Best Handhelds for NES Emulation

The NES is the easiest system in this database to emulate and, uniquely, the easiest to buy a screen for. Those two facts are the entire guide.

Here is the arithmetic. Of the 622 handhelds in our console database, 473 carry a NES and Famicom emulation verdict - and 468 of them grade a straight A, or 98.9%. That is the highest pass rate of any system we track, a point ahead of the Game Boy's 466 and well clear of the Super Nintendo's 377 and the Game Boy Advance's 400. A NES emulator asks for a 1.79 MHz 6502-derived processor and a 256 x 240 framebuffer. Every handheld sold today clears that with room to spare, which is why performance is not a buying decision here at all.

The five that fail make the point. They are the Thumby, a 72 x 40 keychain running a Raspberry Pi RP2040; the Arduboy FX, a 128 x 64 credit-card board on an ATmega32U4; the 32blit and the PicoSystem, two open-source microcontrollers; and the Sega Gopher, a 2006 handheld built around a Motorola 68000. Not one of them is a general-purpose handheld you would buy to play NES games. Everything that is scores an A.

So the machine is solved, and the question moves entirely to the picture - where the NES is, for once, the lucky one.

The one thing to understand before you shop

Every handheld in this guide plays the entire NES and Famicom cartridge library at full speed. The buying decision is the panel, whether it can hold the console's picture at a whole-number multiple, and a short list of cartridge-specific caveats - of which the light gun is the only one that cannot be fixed.

A NES frame is 256 x 240 pixels sent to a 4:3 television, which stretches it to 320 x 240 of square panel pixels - the number you actually have to fit. Four panel resolutions hold that exactly, and they are worth memorising because they decide the whole purchase:

• 320 x 240 is 1:1. The frame at its own size, no scaling at all, on 49 of the graded devices. Honest, and small.
• 640 x 480 is an exact 2x. A game renders at the full 640 x 480 with square pixels and no border whatsoever - 100% of the glass. This is the most common panel on retro handhelds, used by 90 of them, and it is the sane default.
• 960 x 720 is an exact 3x, on six devices.
• 1280 x 960 is an exact 4x, on thirteen.

Add those up and 159 of the 468 A-grade devices - 34% - can fill their entire panel with a whole-number multiple of the NES picture. For comparison, the Game Boy manages that on three devices out of 473. If you widen the test to panels whose height is a clean multiple of 240 and whose width has room to spare, 239 devices qualify, just over half the graded field.

Everything else - and it is more than half the market - has to stretch. The second-most-common panel here is 1920 x 1080, on 60 graded devices, and its best whole-number fit is 4x at 1280 x 960, which covers just 59% of the screen; a 1080p handheld showing a NES game is showing a bordered picture, or a blurred one stretched across the glass.

And the right answer is cheap, which is the part that makes this guide short. The cheapest device here that fills the panel exactly at 2x is the R36S at $40, and the cheapest that does it on a name-brand device with a current chip is the RG-35XX 2024 at $50.

The NES is the one system where the cheap panel is perfect

This is the finding that separates the NES from every other console we cover, and it is worth being precise about, because the usual advice - buy the handheld with the best screen - quietly assumes a problem the NES does not have.

The NES outputs 256 x 240. A 4:3 television stretched that to 320 x 240 of square pixels. Both numbers divide evenly into 640 x 480: 640 is 320 doubled, and 480 is 240 doubled. So the single most common panel on the market - the 640 x 480 4:3 screen that sits on 90 of the graded devices here - is a pixel-perfect, border-free, 100% fill of a NES game. Not a compromise fill like the Game Boy's 67.5%, not a softened one. Perfect.

The Super Nintendo is the control in this experiment, because it looks similar and behaves differently. Its frame is 256 x 224, also designed for a 4:3 television, and 640 x 480 is not a clean multiple of it - 640 is 2.5 times 256, and 480 is 2.14 times 224. The same cheap panel that fills an NES game to the glass edge can only letterbox or blur a SNES one. The older console is the better fit for the screen most people already own.

