Bro, you are looking down into a deep deep deep rabbit hole.

What's your budget and what do you want to play? I haven't kept up with device reviews for a while, but here's what I had in my mind at last reading:

FYI: if you're destitute, then your smartphone and existing ancient PC will still be able to emulate more games than you know what to do with.

1. Budget: Mangmi Air X (up to PSP, gamecube and some 3DS)

2. financially comfortable: Retroid Pocket 6 (up to many modern PC games and most Switch emulation)

3. Trust fund: some top tier Ayn device

These devices have come a long way and come in every form factor and budget. There are loads of videos to watch. Don't worry about pre-loaded games, you'll be doing all that yourself. But that's one of the things you have to enjoy: hours of setup and figuring stuff out.

Retro Game Corps is a great place to start and their device database will be the place to go to compare devices.

Got me an Anbernic RGXX35 SP or whatever it’s called. The foldy gameboy. $70, came with an SD card with tons of games on it, only a few were good though. I got another SD card, threw MUOS on it, and grabbed the ROMs of the games I wanted. AI was actually fairly useful in discovering new titles that corresponded to PC games I liked (ex XCOM > Advance Wars). The system runs PS1 games easily. It’s been cool digging into older titles, as I didn’t play on handhelds/consoles much as a kid (born PC gamer). I think it should be priced closer to $50, but whatever. I get an occasional ooh and aah from nostalgic folks and it’s fun to show off. The main issues I have is that the standby feels more like a shutdown and it’s hard to quickly resume play if you have to close it, so it feels like more of a sit down and play console than a quick session like a phone provides; it’s good for places where you have to wait a while. Also the clicky buttons- I love the sound and feel but I get self conscious playing in a public space where there’s not enough noise to cover the sound. I like the idea of the Ayn Thor or whatever the system is called that is kind of like a retro steam deck that can play PC games but I’m not dropping 400+ atm on a system I won’t use as much as my PC probably. The SP was a great semi-low investment to dip my toes into the retro realm and I don’t regret it.

Edit: I have not tried the WiFi and streaming functionalities but it does have those.

If there's a particular model you're interested in, try doing a search for the model number plus "techdweeb" and "retro game corps". Both are Youtube review channels that specialize in that kind of hardware, and if it exists they've probably reviewed it.

1G1R packs are easy to come by, maybe take a peek over at archive.org

I wouldn't worry about what comes preloaded on the device, and instead focus on things like hardware/software quality, UI/UX, form factor, and compatibility with the games you're interested in.

I've got an Analogue Pocket because I wanted to play a mix of physical and digital content and it's great, but it really only plays up to GBA or so. No PS or more modern games, so there's that potential downside.

I bought a Anbernic RG35XX, flashed a custom firmware and downloaded Tinybestsetgo to get a better ROM selection. With this setup it has been a great devices that has used much time for me in a very portable fashion

There's legit ones like the Miyoo Mini Plus and other retroconsoles. Its a hobby onto itself.

I bought a Miyoo Mini Plus three years ago and liked it so much that I wish I'd bought a more expensive model with analog sticks. Ended up putting far more time into it than my bulky old Steam Deck... until I recently took it out of my bag and found that the screen broke.

Sadly, while I finally have an excuse to upgrade to that more expensive model with analog sticks, it's not in my budget right now. So I got out my old DSi and 3DS and have been tinkering with softmodding. If you've got either of those lying around already, those are also very good options.

They're cool, but as others have pointed out the roms that are pre installed are generally junk. They'll pack thousands of NES roms because they're small, and maybe a handful of PlayStation games. The SD cards provided will also be junk tier and need to be replaced because they will fail.

The r36s is a great entry point, it's cheap but has a large community so there's lots of guides to make flashing a new OS and even curated rom packs. It's far from perfect, but for $50ish all in and two hours of tinkering it gets the job done.

I did. So many tetris clones and mario bros clones

Just curate your own roms

I purchased the Powkiddy RGB10Max back in 2021. I think it was something like $100 or $150 and came with a 128GB microsd card. That included and operating system plus tens of thousands of games.

Based on some recommendations online, I made my own SD card using RetroOz as the operating system instead. It is better, but i'm not sure if was a big enough improvement that it was worth the effort.

