Best FPGA Handheld for SNES Games Under £150 UK (2025)

Sarah Hargreaves — Culture & Features Editor, RetroInHand

Last updated: May 2026

The Short Answer: Is There Actually a True FPGA SNES Handheld Under £150 in the UK?

Let me save you some time before we go any further. If you are looking for a purpose-built, retail FPGA handheld that plays SNES games with cycle-accurate hardware emulation and costs under £150 in the UK right now, the honest answer is: not really. Not in the clean, plug-and-play sense you might be hoping for. The Analogue Pocket — which is the closest thing to a perfect portable FPGA solution for classic consoles — sits at around £220 once you factor in UK import costs and the inevitable customs lottery. That is a different article entirely, and one my cousin James has already been through the wringer on over at our piece on Analogue’s UK pricing situation.

But here is the thing: the question of the best FPGA handheld for SNES games under £150 is still absolutely worth asking, because the answer teaches you something genuinely useful about where retro gaming hardware sits in 2025. It forces you to think clearly about what FPGA actually gives you, what software emulation on a good handheld can legitimately offer in its place, and whether the gap between the two matters for the specific games you want to play. And it points you towards some genuinely compelling options that sit in, around, and just above that price bracket — options that deserve a proper, honest look.

So this is not a bait-and-switch. We are going to cover the real FPGA options that exist under or near £150, explain what you are actually getting with each of them, talk about when software emulation on something like the Miyoo Mini Plus is honestly good enough for SNES, and give you a clear verdict on what to buy depending on who you are. There will be no hedging. By the end of this, you will know exactly what to spend your money on.

What FPGA Actually Means for SNES Emulation (And Why It Matters)

The word FPGA gets thrown around a lot in retro gaming circles, and it has acquired a kind of talismanic quality — say it and suddenly your device sounds premium and serious. But it is worth being precise about what it actually means, because the distinction between FPGA and software emulation is real, and it does affect your experience, but not always in the ways people assume.

FPGA stands for Field-Programmable Gate Array. In plain English, it is a chip that can be reconfigured at the hardware level to replicate the behaviour of another chip. When a developer writes an FPGA core for the SNES, they are not writing software that interprets what the SNES CPU and PPU do — they are building a hardware-level replica of those chips’ actual logic. The result runs cycle-accurately, meaning it processes signals in the same order and at the same timing as the original silicon. The SNES’s famous Mode 7 scaling, its SuperFX chip dependencies, its tricky transparency effects — an FPGA core handles all of these not by approximating them in software but by replicating the hardware conditions that produce them.

This matters most in edge cases. Games that pushed the SNES hardware in unusual ways — Star Fox with its SuperFX chip, Super Mario RPG with its specific timing sensitivities, the transparency effects in F-Zero and Mega Man X — can behave slightly differently on software emulators depending on how carefully the emulator has been tuned. On a good FPGA core, those edge cases just work, because the hardware is behaving like the hardware. On most software emulators running on modern ARM processors, they also largely work, because emulation has improved enormously over the past decade. But “largely” is not the same as “perfectly”, and for certain players — the ones who know what Donkey Kong Country’s transparency effects are supposed to look like, the ones who can feel a frame of input lag — the difference is meaningful.

There is also the matter of authenticity. I find this harder to quantify but no less real. When I play Super Metroid on an FPGA device, knowing that the signal chain from cartridge to screen is being handled by hardware that behaves identically to the original console, something relaxes in my brain that doesn’t relax when I’m playing through RetroArch on a Linux-based handheld. It is the same feeling I get playing a game on original hardware versus a clone. The game is identical. The experience is not quite.

The SNES Core Landscape in 2025

The SNES FPGA core that matters most is the one developed by Artemio Urbina and the MiSTer community for the MiSTer FPGA platform — a community project built around the Intel DE10-Nano development board. This core has been refined over several years and is now extraordinarily accurate. It handles virtually every SNES enhancement chip: SuperFX, SA-1, DSP-1 through DSP-4, S-DD1, SPC7110. It runs at the correct clock speeds. It handles the SNES’s notoriously finicky PPU behaviour correctly. It is, by any reasonable measure, the best SNES emulation solution available at any price point.

The Analogue Pocket uses a different SNES core — one developed specifically for the Pocket’s Altera Cyclone V FPGA — which is excellent but operates in a slightly different ecosystem. The MiSTer community’s SNES core is open-source and has benefited from thousands of hours of community testing and refinement. Both are genuinely impressive. Both cost more than £150 to acquire in usable form in the UK, which is exactly the problem we are here to address.

