Playing retro games on the actual device they were designed to be played on is expensive and difficult. It may be hard to find the hardware, or the games, or they may be prohibitively expensive. Any combination of these factors leads one to search for alternatives to the original hardware. This is where emulation comes into play. If you have a powerful enough machine, then you can download software that will allow that machine to pretend to be the original hardware. Then you can just download the games you want to play and file them onto your system for easy use.
Portable emulation machines are something that has cropped up in recent years to deal with the handheld market that appears to have experienced a bit of a drop off. A single machine can run a multitude of emulators, allowing for a large library of games to be played on that device. The handheld emulator I ended up choosing was the Ambernic RG351P, part of a family of handheld gaming stations that are available at a reasonable price.
This is where my adventure began. When I unboxed the platform, it was packaged well, with setup instructions that were short and easy to understand. I slipped the MicroSD card into the slot and turned it on. It responded on the first touch. After displaying a few lines of code, it started up and loaded into an interface.
This machine is built on Linux, which is an operating system independent of Windows and MacOS. While I have no experience with Linux, I do have a lot of experience with emulators. The card came preloaded with an assortment of games, ranging from Capcom to PC Engine--a device that was only released in Japan in the early nineties.
However, this is where my adventure ramped up in difficulty. I had bought this device to play games that were released on the PSP. When I started up Valkyria Chronicles 3, I immidiately noticed a distinct crackling noise. I restarted the machine and checked the options menu. I switched the emulation software to the other of two pre-installed systems. It seemed to work.
This cascaded, though, as saving on the new software was wonky and didn't work very well. I quickly filled up the available slots--it seemed that I was unable to overwrite old saves. This resulted in me opening up the save data folder using a SD to USB converter. I deleted the saves through the file explorer interface and that worked for a while.
Then I decided to try playing visual novels on the device. They would not save on the Liberto/PPSSPP emulator, so I was forced to switch to the original PPSSPPSDL software kit. While tinkering around with saving options, I accidentally screwed up saving for all the other games as well. This was irreversible, as I spent an hour trying to get it working again. I thought that I would have to return the device, as it was almost unusable. Then I discovered a whole group of people who were working with the exact same machine I was. They had created a completely new OS, and also recommended using a different microSD card, as the ones that came packaged with the device were notorious for being low quality. Learning this, I immidiately bought a high-end SD card from amazon that was Samsung branded for under twenty dollars, guaranteeing some degree of quality. Then I flashed the new OS to the card using a specialized software. The device booted up perfectly, I transferred my saves without issue, and got to gaming.
In the end, I enjoyed this adventure, not just because it allowed me to have access to a number of old games that are not really supported anymore. It required a large amount of expertise, both with computers and with emulators in specific. I had some of that expertise already, but this project really taught me something. I enjoyed it, and to me it was worth the price of admission simply because of how interesting it was. And that, I think, is the ultimate value of any piece of technology.
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