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.

23 points

These things are cool in theory, but $100 before the computer is past what I’d pay for a novelty.

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7 points

So you like $200-150 for a working system. Then the steam deck is like hey im $400 and way more capable.

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7 points
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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.

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2 points

I see what your saying.

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12 points

Its a cute device, but 90 bucks without a pi or sd card?

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11 points

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.

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6 points

Nice idea but I can’t remember the last time I saw a Pi for sale. Might as well be powered with unicorn dust.

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2 points

They stopped or had severely limited production but I think they have started back up in the last few months.

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4 points

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.

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2 points

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.

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2 points

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.

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1 point
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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

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