People also recommended that I find my own Roms elsewhere, but that really wasn't necessary. Sure, some of them are Romhacks (modified versions of existing games that are obviously wrong, like Sonic64). But for thr most part they are just legitimate games for these old systems that you could have bought cartridges for in a store back in the 80's and 90's. The problem is the same problem we face today on tbe Switch eShop, PlayStation Store, and Steam: a lot of this is cheap junk.

Mine came with, as far as I can tell, the complete North American libraries for the Atari 2600, Master System, Genesis, NES, SNES, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance, and N64. It also came with smaller selections of games for PSP, PS1, Saturn, Dreamcast, GameGear and Nintendo DS. Plus a smattering of arcade games, and games for other systems i'm less familiar with (Intellivision, Colecovision, TurboGrafx, Wonderswan, SG-1000, PC-9800, MXS, etc).

By upgrading tk a 256gb card I was also able to add my own PS1 collection that I ripped from discs. I pirated a full collection of the Nintendo DS library, plus more games for Dreamcast, PSP, and Saturn. I added Phillips CDi and Atari Jaguar games too. I also used a second SD card to Ru LineageOS, a version of Android, which I used for Steam Link. This allowed me to stream from my desktop for pretty much any Steam game, plus non-steam games like emulators for PS2, PS3, WiiU, Switch, etc.

The whole experience was... Okay. The analog sticks were tiny. It only has 1 speaker. The shoulder buttons sucked. The screen was only 480p. Sleep mode didn't really work, and it takes like 4 minutes to turn the system on. Eventually the Wi-Fi and one of thr USB ports stopped working.

I am sure things have improved since then. I got a Steam Deck and have barely touched my RGB10 since. I don't regret the purchase though.

They're great, and there are so many retro handhelds out there - all sorts of shapes and sizes and price ranges. You need to do some research to see what you're interested in, but I'd recommend a cheap one to start (60-100 dollars). I'm using the Anbernic RG34XXSP and am very happy with it.

As for the ROM collections, it really depends on the manufacturer. Some are really good collections, and some are just trash with tons of duplicates or games in many different languages. One thing for sure is that there will be missing ROMs because they don't want lawsuits. I've heard most of them don't come with popular Nintendo or Pokemon titles, so you'll need to get them yourself.

Worst case scenario though is that you can just curate your own collection, or download a ready-made collection online and copy it over.

if you're just trying to play old games, nearly all of them are capable enough to run emulators up to ps1. pick the one that supports the controls you want or is in the form factor you find the most comfortable.

so many people on r/retrohandhelds fall into the trap of turning these shovelware devices into their hobby and owning like 15 of them. you need one... the rest are e-waste.

I have a Miyoo Flip v2 and RG35XXH and overall think they are great little handhelds. Out of the box they are functional but to get the most from them I'd recommend (its easy to do) a custom firmware and source your own ROMs to make them even better.

i got an r36s a few months ago, and replaced the microsd card immediately because they're dogshit and fail really quickly. sourced my own roms

like 2 weeks ago i upgraded to an anbernic rgsp, and it was a massive upgrade. replaced the microsd card on that one as well and sourced my own roms

i liked the r36s but i definitely recommend getting a higher quality device immediately to avoid e-waste (also, it's almost certain if you order a "r36s" right now, it will be a clone with poor performance and issues with custom firmware), because it's very likely that you'll want to upgrade because retro handhelds are cool and r36s devices are bottom shelf compared to pretty much everything except for the generic stuff. anything from anbernic for example is a lot better

flashing custom firmware to a microsd card is easy and sourcing roms is very easy too. having 20 000 random roms on a card (which 99.9% you don't give a shit about) that will fail in a few days or weeks is not preferable to a durable sd card with the games that you want to actually play

Often enough they are just poorly thrown together ROM collections. Often enough the worst ROM available is used. And they have numbers at the beginning of their names to sort them by whatever insane quality metric the company had, so good luck finding anything good.

I'd only buy one where you can supply your own ROMs. They are cheap enough these days.

No idea why Nintendo and Co let them do this. Sometimes they don't contain games by the big companies. But most of the time they actually do.