With handheld retro gaming devices coming thick and fast from all directions, Chinese developers Anbernic seems to have the ability to continually churn out devices hand over fist, with modest hardware paired with eccentric design elements that make you sit up and take note.

The Anbernic RG405V is the latest of such devices, with a full 4" screen, twin analogue sticks and fully loaded with Android 12 for your gaming pleasure, and I have to say that it certainly looks the piece!

80s Style Game Boy Aesthetic, 2023 Capable Emulation Box

Unboxing the RG405V I was quite surprised by just how lightweight it was given the burly form factor. Weighing in at just 0.28kg it feels like a nicely balanced device to stave off wrist fatigue holding it up for hours on end.

The twin analogue sticks look superb and the buttons on the rear have a nice layout and a clicky quality to them that makes me think they should be pretty nice during use.

With the built-in RG Launcher software on a handy hardware button, the device looks incredibly user-friendly and fully loaded for emulation freaks, like me, to geek out on with very little fuss, just add your games to the SD, hit the launcher button, and hit X to re-scan for games. You can reskin your launcher as you see fit, or change the layout from a swishy-slidey cover-flow-style layout to a more simplistic grid, it's nice and easy to navigate with just the sticks and the buttons, but don't neglect to use the touch screen if you need to!

The Anbernic RG405V is available in three styles, the one I was sent to review comes in this retro-looking grey fit, there is also a gorgeous transparent purple version, or wood grain for those with a penchant for woody console aesthetics!

• Colours Available: Wood grain color/Transparent purple/Grey
• Screen: 4-inch IPS touch screen (640*480 resolution)
• CPU: Unisoc Tiger T618 64-bit octa-core 2*[email protected]+6*[email protected]
• GPU: Mali G52@850Mhz
• RAM: 4GB LPDDR4X@1866Mhz
• Storage Options: 128GB eMMC/128GB eMMC + 128GB  Micro SD/128GB eMMC + 256GB Micro SD
• Expandable Memory: Supports up to 2TB Micro SD
• WIFI/Bluetooth:2.4/5G WIFI 802.11a/b/g/n/ac,Bluetooth 5.0
• Operating System: Android 12, with built-in game front-end
• Games Support: Android games & emulators
• Battery: Li-polymer battery 5500 mAh, charging 3 hours, battery life 9 hours
• Built-in Fan: Assists heat dissipation and improves performance
• Other functions: Built-in Hall joystick, six-axis gyroscope sensor, support OTA wireless upgrade, online matchmaking, streaming, wireless projection screen, vibration motor, support 3.5mm stereo earphones, energy saving setting, display brightness, multilanguage, hi-fi speaker.
• Accessories: USB charging cable, protective case, user manual, screen protector.
• Console specification: length 14.5cm; width 10.5cm; height 3.5cm; weight 0.282 kg.

Packed with Buttons & Functionality

The Device packs in 21 buttons, including a D-Pad and two Analogue sticks. The sticks themselves feel rubbery on your fingertips and tight in their gate, this is mainly because they are Hall Effect sticks that magnetically track your movement and will never drift! This is a fantastic feature that I think mainstream consoles should adopt going forward, it just makes sense!

The left side of the RG405V holds the mSD card slot, and the dedicated button to launch the emulator front end. Inserting the card and booting up the system there is a short period of updating and installation from the card, but then it swiftly takes you into the main menu ready to play.

The right-hand side of the device has the volume buttons and the power button, and with this, you can modify the power of the audio coming out of the handheld, as well as power it on, reboot or take a screenshot depending on whether the button is being tapped or held down.

The bottom edge houses the two "hi-fi" speakers and the 3.5 mm jack socket, but honestly, the speakers are not much to write home about, with very little bass response and quite a tinny inflexion throughout. I personally much preferred to connect a headset, wired or wirelessly through Bluetooth, rather than use the speakers, though I guess they do enough to appease most people's basic need for a little portable sound on the go to accompany the gaming.

