Up to now the Gamepark 32 and the Sony PSP have pretty much been the standards for portable emulation. The former costs $200 and is frequently out of stock at import stores, however, and the latter costs even more than $200 and requires some hardware modding in a lot of cases. Not only that, at the very least, you have to install emulator software from the internet, and a lot of newcomers find it to be more hassle and confusion than is worthwhile.
Not to say that’s not as it should be, since you would assume part of the reason emulation never really gets cracked down on all that hard is that it is kind of inaccessible to all but the most determined (and at least halfway intelligent.) You can see where there’s a huge market for a portable, plug and play, “out of the box” emulation hardware, however. The “Pocket Retro Game Emulator” (PRGE), manufactured by some company that apparently wants to make it very hard for you to find out who they are or how to contact them, is being sold through ThinkGeek and several other major online stores, and is attempting to fill that market demand for easy portable emulation.
The specs it hits you with are fairly impressive for a $99 package. It claims to emulate all NES, Super NES, Gameboy, Gameboy Advance, Sega Genesis and Neo Geo games. All of the emulation is handled by software built into the unit and there’s no installing to be done on your part, you simply drag and drop ROM files from the computer to the unit via a USB connection. The unit also advertises the ability to play movie and audio files, read e-books, display JPEGs, record voice and even has a built in FM tuner. Internal storage is 4 GB and you can expand that via a mini SD card slot. The screen is 2.8 inches, video out to a TV is possible if you bring the cables, and the internal battery claims six to eight hours of play on a full charge.
Sounds pretty impressive, huh? Let’s put it to the test and see how well it performs at all these duties.
A good starting point is this video from ThinkGeek. You’ll notice that every game they show seems to run smoothly on it, this is because they are trying to sell it to you, so they cherry-picked games that are known to run well. Still, despite the smoke and mirrors here, the emulation on the PRGE works more often than it doesn’t. The highlights are the Gameboy, Gameboy Advance and NES emulation. These run just about anything you throw at them either at full speed or so close as to not be noticeable, and the sound emulation is near perfect as well. The SNES, unfortunately, struggles a lot more. Even one of the games that ThinkGeek shows off, Super Mario World, is running slightly slower and with a small amount of dropped frames, and with missing sound effects and instrument samples that are slightly off. That’s still one of the better ones of the bunch, and it is still playable despite the problems. However, the larger and more complex an SNES game, the more likely it is to have slowdown or dropped frames, or simply not run at all. Most of the games that utilize a special hardware chip, such as the two Starfox games, either don’t run at all or run very poorly. Sega Genesis emulation is overall better, with most games running and at full or near-full speed, and with sound that mostly seems to be on point.
Neo Geo games can also be run, and though it doesn’t seem to be advertised anywhere, so can a limited range of Capcom CPS1 games. The Capcom games in question are arcade games from around the late 1980s to mid 1990s. If you remember the old emulator Callus by Bloodlust Software, the list of games that this system can run is more or less identical to the ones that ran under Callus. In both cases, the games have a fairly high compatibility rate and are playable, but there is very noticeable slowdown and skipping of frames. It still comes out on the playable side but is a little irritating.
It turns out that the PRGE is actually a slightly modified version of the Dingoo A320, a handheld system released not long ago in China (where copyright and intellectual property laws range from very lax to totally nonexistent.) As such, the technical specs indicate that the system should be capable of emulating everything it advertises. So it’s likely just an issue with the firmware’s emulation, which could potentially be fixed by new firmware releases in the future (or by enterprising hackers making their own versions.)
The system itself is like a slightly larger NES controller with a screen inserted in the middle. The NES controller was passable, but not the most comfy to play on, and this thing gets the same ratings. It has the same basic setup as an SNES, with four face buttons, start, select, and two (very small) shoulder mounted buttons, so the number of buttons is adequate for everything that it emulates, but an extra mappable button or two would have been nice.
I expected the non-emulation features to be cheap throwaways but they are actually fairly robust. The overall menu system is pretty much lifted from the design of the PSP and PS3, but it was a pretty good one to pirate. The radio component actually seeks stations and stores lists of them in memory, and the antenna is actually built into the unit, both of which surprised me. As far as MP3 play goes, you are able to search by titles and ID3 tags, and the system reads tags and sorts by Album and Artist, there’s even an on-the-fly selectable Favorites list. It’s no iPod but it does get all the basic features right. Video play is actually better than everything up to the iPhone. The unit seems to play any encoding of MPEG or Real Video. If you select full screen playback you might get a hiccup or dropped frame here and there but it’s surprisingly fluid and powerful for such a cheap system. It offers “Flash Play” of .SWF files as well, indicating you might be able to get Flash games like Dino Run running as well.
For what is basically a cheap pirate system from China, I was actually left fairly impressed by this thing. On the whole, the emulation right now isn’t as letter perfect as you can get on the PC, but for most of the consoles it’s pretty close. Super NES emulation is still imperfect for all portables at this point, even the more powerful PSP, though this unit as-is is markedly worse at it than the PSP or even the Gamepark are. While there’s no promises, it is quite possible that the firmware could be upgraded and fixed to take care of the present emulation issues, and possibly add even more consoles to the mix. It also makes for quite a passable little portable music/video/radio player. At the $99 price point I expect there will be a lot of interest and thus a lot of hacking and upgrade. If you’ve got the free cash and the interest I would seriously consider picking one up before lawsuits start flying and they become a lot harder to get ahold of outside of China.