That single fact reorganises the whole guide. On the Game Boy you pay a premium for the handful of devices that scale cleanly. On the NES you pay nothing, because a $50 vertical already does it right, and the money you save goes into screen size, battery and build instead.

The light gun is the game you cannot play

There is exactly one thing in the NES library that no device in this guide can do, and it is not an emulation limitation - it is physics.

The NES Zapper, the light gun Nintendo shipped with the console's 1985 Deluxe Set, works by sensing the light of the television as its electron beam sweeps down the screen. The game flashes a target, the gun reports whether it saw light at that instant, and the timing is everything. That timing depends on the way a CRT draws its picture, line by line, in a fixed order and a fixed interval. The Zapper only functions on a CRT; it will not work on an LCD, a plasma panel or any other flat display, because display lag destroys the instant the gun is waiting for.

Every device in this guide has a flat panel. That rules out Duck Hunt, Hogan's Alley, Wild Gunman, Gumshoe and To the Earth on all of them - not because the emulator cannot run the code, but because the hardware the games were designed around no longer exists under the glass. No firmware update changes this. If the light-gun games are the reason you want a NES, the NES you need is a real one plugged into a real CRT, and no handheld is a substitute.

Everything else in the library is unaffected, which is worth saying plainly because the light gun looms larger in memory than it does in the catalogue. It is a handful of titles out of more than a thousand.

The other two cartridge quirks, both minor

Two more things can go wrong, and unlike the Zapper both of them are fixable in software.

The Famicom Disk System needs a BIOS. The NES has no boot ROM, so a cartridge game starts from the ROM file with nothing else. The Famicom Disk System - Nintendo's Japanese floppy-disk add-on, released on February 21, 1986 at ¥15,000 and sold 4.4 million times - is the exception. Its games need the BIOS dump disksys.rom, listed as required firmware by the Mesen core with the checksum ca30b50f880eb660a320674ed365ef7a. The payoff is a library of about 194 games that never came out on a cartridge in that form, including the original The Legend of Zelda and Metroid, both of which were designed around the disk format's ability to save progress - which in 1986 was the enabling technology behind the open-world adventure. Most community firmware ships the file; if yours does not, it is a two-minute drop into the system directory.

Some Famicom cartridges carried their own sound chips. The stock NES has five audio channels, and Japanese publishers added more by putting the extra hardware in the cartridge. Konami's VRC6 added three channels. The VRC7 added FM synthesis built with Yamaha. Nintendo's own MMC5 added two square channels and a PCM channel. The Famicom Disk System's Ricoh 2C33 added a fourth wave-table channel. When a game was re-released on a Western cartridge without that silicon - as happened to Castlevania III, whose Japanese soundtrack was reworked to fit the five stock channels - the music changed with it. A core that does not emulate the expansion chips plays the Japanese originals with the wrong music. Mesen does, and it supports more than 220 mappers including every licensed game.

Neither of these is a reason to avoid a device. They are reasons to know which core to pick, and that is a five-minute setting rather than a purchase.

What actually separates NES handhelds

Three things, and only one of them is hardware.

The panel, as above. 159 devices fill it exactly, the rest accept a border or a stretch. What you are choosing is how much of the glass you are willing to leave black in exchange for square pixels, and - for the first time in this series - how many of those choices are cheap.

The body and the d-pad. A NES game needs a D-pad, two face buttons and Start and Select. On a modern handheld that is a cross-style D-pad, four face buttons and two shoulder inputs, which every device here clears. What differs is the shape. The NES was a horizontal, wide, low box with the controller on a cable, and the horizontal handhelds echo it best; the verticals echo the Famicom and the Game Boy; the clamshells echo nothing Nintendo made in this era but protect their screen. And the d-pad deserves a specific mention on this console, because the NES catalogue is unusually d-pad-dependent - Super Mario Bros., Mega Man, Contra and Castlevania are all precision tasks, which is why the arcade-style controls on a horizontal device suit the library more than they might first appear.