The MiSTer FPGA: The Real Answer, and Why It’s Complicated

If you want proper FPGA SNES emulation in handheld or near-handheld form, the MiSTer FPGA is still the most honest answer to that question — but it requires some unpacking. The DE10-Nano development board, which forms the heart of a MiSTer setup, costs around £70–£90 on its own in the UK depending on where you buy it. That sounds promising. It is under £150. But a bare DE10-Nano is not a gaming device. You need, at minimum, an IO board (around £25–£35), an SDRAM add-on board (around £15–£25), and a case. By the time you have a functional MiSTer setup that can run SNES games reliably, you are looking at £130–£160 for a basic configuration.

You can shave this closer to £120–£130 if you are clever about sourcing — the MiSTer community on Reddit and various Discord servers regularly posts deals on component bundles — but even at its cheapest, a MiSTer setup is not a handheld. It is a desktop unit that connects to a television or monitor. It is brilliant for what it does. It is emphatically not portable.

The MiSTer Portable and Handheld Derivatives

Here is where things get genuinely interesting. The open-source nature of the MiSTer ecosystem has inspired several attempts at portable or handheld-format FPGA devices that use or are compatible with MiSTer cores. The most notable of these are the SNAC-compatible portable builds and community projects like the Turbo Chameleon 64, though most of these remain hobbyist territory. A MiSTer in a Raspberry Pi-style portable case, wired to a screen and a battery, can absolutely be built for under £150 if you have the skills and the patience — but calling this a consumer product you can just buy and use is misleading.

There have also been third-party commercial attempts to take the MiSTer concept and package it into something more approachable. None of them have quite landed within our price bracket in the UK. The MiSTer Multisystem, which packages MiSTer hardware into a console-style enclosure with built-in IO, costs upwards of £250. Interesting, but out of scope.

The honest truth is that as of 2025, there is no commercially available, ready-to-buy FPGA handheld under £150 in the UK that specifically targets SNES accuracy the way the Analogue Pocket does. The market gap is real. It is, if you ask me, a business opportunity waiting to be filled — and given how quickly the Chinese handheld market has moved in the last three years, I would not be surprised if that gap closes sooner than we think.

The Analogue Pocket: The Right Answer at the Wrong Price

I want to talk about the Analogue Pocket properly here, even though it officially sits above our budget, because understanding what it does — and what it costs UK buyers specifically — is essential context for every other decision in this article.

The Analogue Pocket launched in late 2021 at $219 USD. In the US, it is a premium but reasonable proposition. In the UK, it has never had an official retail presence, which means every British buyer has to import it from the US Analogue store, paying international shipping, then gambling on whether Royal Mail or their courier will apply customs charges. On top of the dollar price, you are typically looking at £30–£50 in additional costs. At current exchange rates, a new Analogue Pocket will set you back somewhere between £180 and £230 by the time it arrives at your door. The secondary market is slightly more predictable but rarely cheaper.

What you get for that money is genuinely special. The Pocket’s FPGA can run Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance natively, and through community-developed cores, it runs SNES, Mega Drive, NES, PC Engine, and more. The SNES core for the Pocket is excellent. The screen — a 3.5-inch LCD with 1600×1440 resolution — is one of the best displays ever put on a handheld gaming device. The build quality is exceptional. I have been using mine for two years and it still feels like a premium object in a way that almost nothing else in this space does.

But it is not under £150. And we covered the full UK import situation in detail in our Analogue Nomad UK pricing piece — the short version is that Analogue products in the UK involve a financial leap of faith that not everyone can or should take. If the Pocket is within your stretch budget and SNES accuracy is a priority, it is worth every penny. If £150 is a genuine ceiling, keep reading.

Used Analogue Pocket UK Prices in 2025

Worth flagging: the used Analogue Pocket market in the UK has softened significantly from its 2022 peaks, when units were selling on eBay for £300+. In early 2025, you can regularly find them on eBay UK between £160 and £200 depending on condition and included accessories. That is still above our stated limit, but it is close enough that if you have a little flexibility — say, £160–£170 as a realistic ceiling — a used Pocket is suddenly a genuine option. Check seller feedback carefully, make sure cores are updated, and look for units that include the original box and dock if you want the full experience.

