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.
Also, here’s an alternative which uses a RPi Compute Module 4 instead, if you need more power.
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 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.
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
Its a cute device, but 90 bucks without a pi or sd card?
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.