The core, which is the only thing you can change after you buy. Mesen for accuracy, FCEUmm for the middle ground, QuickNES for speed on the lightest hardware. The gap between them shows up on the awkward cartridges, not the famous ones.

The ranking: the handhelds that fill the picture exactly

1. Anbernic RG-35XX 2024 — the winner

The cheapest name-brand device here that shows a NES game perfectly. Its 3.5-inch 640 x 480 IPS panel is exactly twice the console's 320 x 240 picture, so a game fills the entire screen at a clean 2x with square pixels and no border. Inside is an Allwinner H700 with 1 GB of LPDDR4 and a 2600 mAh battery; it grades the NES, Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, SNES, Genesis and PlayStation 1 an A. Its recorded trade-offs are no Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth and no analogue stick, none of which the NES library can notice. At $50 it is the least you can pay for a pixel-perfect image on a device worth owning. If the budget is $50, stop here.

2. Anbernic RG-40XXV — the same picture, larger

The RG-35XX 2024's panel and chip in a bigger body: 4.0 inches instead of 3.5, the same 640 x 480 exact 2x fill, the same H700, a 3200 mAh battery, Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 4.2, at 217 g and $60. It is the device to pick if ten dollars buys you a third of an inch of screen you will look at for hundreds of hours, and it is the largest exact-fill panel in this guide that is still genuinely pocketable.

3. Anbernic RG-40XXH — the horizontal body

The same 4.0-inch 640 x 480 panel, the same H700, the same exact 2x fill, moved into a horizontal shell for $70. This is the one to buy if the shape matters to you, and on the NES it has a real argument: the console was a wide, low box, and the horizontal handheld with its d-pad under the left thumb and its buttons under the right is closer to the way the library was played than any vertical. It carries the same Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 4.2 and adds grips.

4. POWKIDDY R36S — the $40 floor

At $40 the R36S is the cheapest device in this guide that renders a NES game at a clean 2x fill. It is a 3.5-inch 640 x 480 IPS panel in a vertical body, running Linux on a Rockchip RK3326 with 1 GB of DDR3L and a swappable 3500 mAh battery. It grades the NES an A, as it does the Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, SNES, Genesis and PlayStation 1. The RK3326 is an older, slower chip than the H700, and for this library it makes no difference at all - the emulator is not the bottleneck and never was. If $40 is the ceiling, there is nothing wrong with this answer.

5. Anbernic RG-28XX, RG-35XX SP and Miyoo Mini Plus — the shape variations

Three devices with the same exact 2x fill, told apart by what they do with the body.

The RG-28XX is the smallest name-brand option, a 2.83-inch 640 x 480 panel in a horizontal body at 123 g, for $48. The same H700 and 1 GB of LPDDR4 as the winner, with no Wi-Fi, no Bluetooth and no analogue sticks. Buy it for the price or the horizontal grip, not for screen size.

The RG-35XX SP folds a 3.5-inch 640 x 480 panel, an H700 and a swappable 3300 mAh battery into a clamshell that closes over the screen, with Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 4.2, at 197 g and $65. It is the one to pick if you want the screen protected in a pocket, and it is not a Game Boy Advance SP replica in spirit - that machine played a different library - but the folding body suits a handheld that travels.

The Miyoo Mini Plus is 162 g with a 3.5-inch 640 x 480 panel, again an exact 2x, running OnionOS or MinUI on a SigmaStar SSD202D with 128 MB of DDR3 and a swappable 3000 mAh battery, with Wi-Fi, for $70. That 128 MB of RAM is why the Nintendo 64 and Saturn grade an F on it, and why it is irrelevant here: it grades the NES, Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, SNES, Genesis and PlayStation 1 an A. If you want a NES that lives in a jacket, this is the one.