What About Devices That Are Just Under £150? The FPGA Grey Zone

Let us be rigorous about what exists in the £100–£150 range that offers any genuine FPGA capability for SNES games. As of mid-2025, the honest answer is thin. Here is the lay of the land.

The Pocket Mini and Other Rumoured Analogue Products

There has been persistent speculation about a lower-cost Analogue device — something in the Game Boy Micro footprint or a stripped-back Pocket variant — but as of the time of writing, nothing has been announced. Analogue’s product cadence is slow and their pricing historically high. Do not hold your breath for a sub-£150 Analogue product in the near term.

Chinese FPGA Handhelds: The Slowly Closing Gap

The Chinese electronics market has been gradually moving into FPGA handheld territory. Devices like the Pocket Go S30 and the various Anbernic and Miyoo products that have launched in the last three years are not FPGA devices — they use ARM processors running Linux and software emulation. But there is a category of Chinese-designed FPGA devices worth knowing about.

The most frequently mentioned is the Ares FPGA project, a community-driven open-source FPGA gaming device. Related commercial products have occasionally surfaced on AliExpress and similar platforms claiming FPGA-based retro emulation, but many of these are misleading — they use FPGA chips for specific functions (like video output processing) whilst running software emulation for the actual games. Always read the specifications carefully. If a device doesn’t specify that it uses an FPGA core for game emulation — as distinct from using an FPGA for display processing — it is almost certainly a software emulator in FPGA clothing.

The Windjammer and similar community hardware projects have explored sub-£150 FPGA handhelds, but these remain prototypes or very limited production runs rather than readily purchasable products. The technology to build a good FPGA handheld cheaply exists — the Cyclone-series FPGAs used in the Analogue Pocket are available as chips for under £20. The cost is in the engineering, the screen, the software ecosystem, and the build quality. Getting all of those right at under £150 retail price remains, as of 2025, an unsolved problem.

The FPGA Game Console Portables: A Brief But Important Mention

There is one more category worth acknowledging: devices like the Super NT (Analogue’s SNES-specific FPGA console, around £160–£200 on the UK used market) which are not handhelds but do offer genuine FPGA SNES accuracy. If your definition of “handheld” is flexible enough to include “plugs into your telly but you can carry it in a bag”, the Super NT is extraordinary. It outputs SNES games at up to 1080p with zero lag, handles every enhancement chip, and is the closest thing to a perfect SNES experience. But it needs a television. It is not portable. And it costs more than £150. So it is another “right answer, wrong category” situation.

When Software Emulation Is Honestly Good Enough for SNES

Here is where I want to be direct with you, because I think a lot of FPGA discourse does a disservice to software emulation in 2025. The gap between a good software SNES emulator on a modern ARM processor and an FPGA core has narrowed dramatically. For the vast majority of SNES games, played by the vast majority of players, software emulation on a capable handheld is genuinely excellent.

I spent a week playing through the SNES library on a Miyoo Mini Plus — a device I’ve written about extensively and that Tom reviewed properly in our Miyoo Mini Plus review — using RetroArch with the Snes9x 2010 and bsnes-mercury cores. The experience was, by any honest assessment, excellent. Super Mario World, Chrono Trigger, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Super Metroid, Donkey Kong Country — these games played beautifully, looked gorgeous on that tiny screen, and felt responsive. The audio was accurate. The frame rate was solid. If you had shown me this setup ten years ago I would have wept.

The cases where software emulation on a handheld still occasionally struggles are specific. Star Fox and Stunt Race FX use the SuperFX chip, and whilst modern emulators handle them acceptably, they can exhibit occasional slowdown on less powerful hardware (though not on the Miyoo Mini Plus — its H700 chip handles it fine). Games using the SA-1 chip — Super Mario RPG, Kirby Super Star, Kirby’s Dream Land 3 — require a more demanding emulator core for full accuracy. On bsnes-accuracy, you get near-perfect results on capable hardware. On lighter cores, you might see very minor audio timing issues on specific scenes.

For most players? None of this matters. For the player who has never played Super Mario RPG before, software emulation on a good handheld under £100 will be a transformative, joyful experience. For the player who grew up with Super Mario RPG on original hardware and knows exactly what Bowyer’s Forest music is supposed to sound like at 2am — you might care. You might not. Only you know.

The Miyoo Mini Plus: The Best Under-£100 SNES Handheld

If we are talking about the best handheld for SNES games under £150 in the UK and we are being honest about the FPGA situation, the Miyoo Mini Plus is the device that earns the most enthusiastic recommendation for most people. At around £55–£65 depending on where you buy it — it is widely available on AliExpress, Amazon, and various UK grey-market importers — it represents extraordinary value.

