It ended up being not too hard to talk myself out of the Dsi and Wii ideas for now. In terms of the Dsi, the games I’m most interested in are the 3d titles for for the NDS, and 3d titles on the native hardware and the native resolution look terrible to put it politely. I’m genuinely curious of what the play experience of Mario DS, the Legend of Zelda games and Phantasy Star Star Zero would look like with better resolution and better controls. This generally implies emulation, but the problem with the DS is the top and bottom screens side-by-side really hinders the play experience. In this case I think I’m fortunate enough to have a 3ds with an IPS screen, so I might look into running ds games on that, or I might look into mods to see what can be done to make the emulation experience in terms of managing the dual screens.

For the Wii, I’m not interested in the Wii as much as the “legacy” titles from the NES, SNES, GB(C), GBA and Gamecube (not terribly interested in the N64). The first four can be emulated with a genuinely enjoyable experience on the PSP, Ps-Vita and Android. So it’s not as compelling as I originally thought. And another issue with the Wii and console games in general is that I don’t have a lot of time to sit down and play on a console at home, which is why my attention seems to be focused on what can be done with handheld recently. The main draw for the Wii would be the Gamecube titles, and that’s something that could just as well be done on a laptop since I have a USB and Bluetooth style gamecube controller and that would arguably be a better experience and easier to manage not requiring a dedicated device.

In terms of handhelds I think this would be the obvious choice to go with. It’s an Android cellphone with buttons similar to the layout of the PSP and I think I could reasonably be able to expect to play NES, SNES, GB(C), GBA, PSX and PSP. If it could play Gamecube and Dreamcast games, that would make me extremely happy, but this is just what’s available at the end of 2019, and people are finally seeing that there is a lot of demand in this area, so I think we’ll see more competition in 2020. I would be really tempted to buy a Switch Lite to use as a dedicated emulation machine, but I generally try to avoid handhelds and consoles until their life cycle is over and where it can be embraced by a community with open firmware. So I’ll see when I’ll have the option to order the Chinese handheld.