Miyoo flip review and notes
The Flip is a clamshell-style retro handheld from Miyoo with a 3.5 inch screen, like a Game Boy Advance SP with analog sticks and a few more buttons. So far it has had three versions: the original, the V2, and the V2.1. The V2 improves the original by adding Bluetooth and a stronger hinge (hinge breakage was very common). The V2.1 is a further improvement on the hinge. The device supports WiFi, HDMI mini out, a headphone jack, and has two SD card slots. I have the V2.
Edit: the day after I first wrote this, my hinge gave up. I have reordered a V2.1 from the official Miyoo store, which comes with a hinge guarantee and according to Reddit feels as sturdy as either the original Gameboy SP or the Miyoo Mini Flip, which isn’t plagued by hinge issues.
Like most devices in its price range, this thing will play anything up to PS1 with no problem, as well as a number of ported PC games (I was amazed I could play Morrowind on this thing!).
I love the clamshell design (I had a GBA SP so it’s a nostalgic form for me), and find the buttons and thumbsticks to be high quality. It folds nicely into a little pocket in my bag, and also my trousers pocket. I think now the hinge issues ought to be fixed with the release of the 2.1, this is a great choice if you want an inexpensive clamshell device, especially if you value having analog sticks (I don’t use them often, but it’s nice that they’re there). I also love having the option for HDMI — combined with Bluetooth controllers, it’s a decent setup for retro gaming on the TV.
Downsides: the stick placement. If you’re going to be doing a lot of stick-heavy games, you will find stretching your thumbs down while using the shoulder buttons with your index fingers and supporting the weight of the console on your other fingers to be an awkward stretch. Someone on Etsy sells grips that gives it a more traditional playstation-like shape — this may help, but I can’t justify the shipping costs to try it out. WiFi range is also a bit limited, but that’s fine; I don’t need it very often anyway.
Custom OSes
I have tried three custom OSes so far. In common, they all have out-of-the-box support for Portmaster, Syncthing, and a few other useful additional apps.
SpruceOS
This was the first OS I tried (I pretty muched installed it before even trying the stock OS). Honestly, this is a great OS. There are lots of quality-of-life features like OTA updates, a firmware updater, a library for downloading themes and so on. The options are all in logical places, and there is a great in-game overlay menu that pauses the emulation and gives you access to all your emulation options. The only downside for me is it does not support HDMI out. If it had this feature, I’d never have looked elsewhere.
Surwish
Surwish for me was janky. Maybe there was something wrong with my installation, but I kept finding that say, after entering an app and returning to the menu, that the theme was reset to default. I also found it very bloated. It supports a huge number of emulators, to a completely unnecessary degree for most people — but its mechanism for hiding unused emulators is by manually running an emulator cleaner app. But even worse, if you run this, there will still be loads of unused emulators in your menus, because the Surwish distribution adds a bunch of random unnecessary files to some emulator folders (some are literally just game recommendations, I think), thus counting that emulator as “in use”. Despite only having games installed on like 2 emulators, it still showed about 25 emulators as “in use” until I manually went through and deleted the crud. Spruce and Knulli automatically hide unusued emulators for their menus, and aren’t full of this bloat. Also, I don’t like how Surwish handles user data like save files and save states — they’re in a hidden RetroArch folder, along with all of the RetroArch system files. Spruce and Knulli do a much better job of keeping user data in easily accessible folders separate from system files, especially Knulli.
On the plus-side it has a similar nice in-game overlay menu to Spruce.
Knulli
Knulli is the OS I have settled on. The HDMI works nicely (even has cute bezel graphics to fill the space at the sides that naturally arise from playing a 4:3 game on a widescreen TV), it’s not bloated, and it has pretty much all the features I like from the other two, except the in-game overlay menu (you have to use hotkey shortcuts instead to do the same things). Like Spruce, it has a nice theme browser (though I ended up sticking with the default). I also really appreciate the architecture it enforces on its SD card — two partitions, one for system files, one for user files like games, screenshots and saves.
The only real downside is a slightly odd way it seems to handle lid events — closing the lid while the device is already suspended seems to wake it up.