The screen is a 3.5-inch IPS panel at 640×480 resolution, which maps to SNES’s 256×224 native resolution with a clean 2x integer scale and room for borders. The H700 processor handles SNES emulation at full speed including the demanding enhancement chip games. The battery life is genuinely impressive — eight to ten hours of SNES gaming on a charge. The build quality is better than its price suggests. OnionOS, the custom firmware that essentially everyone installs, transforms the device into a beautifully organised retro gaming library.

Is it FPGA? No. Is it accurate enough to play every SNES game in the library without meaningful issues? Yes. For £65, it is remarkable. Our review covers all the nuances, but for SNES specifically, it is the value champion of this entire conversation.

The Anbernic RG35XX H and RG35XX Plus

Anbernic’s RG35XX family has become one of the most competitive ranges in budget retro gaming. The RG35XX H (horizontal form factor, around £45–£55) and the RG35XX Plus (vertical Game Boy-style form factor, around £45–£50) both run SNES emulation well. They use similar or identical processors to the Miyoo Mini Plus depending on revision, and they run GarlicOS or ArkOS with RetroArch for SNES emulation.

The RG35XX H’s horizontal layout, with its SNES-controller-echoing button placement, feels almost designed for SNES games. Wide grips, face buttons in the right positions, decent D-pad. It is not as polished a product as the Miyoo Mini Plus and its software ecosystem is slightly less refined, but it performs comparably for SNES and costs a little less. Worth considering if you prefer the landscape form factor.

The Case for Building a MiSTer FPGA Under £150: A Practical Guide

I want to spend some real time here, because whilst a ready-to-buy FPGA SNES handheld under £150 doesn’t exist, a properly functional MiSTer FPGA desktop setup absolutely can be built for around that figure, and for the right kind of reader — one who doesn’t mind a bit of assembly and setup — it is genuinely the best option for FPGA SNES accuracy at this price.

I built my first MiSTer in 2022 for around £140 all-in, buying components gradually over about six weeks. Here is what that looks like in practice.

Core MiSTer FPGA Components and UK Costs (2025)

• DE10-Nano development board — The heart of the system. Intel Cyclone V FPGA. Available from Terasic directly (around £85 shipped to UK) or occasionally on Amazon UK (£75–£90). This is the one component you cannot substitute.
• MiSTer IO Board — Adds analogue video output (SCART, VGA), audio, USB hub. Available from various community vendors including MiSTer Addons, MIST-Addon, and others. Budget around £25–£35 shipped to UK.
• SDRAM Board (32MB or 128MB) — Required for accurate emulation of most cores including SNES. Available from the same vendors. Around £15–£20.
• Case — Optional but strongly recommended. Various 3D-printed and injection-moulded cases available. Budget £10–£20.
• USB OTG cable and USB hub — For controller and storage. £5–£10.
• MicroSD card (64GB minimum) — For the OS and ROMs. £8–£12.

Total: approximately £138–£177 depending on where you source components and which options you choose. You can hit under £150 if you buy the DE10-Nano during a sale period and source the IO and SDRAM boards from community vendors rather than premium resellers. The Facebook group “MiSTer FPGA UK” and the MiSTer Subreddit are excellent resources for UK-specific sourcing advice.

MiSTer SNES Core: What It Actually Does

The MiSTer SNES core in 2025 is extraordinary. It supports every known enhancement chip. It handles the SNES’s PPU transparency effects accurately. It runs at the correct clock speed. It can output via SCART RGB, which means if you have a good CRT and the right cables — and if you have been reading this site for any length of time, there is a reasonable chance you do — you can play SNES games with the exact visual presentation they were designed for. There is a reason the piece we wrote on SCART RGB modding resonated so strongly with readers: there is a whole community of us who care deeply about analogue output quality, and MiSTer speaks directly to that audience.

The core also supports save states, rewind, and various display options including scanlines and integer scaling. You can load games from SD card. You can use any USB controller — an 8BitDo SN30 Pro works beautifully and maps perfectly to the SNES button layout. The experience, once set up, is genuinely seamless.

What MiSTer does not give you is portability. It needs a screen, a power source, a controller. It is a desktop experience. But for home use, for the player who wants the closest thing to perfect SNES emulation within the £150 budget, a MiSTer is the answer. It is just not a handheld.

