ANBERNIC RG-ARC (or, “Return of the Nomad”)

Forgot to mention that I got mine!




Extremely comfortable; maybe my favorite handheld ever as far as ergonomics go. Colors look super nice too. Superb design.

As mentioned before, it can only go so far on Saturn and 6th gen emulation, but everything below that works fairly well. At the very least for Dreamcast, it can play Virtua Fighter 3tb and Soul Calibur well. Haven't tested Project Justice or Tech Romancer yet but if it can play those then we're pretty much golden. Though I would like to test Model 2 and 3 emulation on it too at some point. Aching for some Daytona and SCUD Race on the go.

This is pretty much gonna become my machine for playing Genesis/32X/CD, NES/SNES and GB/GBA games. I just wish the menus were a bit less ducktape-and-glue, and that it wasn't such a hassle to change mappings. That's about all I've got bad to say though. I'm loving it.

 

How is the performance on the Saturn and PS1 performance on the thing?

 

Apparently there's a custom firmware for this now called ROCKNIX, which was recently updated. I don't know if this is the first version for the ARC or not, but it came out yesterday. Anyway, it uses an EmulationStation front-end, and it seems much nicer than the stock firmware (which was serviceable but clunky).

Annoyingly, it uses B for confirm and A for cancel, which takes some getting used to; the stock firmware uses A for confirm and B for cancel, which feels more natural. The ideal would be A and C for confirm and B for cancel, but we'll probably never get that because it's a niche device that we're lucky anybody is supporting at all.

You can store your ROMs on the same SD card or on a second SD card; if you use a second SD card, you have to move all the directories into a subdirectory called "roms" or it won't find them (e.g., roms/neogeo instead of just neogeo at the root, which is where the stock firmware wants them, so if you have the card set up for the stock firmware, you'll have to move them). For CD-based systems, you had to put everything in its own subdirectory for the stock firmware (e.g., roms/segacd/Sonic CD, then the cue file and all the bin files inside there), but for this firmware, you want to just dump everything in the folder for the system (so put all the cue and bin files for every game directly into roms/segacd with no subdirectories).

Capcom CPS games didn't work for me using whichever emulator core it uses when you put the ROMs in the the cps1/2/3 folders (EmulationStation shows them under the appropriate platforms fine, but when I played them, it played the audio and responded to inputs but displayed no video), but they work under FinalBurn Neo (under the fbneo folder). Everything else seems to work fine, though.

You can exit games by holding Select and pressing Start twice (or raise the RetroArch menu with the F button).

To correct something I said last time:

Ten buttons is actually standard for basically all of these devices (the ones that have analogue sticks anyway). The Z and C buttons on the ARC correspond to the L3 and R3 buttons that you get from pressing in the sticks on other devices.

(Edit: I forgot to copy all the BIOS files to the roms/bios folder. I noticed when I tried playing a Sega CD game, and it wouldn't work. Oddly, Saturn games worked without the BIOS files. Anyway, after I copied all the BIOS files over, CPS games worked fine. So don't forget to do that.

Also, I found an option for swapping the A and B buttons in EmulationStation, which makes it a lot nicer to use. It's in the options under UI Settings.)

 

You can run about maybe 50-75% of the saturn library on the thing, but you'll have to enable frameskip to get it to run full speed. Without frameskip, you're looking at usually somewhere around 45-50 fps. Frameskip in Yaba Sanshiro is just a blunt auto on/off feature, so when you turn it on, it tries to lock to 60 fps with the appropriate frame skip, i.e. 5 or 6 frames or so. Most 3D sega Saturn games already were iffy about framerates in the first place, with 3D object planes rendering at different framerates than the background usually, so I don't find the frameskip too distracting or anywhere near a deal breaker. I bought this pretty much specifically to have a handheld Sega Saturn, and I feel happy with the purchase. Stuff like Virtua Fighter 2, Fighting Vipers, Virtual On, Shining Force III, and Panzer Dragoon Zwei run well enough that I can enjoy them. There are sadly a number of big name games that just don't run at all, as in black screen emulation, notably Burning Rangers, and NiGHTS into Dreams is a much lessened experience because of the lack of the analog stick, but overall, for the main games I like on the saturn, it works well. 2D stuff in particular, like Legend of Oasis, looks gorgeous on the small 4:3 screen.

Playstation stuff runs on a potato and has for decades. It is completely fine here. The main point of this is really to provide a Sega focused handheld, and from everything Master System to 32X, you've got perfect compatibility, and with Saturn and Dreamcast, much more "hit" than "miss" to the point where it's still worth it. FWIW Dreamcast stuff actually runs better than Saturn stuff, but there is less interesting things to play from the Dreamcast due to lack of analog stick. Plus, since a huge part of the Saturn and Dreamcast libraries are 2D fighters, you can get those better in MAME on the same machine, outside of Naomi stuff like Marvel vs Capcom 2 (which runs well on the machine regardless).