Everyone knows the “handheld market” is hot right now. On top of the old crop of “open-source handhelds,” we’re drowning in “high-performance handhelds.” Plenty of people are chomping at the bit for these things, but most of them are “playing with the machine, not the games”—buying one after another, testing for a bit, then stopping cold. Some call this “electronic impotence.” I don’t buy it. I just think most of today’s “handhelds” don’t deserve the name. They’re more like a “giant desktop PC you can cradle in both hands.” Whether it’s Aya or GPD, each new machine is bigger than the last, and heavy too. I basically have no desire to take them out anymore—you need a dedicated shoulder bag just to carry one. And that’s not even the main issue. The most awkward part is that battery life on these handhelds tops out at two hours. Good luck getting enough playtime out of one on a trip. Aya even showed off a concept machine called the Next 2 that ditches the battery entirely and has you play plugged in. Which is basically an admission that this thing isn’t a “portable handheld” anymore—it’s just a mini desktop you can hold in your hands. If that’s the case, why not just use the TV at home?

Zhou Ge (Maxzhou) is one of those figures in the “open-source handheld” scene who gets both love and hate. The love is because he keeps cranking out new products, and the new products generally look pretty good. The hate is because they’re all expensive, the performance gains are minimal, and people roast him for “harvesting the leeks.” Honestly, though, while there’s profit in Zhou Ge’s machines, calling it leek-harvesting is a stretch. His machines just take open-source designs and pile on a lot of his own tweaks and optimizations—higher-quality metal shells, better-feeling conductive rubber pads and metal dome switches, and so on. You can argue this kind of handheld isn’t worth that much, but if you bought one and modded it yourself, the cost wouldn’t be much lower than buying straight from Zhou Ge. Think of it as buying a fully modded open-source handheld out of the box, saving you the hassle later. From that angle, it’s really not that expensive.

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.

This post has been updated: Check out the new firmware guide and tinkering notes: /archives/9750/ I loved handhelds as a kid, and the habit stuck. I bought a PSV, I bought a Switch, and I still enjoy just holding a handheld and fiddling with it. Recently I was bored, stumbled onto this whole open-source handheld scene online, saw a bunch of crowdfunding projects, and ultimately—because I’m broke—went with the cheap Subor Retro Game (RS97).