The PAL SNES Experience: Why UK Players Have a Specific Grievance

I cannot write this piece without acknowledging something that is very specific to us as UK and European SNES players: we got the slow version. The PAL SNES ran games at 50Hz rather than the NTSC 60Hz used in Japan and the US. This meant most games ran approximately 17% slower than their developers intended, and many were displayed with thick black borders at the top and bottom of the screen where the PAL frame’s extra lines went unfilled. It is the same issue that affected the PAL Mega Drive, PAL PS1, and essentially every console released in Europe before the PS2 era — something we explored in depth in our piece on the PS1’s 50Hz problem.

For SNES specifically, this is significant. Super Metroid at 50Hz is measurably slower and the music is pitched slightly lower than the NTSC version. F-Zero feels a touch less aggressive. Donkey Kong Country — and this one genuinely hurt as a child — runs more slowly than it should. We grew up with these games in their compromised European versions and many of us didn’t know for years that we were missing something.

Every FPGA and software emulation solution discussed in this article runs games at their original NTSC 60Hz by default. This is, depending on your perspective, either a straightforward improvement or a slightly alien experience. Playing Super Metroid at 60Hz for the first time after growing up with the PAL version is genuinely startling — it feels faster, snappier, more urgent. The music sounds brighter. It is the game as it was designed, not as we received it. Given what we explored in our piece on how PAL distribution shaped what British players experienced, there is something almost political about having access, at last, to the correct version of our own childhoods.

This is one of the underrated joys of the whole FPGA and emulation conversation. It is not just about convenience. It is about playing games the way they were supposed to be played, sometimes for the very first time.

My Honest Recommendation: What to Buy Depending on Who You Are

We have covered a lot of ground. Let me be direct about who should buy what.

If You Want True FPGA SNES Accuracy and £150 Is a Hard Ceiling

Build a MiSTer. It is the best FPGA SNES solution at this price. It requires some effort — buying components, assembling, installing the OS, adding cores, learning the interface — but the MiSTer community is extraordinarily helpful and the documentation is excellent. The MiSTer Forum, the MiSTer FPGA subreddit, and various YouTube build guides (Retrorgb.com’s guides are particularly good) will get you from zero to playing in a weekend. You will end up with a device that plays SNES games more accurately than anything else in this price bracket, plus accurate emulation of dozens of other systems.

The trade-off is that it is not a handheld. It is a home console experience. If that is acceptable to you, it is the right answer.

If Portability Is Non-Negotiable and £150 Is Your Ceiling

Buy the Miyoo Mini Plus. Spend the remaining £85–£90 on something else you’ve been wanting. The Miyoo Mini Plus running OnionOS with the Snes9x or bsnes-mercury core is an exceptional SNES handheld experience. For the SNES library as most people play it — the classics, the RPGs, the platformers — it is better than good enough. It is genuinely great.

I want to be clear about why I feel comfortable saying this. I have played Chrono Trigger to completion on a Miyoo Mini Plus. I have played through most of Super Metroid on it. I have run the SNES top-100 through it and found exactly two games with any noticeable emulation quirks. The screen is excellent, the battery life is good, the form factor is comfortable for extended sessions. If you are reading this because you want to play SNES games on the go and the word FPGA caught your eye without you being deeply invested in what it means, the Miyoo Mini Plus is your answer.

If You Have a Bit of Flexibility Above £150

Stretch for a used Analogue Pocket. Set a eBay alert for “Analogue Pocket” in the UK and be patient — units come up regularly between £160 and £190, and that is genuinely a reasonable price for what you get. A used Pocket with a freshly updated SNES core is the best FPGA SNES handheld experience available, full stop. Our ongoing coverage of what the Analogue Pocket is like in extended daily use — including the piece on what happens when you try to replace it with a modded GBA — will tell you everything you need to know about why it earns that premium.

If You Are Primarily a SNES RPG Player

Honestly? Software emulation is fine for you. The SNES RPG library — Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI, Secret of Mana, EarthBound, Breath of Fire II, Tactics Ogre, Super Mario RPG — plays exceptionally well on modern software emulators. These games are not pushing the hardware in ways that stress software emulation. They are mostly 2D, mostly static backgrounds, mostly straightforward CPU usage. Get the Miyoo Mini Plus, load it up, and enjoy thirty-plus hours of Chrono Trigger on your commute. It will be magnificent.