6. Data Frog SF2000 and Anbernic RG-FC520 — the native-resolution curiosities

Two devices that break the 640 x 480 pattern, each for a real reason, and each for the buyer who wants the picture at its own size rather than scaled at all.

The Data Frog SF2000 is, at $24, the cheapest device here that plays the NES correctly - and it does it with a 2.8-inch 320 x 240 panel, which is the console's picture at a true 1:1 with no scaling, no interpolation and no border arithmetic. It runs a multicore firmware on a Hi-Chip B210 with 128 MB of DDR2 and a swappable 18650 battery, and it grades the NES, Game Boy and Genesis an A. What it is not is a general-purpose device: the SNES grades a C and the PlayStation 1 an F, so buy it as a NES, not as a handheld.

The Anbernic RG-FC520 is the oddity the NES deserves. At $13 it is a 3.0-inch vertical with a 320 x 240 panel and - unusually - an actual Ricoh 2A03, the console's own CPU, running Famicom games from a cartridge slot rather than emulating them. It grades the NES an A and everything else an F, because it is not a general emulator: it is a small Famicom. Its recorded trade-offs are a 600 mAh battery, no operating system, no Wi-Fi and no Bluetooth. Buy it because a handheld that plays the real cartridges for the price of a game is remarkable, not because it is good value as a computer. It is not.

The higher-resolution fills and the FPGA route

Two more ways to get the picture right, for buyers who want more than the cheap panel.

The Anbernic RG-476H does the NES at an exact 4x. Its 4.7-inch 1280 x 960 panel holds the console's 320 x 240 picture four times over, filling the whole screen with square pixels and a larger image than anything else here, on a UNISOC Tiger T820 with 8 GB of LPDDR4X, Android 13 and a 5000 mAh battery. It grades the NES and every other 2D system an A. It is tracked at about $165, which is a lot for this library - you are buying the panel for the systems above the NES, and the NES simply rides along at its best possible scale.

The Analogue Pocket is the only device here that is not emulation. FPGA hardware simulates the NES at the circuit level through the agg23 openFPGA core, which reaches mapper parity with the MiSTer core and supports four players through the Analogue Dock's multitap. It is also the only handheld in this guide that plays original cartridges from a slot - Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance natively, with the original hardware's timing rather than an approximation of it. Its one caveat for this guide is arithmetic: its 1600 x 1440 panel is not a whole-number multiple of the NES's 320 x 240 picture, so a NES game runs with a border rather than to the glass edge. At $220 you are buying accuracy and cartridge support, not the perfect fill - and for the NES, where even a $50 device fills the screen exactly, that is a trade worth making deliberately rather than by default.

What about the flagship handhelds?

They play the NES perfectly, exactly as a $40 device does, and this guide will not pretend otherwise. A Snapdragon handheld with a 1080p widescreen panel grades the NES an A - and then renders a 320 x 240 picture into a 16:9 screen at a scale that either leaves a large black margin on every side or stretches the image outright. Of the 468 graded devices here, 123 have a 16:9 panel, and not one of them is a better NES screen than a $40 handheld with a 640 x 480 4:3 panel. Buy the flagship for PlayStation 2, GameCube, Wii and Switch, and let the NES ride along. Do not buy it for the NES.

The verdict

NES emulation is solved everywhere, and on this console the screen is solved cheaply too, which makes the advice unusually simple. Buy the Anbernic RG-35XX 2024 at $50: a 3.5-inch 640 x 480 panel that is exactly twice the NES's 320 x 240 picture, so a game fills the screen at a clean 2x with square pixels and nothing left black, with an Allwinner H700 that is more chip than the library can use and a straight A grade on six systems. If you want a bigger exact fill, the RG-40XXV does the same thing at 4.0 inches for $60, and the RG-40XXH puts it in the horizontal shape the console actually was for $70. If $40 is the budget, the R36S is the cheapest device that gets the picture right. If you would rather have the picture at its own size, the Data Frog SF2000 shows it at a true 1:1 for $24. And if you want the most accurate NES that exists on a handheld, with the cartridges in a slot and an FPGA underneath, the Analogue Pocket is the only device that offers it - just not the perfect fill.

