Hands-on: Retro Game 350

I’ve been tinkering with open-source handhelds for a long time. The last one was probably the Retro Game 97 — I reflashed its firmware several times and even swapped the conductive pads. It worked well enough, but I always felt it wasn’t perfect and still had a lot of problems.

So a while back I was browsing the forums and found that a successor to the Retro Game 97, the Retro Game 350, had been released. The price seemed acceptable, so I bought one to check it out.

The packaging is pretty ordinary, the accessories inside are pretty ordinary, and then you take the machine out… and it no longer feels ordinary.

How should I put this — there’s plenty about this machine’s features on YouTube and the forums, so I’ll just give a quick rundown of my own impressions:

• USB Type-C port. Huge thumbs up!
• Bigger built-in battery, more than double the original. Huge thumbs up!
• IPS screen, QVGA resolution. Not high-res, but a lot of games run pixel-perfect on it. Thumbs up!
• The screen is Gorilla Glass 3 by default, so it’s already scratch-resistant
• The conductive pads are the “Zhou Ge” version by default — no DIY needed. Thumbs up!
• The default system is Open Dingo, with everything that can be enabled already enabled. Thumbs up!
• The machine’s HDMI output actually works. Thumbs up!
• It has dual analog sticks, but the left stick mimics the Switch, which feels very awkward in a lot of old games, and the feel is poor in games like QUAKE 2 and DOOM.
• There’s still room to optimize the system — GBA even runs less smoothly than on the RG97
• The processor it uses… still isn’t great
• It comes in several colorways. I still like the FC colors; I don’t like the transparent ones
• The biggest highlight of this machine, the one that completely crushes that other 350H bandwagon-jumper, is that it has dual speakers, and the sound quality is genuinely great

Overall, the pros far outweigh the cons. The feel and build quality are great, and I personally think it’s worth the 400 yuan. It’s way better than that Game Shell with its terrible screen and garbage battery life, and it’s very portable too. I’ve seen that people overseas have already released new firmware, so we’ll see if it gets better down the line.

Taobao purchases support interest-free installments, and it comes with freebies including a case and a tempered glass screen protector. The default screen is already good, but slapping on a protector doesn’t hurt.

Overall, apart from the controls being uncomfortable for some old games and the dual sticks feeling awkward in FPS games, I’m very satisfied with this machine.

Lots of people on the forums trash this machine, and from what I’ve seen most of them are complaining about the price. Personally, I think the build, materials and quality of the Retro Game 350 justify the 400 yuan price tag. If you insist on someone making a 199 yuan machine, you probably won’t get this screen, these ports, this built-in system, or these dual speakers.

Given the jump in quality that comes with the higher cost, I think the Retro Game 350 is a genuinely sincere effort and worth recommending.

Of course, if you play GBA and FPS games, that’s a different story — this isn’t really suited for them. GBA can wait for optimization, but FPS… the machine is too small, and gripping it with dual sticks is a bit uncomfortable, unless you have very small hands.