I’m holding a R36S emulator console. It’s transparent black with a d-pad on the left, two analog sticks, three buttons in the center and your standard A/B X/Y buttons to the right. On-screen is Zelda: Ancient Stone Tablets for SNES.

Picked up a R36S emulator console at a local video game place while my Switch was getting serviced last week.

I thought it would be a short lived little toy to tinker with until I got the Switch back, but I’ve been hooked! I’ve been playing a lot of ROM hacks and other homebrew stuff like Metroid Ascent and The Legend of Zelda: Parallel Worlds.

My favorite genres lately have been Metroidvanias and turn based RPGs anyway so this little handheld is right up my alley.

I’ve been getting hit with so many waves of nostalgia! Not really because of the retro games I’ve played a million times but more in the way of console modding and weird Linux distros like I used to screw around with back in the original Xbox days.

It runs on a distro called ArkOS which feels a lot like the UnleashX dash or Xbox Media Center from back in the day. I thought it was pretty wild that it boots right off a microsd card too. The one it comes with is shit; everyone recommends immediately replacing it with a better one, so I flashed the community version of ArkOS on a 128GB Sandisk card. Just as easy as making a bootable Ubuntu thumb drive.

I honestly have absolutely no idea how companies are selling these things preloaded with everything from Megadrive and SNES to PSP and Dreamcast ROMs. Nintendo alone is pretty hardcore about taking down anyone who shares ROMs (even the Internet Archive) so these things have to be breaking some kind of copyright laws or something.

Definitely recommend picking one up if you like old school video games. I overpaid for mine because I bought it at a local brick and mortar shop but I’ve seen them online anywhere from like $20 to $40.