Summary
DROIX blog review of the retroid-pocket-flip. Published 2023-05-04 on droix.net.
Benchmark Data
| BATTERY LIFE | Up to 8 hours depending on usage. In our tests we got just over 5 hours running 3DMark benchmark on a loop. |
FPS / Gaming Performance
- The Dolphin emulators have great compatibility but the Retroid Pocket Flip and similar handhelds do struggle with performance. Our go to game Burnout 2 works great and runs at mostly 60 frames per second. However you will find many games that are running at slower speeds, with many being unplayable.
- Our go to game God of War runs at mostly 60 FPS with very rare frame drops but nothing that spoils the gameplay.
Emulation Notes
- Dolphin emulator
- Citra Emulator
- We do not often get many arcade game requests so I wanted to check out a couple of suggested ones. With Arcade games I find you often have to spend a little time to make sure you are running the correct emulator with the ROM set you have. Some are for MAME 2003 while some are for MAME 2010 as an example. With RetroArch you can download a few different MAME and Arcade Cores and it should put them with the correct Core when you import the games.
- Again there are a few emulators in RetroArch and native such as DuckStation that you can use. PlayStation runs great on this handheld and I did not have any problems with performance. I recommend DuckStation as you get excellent results from it including graphics improvements.
- Now we get into the will games work or not area. PlayStation 2 emulation is relatively early on Android but with AetherSX2 we do see a few games working great. XIII and Shinobi were suggested and they do play very well.
- XIII on the PS2 emulator
- The Dolphin emulators have great compatibility but the Retroid Pocket Flip and similar handhelds do struggle with performance. Our go to game Burnout 2 works great and runs at mostly 60 frames per second. However you will find many games that are running at slower speeds, with many being unplayable.
- The Citra emulator has seen some decent performance improvements over time and I noticed less stuttering when shader caching on Sonic Generations.
- Ridge Racer 3D on Citra
- PlayStation Vita emulation with Vita3K is relatively early in terms of development but we were able to get some games running. The excellent TxK is very playable as were a few other games.
- We will now summarise our Retroid Pocket Flip review with our thoughts on the portable retro gaming console. The Retroid Pocket Flip is a very good gaming handheld in general. Its main use is for emulation and this is about as good as you are going to get in this price range right now. It can emulate up to the PlayStation 1 and Dreamcast era with no issues at all. And as we go into more recent generations we find good support for the handheld consoles. The Vita3K and Skyline emulators are relatively early in development and some games are playable which is impressive but don’t expect performance to be much better on these going forward.
- The choice of Android or Retroid Launcher is a nice touch. You can set up your game collection to have easy access from a decent game browser. It does take a bit of time to set up, but it is just as long as doing RetroArch or each emulator individually if you wanted to.
Source
Full review available at: https://droix.net/blogs/retroid-pocket-flip-review-with-video/