The rear of the device has the four "shoulder buttons" as clicky little triggers and a fan that ramps up when the system comes under stress. This venting of heat allows for harder overclocking and less concern about blowing it up by pushing it to its limits. You also have these two built-in grips that keep your hands from cramping, but it would have been nice to see something more grippy in the texture department, for those with a sweaty disposition.

The top edge of the Anbernic only has the main exhaust vent for the fan, the USB-C charging port and the obligatory charging LED.

The front-facing buttons stand out proudly and have a nice tactile click to each one of them. The D-Pad is especially nice to play with as it is not mushy and doesn't slide about, It is really nice under your thumb and reminds me a lot of Nintendo or Sega D-Pads of yore.

The analogue sticks proved themselves in the heat of battle, and the rubbery finish makes them feel superb to play with. The hall effect sticks also felt exceptionally accurate regardless of which emulator you choose, but some sticks need dead zone adjustment to get them acting just right in your chosen platform.

On the front, you also have a menu button that overrides all action on screen and takes you back either to the previous emulators menu, or to the home screen. This feature is a nice safety blanket to being easily able to back out of a system and get back to the main launcher or Android UI easily.

The 4" touch screen is a nice "touch" too if you'll pardon the pun because it allows for input for specific emulators (DS/3DS) and gestures for utilising more features of this device mid-game.

The addition of Android 12 is a fantastic one because it's so entirely flexible, and works so intuitively compared to using purely a bespoke customised OS. This effectively means you can upgrade emulators and cores with ease, pair external controllers, and cast to a TV with minor lag (cannot be docked via USB-C, I tried) The touch screen also lends itself well to letting you type in-game, set up configs easily, take screenshots etc.

Emulates Most Systems To a Point

Emulation on the RG405V is touted to be anything up to PS2/DC/GC and Wii, though through testing I think that PS2 on the Mali G52 and Tiger T618 is a bit of a stretch, with some games working fine out of the box and others suffering performance and framerate issues. The upshot of using Android 12 is that countless modifications can be made to every emulator on the system, so there is ample room for improvement on each emulator, in terms of optimisation, resolution and even texture replacements.

Don't forget that you can play Android games on this device too, and some games for PS2 also have Android counterparts (GVA series for example) which obviously run better than their emulated versions!

To facilitate this, ease-of-use mentality,  Anbernic has preinstalled various software toggles to enable the built-in fan, "CPU high" mode, and "NS mode" which I believe is for connecting Joy-Cons to the system as a controller.

I immediately found that the settings for PS2 emulation (AetherSX2) were poorly configured. I assume that Anbernic has cherry-picked settings to show off the fact that PS2 is "playable" but it's questionable at best in my opinion, and with a little tweaking you can get better performance anyway. The default was inexplicably set up with a 50% EE cycle rate selected as default, causing really horrible performance until rectified back to 100% or default settings.

Removing the frame limiter and frame skip settings also yielded better results for most games, bringing less stutter but games like God of War II just play horribly, hovering around the 45-60% speed mark. I would highly advise that PS2 emulation is a bit of a stretch for this handheld, definitely stick to less demanding PS2 titles, such as 2D sidescrollers like Metal Slug Complete or at the very least test the ISOs you want to play beforehand and see if you can eke out more performance through twiddling with the AetherSX2 settings because this is not a one for all solution yet, and will not run the majority of games to an extent that I would deem "playable".

Sadly, I could not eke out enough frames on most high-end games to make the PS2 experience really worth it for me, but perhaps over time, this will improve with better configurations and app updates.

Equally, when testing PPSSPP for example the given Vulkan settings opted for frame skips and un-capped frame rates, however GTA:LCS runs like a slideshow and about 5 times faster than it needed to be, so limiting the frames, removing skips and altering the resolution meant that I managed to get a steady 30fps out of it at 4x PSP resolution, which looked and played fantastically on the 4" screen. Again it's a per-game basis but the majority of PSP games should run just fine after a little tweaking.