Sources

• Wikipedia, Nintendo Entertainment System - the Ricoh 2A03 running at 1.79 MHz in NTSC consoles and the 2A07 at 1.66 MHz in PAL ones, both based on the MOS Technology 6502; the Ricoh 2C02 Picture Processing Unit clocked at 5.37 MHz with 2 KB of video RAM and 256 bytes of object attribute memory; the Japanese launch on July 15, 1983 at ¥14,800 and the North American test launch on October 18, 1985 at $180, with the $179.99 Deluxe Set bundling the Control Deck, two controllers, the Zapper, R.O.B., Gyromite and Duck Hunt; 61.91 million units sold; the 10NES lock-out chip and the Official Nintendo Seal of Quality; the Famicom's hardwired controllers, its 15-pin expansion port and the microphone in the second controller; the NES Satellite infrared multitap and the 1990 Sports Set; and the Dendy clone licensed for sale in Russia in 1994: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Entertainment_System
• Wikipedia, NES Zapper - the light gun's North American launch on October 18, 1985, and its documented limitation that it can only be used on CRT displays and will not work on LCDs, plasma displays or other flat panel displays due to display lag: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NES_Zapper
• Wikipedia, Famicom Disk System - the February 21, 1986 Japanese release at ¥15,000, the 4.4 million units sold, the proprietary 112 KB Disk Cards, the Ricoh 2C33 wavetable sound channel, the Disk Writer kiosks, and the roughly 194-game library including The Legend of Zelda and Metroid: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famicom_Disk_System
• Wikipedia, Memory management controller - the VRC6's three extra sound channels, the VRC7's Yamaha FM synthesis, the MMC5's two extra square channels and PCM channel, the Famicom Disk System ASIC's single wavetable-lookup channel, and the note that the Japanese Castlevania III soundtrack was reworked for the Western cartridge to fit the NES's five stock channels: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_management_controller
• TASVideos, Pixel Aspect Ratio - the NES NTSC framebuffer of 256 x 240, its 280-dot by 240-line output signal, its 8:7 pixel aspect ratio of 1.143, and the corrected framebuffer of 292.57 x 224/240 pixels used to derive the 4:3 display: tasvideos.org/HomePages/Zinfidel/PixelAspectRatio
• Libretro Docs, Mesen - the accuracy-focused NES and Famicom core, its NES, Famicom, Famicom Disk System, Dendy, VS System and NSF emulation, its support for over 220 mappers including all licensed games, its 256 x 240 base framebuffer, and the disksys.rom Famicom Disk System BIOS it lists as required firmware with the checksum ca30b50f880eb660a320674ed365ef7a: docs.libretro.com/library/mesen
• Libretro Docs, QuickNES - the fast, low-overhead NES core and its documented compatibility limits, including the MMC3 softlock in Burai Fighter, the unsupported mapper 210 crash in Family Circuit '91, the mapper 3 issue that stops enemies spawning in Huge Insect, and its color palette options: docs.libretro.com/library/quicknes
• openFPGA Library / agg23 - the NES core for the Analogue Pocket, its mapper parity with the MiSTer core, and its four-player multitap support through the Analogue Dock: openfpga-library.github.io/analogue-pocket
• Analogue - Pocket's FPGA hardware, its original-cartridge support for Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance, its 1600 x 1440 display, and its display modes: analogue.co/pocket
• Anbernic - the RG-35XX 2024, RG-40XXV, RG-40XXH, RG-28XX, RG-35XX SP and RG-FC520 specifications, including the 640 x 480 panels, the 320 x 240 panel and the Ricoh 2A03 in the RG-FC520: anbernic.com