Hi!

I investigated so many times last years to find a good PICO-8 mobile hardware. On this BBS there are many posts talking about that but they are often involving complex solutions (I already had a Raspberry PI and did not want to spend the time again to setup and configure one) or are outdated, so I was giving up.

But I recently found that nowadays there are a ton of simple handheld devices able to run PICO-8 very easily. So I'm adding a new post to the collection, hoping it will help someone. You can find some of those devices in this guide but there are much more: if you dive into the channel of the guy who wrote this guide, you will find a bunch.

Personally I decided to buy a RG351m. PICO-8 runs beautifully on it and setup was super simple. The first time I tried a PICO-8 game I thought the screen was a bit too small but I got used to it very quickly. It's so fun to spend a couple of hours creating a game and then having it running on a real handheld game console right after! Discovering and playing games with Splore in the bed in also a great experience!

(nb: I made myself above's splash screen, for my own personal usage, from a picture I found on internet)

My latest small project running on it.

If someone is reading this review and is willing to buy such device, I would still recommend to buy one with a slightly larger screen, such as the Powkiddy RGB10 Max.

Nice! :D the Rg351V is also great for pico-8

I just ordered one about a week ago.
It seemed to be the only option with dual thumbsticks, wifi and the ability to run actual Pico-8 (rather than the Pico-8 emulator).
Can't wait to give it a go.

Yup, RG351V is also great for PICO8, can confirm. It also has a slightly higher Resolution (640x480) and runs on ARM (like any other RG351-Devices, but NOT RG350-Devices as far as I know), means it runs the "native" PICO8-Version for Raspberry Pi. An Emulator, such as tac08, isn't needed for that Device...

Screens:

My Smartphone-Camera isn't really good^^:

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There are non-transparent Cases as well^^.

> It seemed to be the only option with dual thumbsticks, wifi and the ability to run actual Pico-8

There is also at least the Powkiddy RGB10 Max that matches this requirement list. To run the real Rasberry PI version of PICO-8, any device able to run ArkOS will do, but I did not investigate enough to know if there are more of those devices with dual thumbsticks + embedded wifi.

I just wish that these devices had the equivalent of cartridge slots. No, MicroSD doesn't count - it's too small to show a logo and cover art, nor to have fun with the tactile experience of inserting and removing the cart. Ideally these Linux handhelds would have a CompactFlash slot, since that's physically the biggest flash card and the most like a console cartridge. Obviously even the oldest, smallest-capacity CF card is wild overkill in terms of storage capacity for PICO-8 carts, but this is about fun, not practicality.