Came across this over the weekend. It’s still pretty light on details and specs but the hardware looks interesting at first glance. If the cart slot is proprietary to the system it loses a bit of appeal to me. And it seems unlikely that Nintendo/Sega/Sony will be striking any deals with them anytime soon so I guess that leaves companies like Atari. But in 2019, I’m not paying any amount of money to emulate 2600 games, sorry. Maybe Lynx is in the works? The marketing is a little funny to me…“Yours to keep. Forever!” Gee, thanks for not breaking into my house to steal my shit!
Yeah I can’t see the big three supporting this, which will severely hurt it’s feasibility. Perhaps it’ll get hacked and would make a killer emulation system.
Tomorrow was meant to be the launch day for this - but it’s now become the beginning of an extended launch window due to COVID-related shipping delays. Understandable of course, but I just really wanted to ask you folk: Who’s picking one up?
I’m still on the fence. The early review from last month were certainly intriguing, and I’m glad the emulation is solid and that they’ve gone for a screen close to 240p. But despite the very appealing price (it’s equivalent to a single full price big console game here) there are two things which put me off buying one out of curiosity:
The button layout. Old photos of the handheld show it with a SNES face button layout, which makes sense given the supported formats (Lynx, Game Boy, Famicom and Super Famicom would all map perfectly to this layout). However, the finished unit uses the Dreamcast/Xbox ABXY layout, which is madness. There is an interesting interview with the project’s director that asks why this is, and it seems it’s based on the result of an non-contextualised Facebook survey with a small number of respondents. There’s a patch coming at least, presumably to make it so Evercade B = A etc. but it doesn’t change what may well be a permanent blight on the hardware’s exterior.
The Namco cartridges are cool curated selections, but I think we’ll see every Famicom game released in next month’s Namcot Collection on Switch. So I’m adopting a wait and see for now, as the only other cartridge I planned to pick up is the Data East one.
Overall I think the finished product is pretty compelling given the price point. However I almost wish they targeted enthusiasts more with a higher priced product, in exchange for more museum/history-like features in the carts, a higher quality display and exterior design etc. etc. For what they are doing though I can’t complain too much, face buttons aside. The cartridges in particular have a very attractive minimalist design while still feeling like they’d fit in with handhelds of the past, and even their pricing is extremely reasonable given what you get.