N64 on this device is a strong outing! I absolutely loved chucking any and every game on there to relive my favourite console of all time, Conker, Wave Race, Quest 64, and even mods like GoldenEye X 5e and Goldfinger worked superbly with only minor texture issues here and there through M64Plus FZ. Very happy to have a decent N64 portable to hand!

Wii and GC games use Dolphin or the MMJR2 modded version and play reasonably well, though the majority of games hit the 50-60 fPS mark during cut scenes but drop sharply to high 20s / low 30s during actual gameplay. Not that this renders them unplayable by any stretch, but I definitely noticed some choppy framerates and missing textures in Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars, and Twilight Princess (GC version) had some hefty pop-up in the cut scenes, but was a steady 31FPS in most areas. Fzero AX also struggled to render and could not maintain a reasonable framerate at around the 21 FPS mark.

While technically still "playable" isn't exactly the experience I desire for replaying these games. Some of these issues come from the emulator itself, others from the middling hardware at the Anbernic RG405v's core, so I would definitely spend more time testing newer nightly builds of Dolphin (or modded builds) as and when they arrive, to get that bit better performance each iteration.

Yabause via Retroarch and Yaba Sanshiro 2 (standalone) are also included for Saturn enthusiasts, and while the idea is nice, the gameplay and sound quality are far too choppy to be enjoyable in any form on RG Launchers set up of Yabause, but using the standalone launcher for Yaba Sanshiro 2 Pro most games run at full 60 fps!

NDS and even 3DS emulation is technically passable, and while 3D games offered far less stable performance than the 2D titles, sharing two emulated screens across one 4" screen is way too far from ideal, so I moved quickly on to emulators that focussed on one screen alone. Though you can swap between screens by touching the screen and selecting your desired viewport, it just doesn't feel great for me, though the games I tried definitely show promise and some may get better mileage out of this than I did depending on your love for these games.

The GBA/GBC/NES/SNES/SMS/MD/FBA/CPS3/GBA/Wonder Swan and Neo Geo all ran wonderfully during testing and confirmed the actual level of emulation capable on this system. It was an absolute joy to fire up a GBA game on that 4:3 ratio screen, and playing SF3 was phenomenal on the go!

Interestingly, this device is also bundled with Redreem and Flycast which honestly blew me away with the near-locked 60 FPS of most games I threw at it and with zero messing with configuration. Crazy Taxi 2 plays fantastically though personally, I felt that the sticks were far too sensitive by default, so again a little adjustment in the settings and I was a happy bunny again.

AtomisWave ports to DC also worked flawlessly so Dolphin Blue works perfectly and is one of my guilty-pleasure-all-time-faves!

Great Features, Decent Price & Highly Recommendable

Thanks to the savvy tech bundled within and the magnificent pairing of Android 12 it is possible to connect controllers to the device, and then cast it to a TV! This brings a whole new level of interactivity but detracts from the portability of the device. It's a bonus feature that you can use if you want, but I highly recommend it because it's also useful for X-Cloud for Xbox, and Remote Play on PlayStation.

The Anbernic RV405s costs $137.99 in its standard form, and $167.99 with a bundled 256GB mSD card, that is *cough* loaded *cough* with content for you to enjoy. Whether that's legal or not is a grey area, however even without the expanded storage at the time of purchase, you have 128GB internally to mess with and a maximum capacity of 2TB to fill with your own totally legally obtained content.

As handhelds go this is definitely up there for those who want to emulate up to DC/PSX games with ease, on the go, with little to no configuration. The built-in launcher is incredibly easy to grasp, and the bundled software is well-rounded to start you off in the right direction, but you can always update the emulators, tweak them or even swap them out to entirely different ones if you wish.

I enjoyed playing on the RG405V, and with its 8+ hour battery life, this is one to pack with you when going on a journey, or even when holidaying.