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?
I’m not sure about the price/performance ratio of the actual SoCs, but if you take the Pi Zero 2 W for instance ($15), it can comfortably emulate most consoles up to the 5th generation (PS1, Saturn, N64). The performance is equivalent to that of it’s direct competitor, the Miyoo Mini Plus ($80). If you want to upgrade the Miyoo Mini, you’d have to buy a whole new device, but with the PiBoy you only need to update the Pi (which will only be $15). So sure, it may still need a few upgrade cycles to match the value, but if you treat the original purchase as an investment, spending only $15 for an upgrade doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. Especially when you consider the resale value - the Miyoo Minis are already cheap, so the value of an older model wouldn’t be much if you were to sell it off on say eBay or something, since most folks would prefer buying a newer model which can handle emulating more recent consoles. Whereas the Raspberry Pis - even older ones sell well, one reason being a perpetual supply shortage (just look at all the people in this thread treating buying a Pi like finding unicorns), the other reason being a Pi is always useful - even the first Raspberry Pi can still be used today for things like basic home automation tasks, or even as a tiny web server, as a home security system, or wherever - hundreds of projects out there which don’t really need the computing power of a current gen Pi. Since the PiBoy is targeted at DIY-ers, no doubt there would be a significant portion of it’s buyers into DIY stuff and could make use of a Pi around the house. As DIY-er myself, I can never have enough Raspberry Pis, and always carry a spare Pi or two around with me when I go around - you never know when it may come in handy. For instance, when I recently visited some relatives overseas, I used one of the spare Pis in my backpack to convert their old printer into an wireless printer, so they could now print directly from their phones - and saved them from buying a whole new printer. Raspberry Pis always come in handy like that at unexpected times and places, so you can never have enough of them, but if you do, there are plenty of folks who’d be glad to take the Pi off you for their own projects.
Regarding the display on the PiBoy, I doubt you’d want to upgrade it that many times, I mean, it’s just a tiny 3.5" display used to play mainly 8bit and 16bit games, getting something like a higher resolution or vibrant display would make no difference, since most of these games are low res with a low color pallete. In fact, most of the OG displays of these handhelds had shitty displays by modern standards, so any modern display in itself is a big upgrade compared to what gamers played on back then. At the most, an upgrade which may be worth could be a brighter display or an OLED panel or similar, but even then it would be a one-off upgrade and really, it doesn’t add that much value when you’re mainly playing retro games on there. A display upgrade for a retro console is just one of those “nice to have if you’ve got the spare change” kinda deal.
Also, here’s the main thing: with competing handhelds like the Miyoo Mini Plus (or w/e) there’s no guarantee that there will be an equivalent upgrade. They could change the form-factor in the next Miyoo Mini, or change the material of the chassis, like say switching to a metal chassis, which may make it heavy for you. For instance see the Anbernic devices, although they’ve been around for a while and have released many devices, a new Anbernic may not necessarily be an upgrade for your current one, with so many different form factors to choose from. Like the RG351MP, which felt like a good upgrade on paper, but in reality, most users felt it’s metal body made it quite heavy, making it unsuitable for even moderate length gameplay. So the decicison to go all metal was actually a downgrade, making the earlier plastic versions better. So companies may pull stunts like this, messing around with the form factor or changing features, and then you’d need to look for some other manufacturer who may not have an equivalent, they may use Android for instance, which may result in poorer battery life and performance, so it may not be an upgrade for you.
Also, there’s the problem of support - most of the official firmware on these devices are never updated by the OEM, and they also kinda suck, so most SBC gamers prefer to use a custom firmware, like OnionOS, GarlicOS, ArkOS etc. And these community built firmware may suddenly decide to drop support for older devices, for instance, see how the very popular ArkOS dropped support for the still-popular RG351M/P devices, and users were forced to look for a different firmware. Now this is where the Raspberry Pi shines - not only are there several gaming-oriented firmware you can choose from (such as Retro Pie, JelOS etc), the fact that this is basically a full-fledged computer and a Pi means there are several generic distros you could always switch to, like the official Raspbian for instance, and then just set it up to boot directly into Retroarch or Emulation Station or w/e to get a similar experience as a custom gaming distro. And that’s where the Pi really shines, it’s massive community support and the plethora of software (and hardware) options. A device like the Miyoo Mini may be popular now, but it’ll soon be forgotten, like the poor RG351M/P, and turn into e-waste, whereas a Pi lives on practically forever, if not as a gaming SBC then maybe as something that’ll turn your coffee machine into a smart coffee machine.
That’s the true beauty of a Pi - it’s worth cannot be simply compared in terms of dollars.
My raspberry pi4 is collecting dust I dunno what to use it for 🤔
Magic mirror, pihole, lightweight media server, lightweight home assistant
Gpi case 2 would be a cheaper purchase. Only lacking a joystick and two other buttons, which really only os helpful for psx games which run okay at best on cm4 hardware.
Also, here’s an alternative which uses a RPi Compute Module 4 instead, if you need more power.