The Wider Picture: Why This Question Matters in 2025

There is something culturally interesting about the moment we are in with SNES preservation and accessibility. When I was twelve years old, the SNES was the present — an expensive, desirable, slightly out-of-reach present for some of us. Watching the price of cartridges climb on eBay throughout the 2000s and 2010s felt like being priced out of my own childhood. A complete, boxed UK copy of Secret of Mana now fetches £80–£120. Terranigma — a genuinely wonderful JRPG that got a PAL release but not a North American one — regularly sells for £150 or more. Original hardware with no faults costs £60–£80 for the console alone.

In that context, a £65 handheld that plays the entire SNES library with excellent accuracy is not just a gadget. It is a kind of democratisation. The games that shaped a generation are accessible again without the cartridge market’s price gouging, without the console hunting, without the worry that your twenty-five-year-old capacitors are going to fail mid-playthrough of Final Fantasy VI. The question of whether that access is “legitimate” in some philosophical sense is one for another piece. The practical question — is it good? — has a clear answer: yes, increasingly, remarkably so.

FPGA takes this a step further by making the argument that preservation should be as faithful as possible to the original experience — not just that the game should run, but that it should run the way the hardware ran it. That is a genuinely honourable goal, and the MiSTer community in particular has done extraordinary work in service of it. The fact that the best FPGA SNES experience remains slightly out of handheld reach for under £150 is frustrating but understandable. The engineering challenges are real. The Analogue Pocket is priced the way it is partly because of genuine cost and partly because of genuine quality.

My suspicion — and it is a suspicion shared by people in the know — is that within the next two years, a commercially available FPGA handheld under £150 that genuinely handles SNES accuracy will exist. The DE10-Nano is already several years old as a chip design. Cheaper, newer FPGAs with equivalent capability are available. Chinese manufacturers who built the Miyoo Mini Plus and the Anbernic RG35XX family are watching this space. Someone will crack this market. When they do, the retro gaming community will move very fast.

Until then, the choice is between good-enough software emulation for £65, build-it-yourself FPGA accuracy for £130–£150, or stretch-the-budget Analogue Pocket for £160–£200. All three are better options than they would have been five years ago. All three represent extraordinary access to one of the greatest game libraries ever assembled.

Quick-Reference: Best Options for SNES Gaming Under (and Just Over) £150 UK

• Miyoo Mini Plus (£55–£65) — Best overall for portability and value. Software emulation but genuinely excellent SNES compatibility. Recommended for: everyone who wants to play SNES games on the go without fuss.
• Anbernic RG35XX H (£45–£55) — Excellent budget alternative with SNES-friendly horizontal layout. Software emulation. Recommended for: budget-conscious buyers who prefer a landscape form factor.
• MiSTer FPGA DIY Build (£130–£150) — True FPGA SNES accuracy. Requires assembly and setup. Not portable. Recommended for: accuracy-obsessed players who primarily play at home.
• Used Analogue Pocket (£160–£190) — Best FPGA SNES handheld available. Slight budget stretch required for UK buyers. Recommended for: players who want the best possible experience and can absorb the additional cost.

Final Verdict: Be Honest With Yourself About What You Actually Need

The best FPGA handheld for SNES games under £150 in the UK, strictly speaking, does not exist as a retail product in 2025. That is the honest answer, and I think you deserve it clearly stated rather than buried in caveats.

What does exist under £150 is excellent software emulation that will satisfy the overwhelming majority of SNES players. What exists at £150 if you are prepared to build it yourself is genuine FPGA accuracy on the MiSTer platform. And what exists just above £150 on the used market is the Analogue Pocket, which is the right answer if you can stretch to it.

My personal recommendation for most readers? Buy the Miyoo Mini Plus, spend an evening setting up OnionOS, load it with the SNES library, and play Super Metroid the way Yoshio Sakamoto intended it — at 60Hz, on a beautiful small screen, wherever you happen to be. Then, if that experience makes you hunger for deeper accuracy — if you find yourself wondering whether that slight audio timing issue in Super Mario RPG‘s opening moments is real — save up for the Analogue Pocket.

The SNES library is one of the greatest arguments for why video games matter as a cultural form. Getting to it, in any form, at this price, in 2025, is still something worth appreciating. We spent years watching those cartridge prices climb on eBay whilst the hardware aged and degraded. The fact that we can now carry most of that library in our pocket for the price of a restaurant dinner for two is, by any measure, remarkable.

Just don’t let anyone tell you software emulation is beneath you. The games are what matter. They always were.