very pretty backgrounds--work at full speed, but I hate them. Mame4all emulates most classic arcade games fine although screen rotation kinda sucks with a clamshell device. So the Dingoo is better if you wanna play Galaga.
It came with a funny SD card brand I'd never heard of "Seapiy." Whatever...better back it up before it fails, LOL. I copied it to hard disk using dd, just in case it has any good roms, games, or not-too-broken emulators. The "original" FW appears to be some old version of Miyoo or they just stole the pretty splash screen, who knows.... The only huge annoyance I found was that there was no obvious way to lower the high screen brightness. (Brighness is adjustable on current Miyoo CFW.)
The easily-replaced battery, BL-5C of Nokia fame, seems pretty meh but I'm not sure I can trust the tiny gmenu2x battery meter; it is both hard to see and probably wrong anyway. I guess a few hours is good, since I can't stand to play games much longer. No tricky-to-open case and soldering to replace battery like in the Dingoo!
I really like that there is no package management on Miyoo. On other more expensive RetroFW handhelds, the opk packages seem like nice, easy plug-n-play but they add complexity, the read-only filesystem makes porting games a pain in the ass, and encourages users to be completely clueless and not worry their pretty little heads about how anything works. (Just whine to, or stroke egos of, 2 or 3 unpaid developers on Discord or wherever and they might fix things whenever, if they feel like it.) It is just fine on the Dingoo/Miyoo devices having the binary and all it needs in a folder and just manually (though gmenu GUI) adding a link to gmenu2x.
So Powkiddy is about as powerful as the original Dingoo: meaning GBA is pretty good, older handhelds and 8-bit micros are mostly perfect (except for odd-ball systems few people had), PSX and beyond is still no-go. (I'm not even trying Pocket Go and BittBoy because their screens are just too small.) Battery life is comparable to the Dingoo A320. It is better than Dingoo in that it is a clamshell and you don't really need a case. Its (two) speakers are garbage, just like the Dingoo's, but at least they do not point downward. It is easy to cross-compile software for both devices, and a lot of "porting" from OD is just Makefile editing or figuring out which functions (mostly SDL) changed from versions 1.x to 2.x.
Unfortunately, the Dingoo A320 is viewed by some as collectable, and often goes for crazy prices on eBay ~100 USD. So I guess the Powkiddy, with a bigger screen and nice clamshell is the lesser rip-off at 40-50 USD. Replacing the battery is also MUCH easier on the Powkiddy. Nevertheless, its crappy plastic and awful speakers makes me feel like it is really worth $20. So wait for it to go on sale or save up your eBay bucks....
All three devices use the same custom firmware "Miyoo". I tested this by swapping SD cards with all three and pretty much the only thing that was amiss was the boot splash screen: For example, if you put the V90 SD card in a Pocket Go, it boots up fine but still shows that "Powkiddy" splash logo.
The Powkiddy, which looks very much like a Gameboy Advance SP, has the biggest screen so I'll concentrate on it from here on. Most OpenDingux stuff has been ported and works fine. Gameboy Advance still seems a little slow and many PSX games are still unplayable. Emulators of obscure systems (TI 99/4A, Atari 800/5200) appear to have not been updated at all--just ported--since the death of the Dingoo: the same problematic games still look messed up or crash. Most of the old native OD games are available and work. Capcom--mostly stupid whack-whack-whack, button-mashing fighting arcade games with very pretty backgrounds--work at full speed, but I hate them. Mame4all emulates most classic arcade games fine although screen rotation kinda sucks with a clamshell device. So the Dingoo is better if you wanna play Galaga.
It came with a funny SD card brand I'd never heard of "Seapiy." Whatever...better back it up before it fails, LOL. I copied it to hard disk using dd, just in case it has any good roms, games, or not-too-broken emulators. The "original" FW appears to be some old version of Miyoo or they just stole the pretty splash screen, who knows.... The only huge annoyance I found was that there was no obvious way to lower the high screen brightness. (Brighness is adjustable on current Miyoo CFW.)
The easily-replaced battery, BL-5C of Nokia fame, seems pretty meh but I'm not sure I can trust the tiny gmenu2x battery meter; it is both hard to see and probably wrong anyway. I guess a few hours is good, since I can't stand to play games much longer. No tricky-to-open case and soldering to replace battery like in the Dingoo!
I really like that there is no package management on Miyoo. On other more expensive RetroFW handhelds, the opk packages seem like nice, easy plug-n-play but they add complexity, the read-only filesystem makes porting games a pain in the ass, and encourages users to be completely clueless and not worry their pretty little heads about how anything works. (Just whine to, or stroke egos of, 2 or 3 unpaid developers on Discord or wherever and they might fix things whenever, if they feel like it.) It is just fine on the Dingoo/Miyoo devices having the binary and all it needs in a folder and just manually (though gmenu GUI) adding a link to gmenu2x.
So Powkiddy is about as powerful as the original Dingoo: meaning GBA is pretty good, older handhelds and 8-bit micros are mostly perfect (except for odd-ball systems few people had), PSX and beyond is still no-go. (I'm not even trying Pocket Go and BittBoy because their screens are just too small.) Battery life is comparable to the Dingoo A320. It is better than Dingoo in that it is a clamshell and you don't really need a case. Its (two) speakers are garbage, just like the Dingoo's, but at least they do not point downward. It is easy to cross-compile software for both devices, and a lot of "porting" from OD is just Makefile editing or figuring out which functions (mostly SDL) changed from versions 1.x to 2.x.
Unfortunately, the Dingoo A320 is viewed by some as collectable, and often goes for crazy prices on eBay ~100 USD. So I guess the Powkiddy, with a bigger screen and nice clamshell is the lesser rip-off at 40-50 USD. Replacing the battery is also MUCH easier on the Powkiddy. Nevertheless, its crappy plastic and awful speakers makes me feel like it is really worth $20. So wait for it to go on sale or save up your eBay bucks....
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