Finally got my hands on an ANBERNIC RG 34XXSP, which is by far a very good GameBoy Advance SP clone if you look from a distance. From the looks, the ports, and the clicky buttons, this shares striking similarities to the original SP – and it even has modern USB-C charging.
My model has the gamecube color scheme and the B, A, Y, X buttons has the SNES color scheme. And the thumbsticks are there incase you wanted to play 3D games from PS1, Nintendo 64, Gamecube? For my use, I’m happy with just the D-PAD since I won’t be gaming with those systems.
The system itself off Amazon did come with ANBERNIC’s own linux firmware on a SD card. This thing won’t boot if there is no SD card. There is 2 slots, one for the firmware which always goes to TF1 and another slot is used for games. But I’ve decided to put everything in 1 card since I won’t be having to many games on the device.
The SD card does come packed with an assortment of gaming handheld bios and games from various systems. But the original firmware is quite buggy with RetroAchivements keeps logging me out from RetroArch if I started playing CPS1, arcade and few other games above Megadrive and the Famicom era. Gameboy games are shifted 16px down and has a black bar on the top causes platformer games to be a hit and miss.
Eventually for me, enough is enough and decided to flash KNULLI instead.
I didn’t realize the newest hardware revisions of the SP require the latest Scarab release of KNULLI. and I flashed the older Gladiator II dozens of times, tried different SD cards and the reset + power combo to no avail. Once I flashed the SCARAB build and plugged in a USB-C cable, the device instantly lit up and was ready to go. Apparently ANBERNIC did a slight hardware revision to the boards that breaks compatibility with older OS builds.
If you are familiar with Batocera, EmuDeck, RetroBat or even the OG EmuStation, this would be familier to you in terms of the layout, settings and so on. The difference is KNULLI is forked from Batocera, it uses a stripped-down, optimized version of the classic theme engine specifically tailored for low-powered handhelds.
Since I’ve used RetroBat on PC, I then ported some of my collections and ANBERNIC’s collections and copied over the SD cards. And out of all the systems I’ve tested so far like Famicom, MegaDrive, GameGear, GameBoy and MSX ran flawlessly and RetroAchievements logged all of the games and playtime just fine. However, outdoors with no Internet connection is a struggle and requires you to select a new connection each time you’ve disconnected from home network.
So, if you have any suggestions, hit me up.
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