I’ve always really enjoyed older consoles, or, I mean they weren’t really that old when I started out playing them, I grew up on the dmg Gameboy, and have been mostly having all the nintendo handhelds as they have been released.

Emulation has always been kind of magic, and I’ve really enjoyed it, to the extent that I do have aftermarket SNES controllers more or less always connected to my PC, to have some fun playing old games. The downside about that has always been that I have to sit down in front of my PC to enjoy playing old games that I enjoyed, and I’ve always been more of a handheld gamer.

For a while now (3+ Years) I’ve been listening to the “Into the Aether” podcast, and Brendon there has been talking about his emulation handhelds for a while. I don’t quite know why but it always felt like something that I didn’t really have the possibility to have myself.

That is where joel comes in, he was also getting into emulation handhelds and was pushing me towards getting one for myself. So I eventually got to it and ordered one off of amazon. It took a while for it to arrive though, as the first shipment got lost by amazon, but the second one did arrive.

I got the miyoo mini plus in nice gray gameboy colours, which I really like the look of. It does come with an SD card filled with stuff, but many has warned me off that, so I haven’t used this card at all, using a known good SD card brand that I knew from before, and installing the onionOs on it from the get-go, it has a lot of comfort functions and emulation cores that supports a lot more systems by default. Which is really nice.

I didn’t really want to think too much about which roms to download and stuff like that so I went with a curated pack tiny best set go and supplemented it with roms from roms megathread since tiny best set doesn’t really have any Nintedo DS or Playstation roms in it (My SD-Card is small 32 gb so I didn’t go for the bigger collections). I also did not copy over the arcade roms, since they don’t really interest me much. After a short while I got going. I was trying to evade my normal pattern of just using a lot of time customizing and adding games more than actually playing them so that was a short way to get started and just get going.

I’ve been testing out some different games, and the little device seems to just play everything I chuck at it well, even the more demanding nintendo ds games and playstation games, which left me pretty impressed.

The handheld form factor really makes a huge difference in how much I do enjoy playing handheld games it turns out. I’ve tried doing emulation on my phone, but even though the games ran perfectly, it just didn’t feel right. I really like having the physical buttons and it being an all in one dedicated machine. Just like having an ebook reader dedicated to read books, having a device dedicated to emulating just makes sense to me, and it feels great.

After having played a bit around with just seeing how stuff runs, I decided to start playing pokemon games, I never really played any of the ones after the first generation, and this feels like a really good time to go on. There is something about a simple monster capturing game that doesn’t really demand that much of me, it’s nice to have something to wind down with after work. So I started out with pokemon Chrystal, and I’m really impressed about how good it looks to be a Game Boy colour game. So far I’m really enjoying it.

We’ll see what the future brings, but I’m really having fun with this thing now.