After spending time with Anbernic's RGSP, my hands-on review is now live. Mine got super delayed because I have a ton of other things I've been working on, so I'm sure not much in here will be a surprise to anyone. But if you're a fan of written articles, then this might tick that nostalgia box for you.
I spoke with Frysee, the lead developer of NextUI, and pvaibhav, who has been leading much of the H700/RG SP implementation, about what it takes to bring NextUI's firmware experience to Anbernic's latest clamshell effort. Frysee's dev unit arrived a good few days ago, so by the time you all have these in your hands, whatever tiny quirks will have been well ironed out.
Their takes on topics like boot times, display calibration, lid detection, feature parity with stock firmware, and the philosophy behind creating a true "pick up and play" experience was nice, and add a perspective. I hope at least some of you here enjoy it :)
how does this compare to the r36s?
The R36S is a pretty unique device. It is very low powered, by the retro handheld industry standards. It is very cheap (by anyone's standards), and it is not built, maintained nor shipped by any one single company. The strengths of it is that it is so widely available, and one of the smartest developers I know (bmdhacks, who recently joined in as the lead dev for ARMSX2) swears by them. In fact I covered his work for the R36S specifically, not so long ago:
https://gardinerbryant.com/the-anatomy-of-an-impossible-port/
But it really is as entry-level-to-the-hobby as you can get. There are infinitely more powerful devices all over the place. This one, the RGSP is just...different. It is specifically designed to be about as good as you can hope for to play GBA games, but also covers most systems up to PSX.
Comparing the two is waaaaay too apples to oranges to make much sense here. While they technically do the same thing, they do it so differently that owning one over the other (or both) makes as much sense whichever way you cut it :)