Best Handhelds for Pokémon ROM Hacks

The Pokémon ROM hack scene has outgrown the hardware conversation around it. Pokémon Unbound, a FireRed hack set in a region that never shipped, and Radical Red, a difficulty hack built on the Complete FireRed Upgrade engine, are both Game Boy Advance ROMs. The Game Boy Advance is the one system in our capability index that 373 of the 443 graded handhelds take a straight A on. For those two hacks the entire buying question collapses into fifteen dollars.

The hacks that get expensive are not the famous ones. They are the ones built on later platforms: a Nintendo DS hack like Blaze Black 2 Redux, or a 3DS hack like Prismatic Moon, which is not a patched ROM at all but a mod that sits on top of a copy of Ultra Moon and needs that game's title update installed before it will launch. Those are the purchases where the data changes shape, and where most "best handheld for Pokémon" advice stops being useful, because it answers the franchise question instead of the platform question.

This guide answers the platform question. Every count below comes from the 443 handhelds in the index, 376 of which carry a tracked street price.

The five hacks that define the question

The scene is large, but the hardware question is set by a handful of releases, because each one is built on a different base game and therefore lands on a different emulated system.

Two things in that table decide everything below. The first is that the platform column is a property of the base game, not of the hack's ambition: Radical Red is a harder game than Black 2 in every way that matters to a player, and it runs on hardware five times cheaper, because it is still a Game Boy Advance ROM. The second is the 3DS row, where the hardware requirement is not just an emulator that runs the system but a full copy of the original game underneath the mod.

The distribution model matters here too, because it is the same for all five. A hack circulates as a patch - IPS or BPS - that you apply to a ROM dump of the base game you own. Unbound and Radical Red patch FireRed, Prism patches Crystal, Blaze Black 2 Redux patches Black 2. The patch contains none of the original code, which is why the projects are documented publicly and why this guide points at the projects rather than at downloads. It is also why the base game is part of your budget, at least conceptually: a second-hand FireRed cartridge is the only thing standing between a $30 handheld and Unbound.

For a GBA hack, power is not the question

Here is the number that makes this the easiest buying decision in retro handhelds: 437 of the 443 devices we grade take a straight A on the Game Boy, and 373 of the 443 take a straight A on the Game Boy Advance. Every single one of those 373 is also a straight A on the Game Boy - the overlap is total, not partial. Whatever runs a GBA hack properly also runs a Game Boy Color hack properly, which means the Prism question is answered by the Unbound answer.

The GBA is the only system in this guide where the hardware actually separates, and even there the spread is small. 430 of the 443 devices we grade on the system are playable at a B or better. The 70 that miss the top band are not a random sample - 55 grade a B, 12 grade an F, 2 an A- and 1 a C - and they cluster at the very bottom of the market. The cheapest device that runs a GBA hack at all is the GB300 at $15, and it grades the system a B. The cheapest that runs one at full quality is the G28 at $30, tied with the U8.

Fifteen dollars is the entire quality spread across 443 handhelds. That is worth sitting with, because it inverts the way this purchase is usually written about. You are not shopping for power. 335 of the 376 priced devices in the catalogue are a straight A on the GBA, which is 89% of everything on the market. If a device costs $90 and grades the GBA a B, it is not a budget device with a budget grade - it is a device that is worse at the only job you have for it than a $30 one.

What separates the 373 devices that do it well is everything the grade does not measure: the screen, the shape, the buttons, the speaker, whether the shell rattles. A GBA hack is a ROM measured in megabytes rather than gigabytes, and its save file measured in kilobytes.

The DS line costs ten dollars

The Nintendo DS is where the market starts to filter, and the filter is sharp enough to be useful.

442 of the 443 devices carry a DS grade. 309 are playable at a B or better. 208 take a straight A. The step up from the GBA answer is ten dollars at full quality: the cheapest device that plays a DS hack at all is the U8 at $30 with a B, and the cheapest straight A is the R39S at $40. Five priced devices manage the full triple of Game Boy, GBA and DS at a straight A for $60 or less, and 39 do it for $100 or less.

The important number is not the price of the step, though. It is how many devices fall out of the top band on the way: 165 of the 373 devices that are a straight A on the GBA never reach a straight A on the DS. That is 44% of the GBA-capable catalogue, and it includes devices that cost $150. A handheld bought for Unbound is, more often than not, a handheld that runs Blaze Black 2 Redux at a B at best.

That is the trap this guide exists to name. The DS grades in the index are not a formality - 83 devices grade the system an F outright, which means they will not boot a DS hack at all - and the price does not predict which side of the line a device is on. The Retroid Pocket Classic at $114 is a straight A on the DS; several devices at twice its price are not.

The 3DS is where the money goes

Everything about the 3DS is different, starting with how a hack is delivered. Photonic Sun and Prismatic Moon are mods of Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, not patches of a single ROM: the release thread on Project Pokémon states plainly that the hacks require the title update for Ultra Sun or Ultra Moon to be installed in order to work properly. So the emulated device has to carry a full copy of a 3DS game before the hack has anything to sit on.

The grades are brutal in a way none of the earlier systems are. 436 devices carry a 3DS grade. 268 of them - 61% of the catalogue - grade the system an F. Only 144 are playable at a B or better, and 115 take a straight A.

The prices follow. The cheapest device that plays a 3DS hack at all is the Pocket Air Mini at $70 with a B, and that is not a small jump: it is more than double the price of the complete DS answer. The cheapest straight A on the system is the Mangmi Air Y Pro at $160, four times the DS floor. 112 priced devices are a straight A on all four of the platforms this guide covers, and only 11 of them cost $200 or less.

For a 3DS hack, then, the honest framing is not "which handheld" but "is a handheld the right purchase at all". A 3DS you already own is the cheapest machine that runs a 3DS hack, by a wide margin, and no emulation layer on this list reproduces the two screens, the 3D effect or the clamshell ergonomics. The handheld exists for people who want one device for four generations, not for people who want Prismatic Moon specifically.

What the grades do not measure

Four things decide whether a given hack actually plays well on a given device, and none of them appear in a letter grade.

The patch format and the base game. A hack ships as a patch in one of two formats, IPS or BPS, and you need a patcher that reads the one your hack uses. The usual desktop tools handle both, and the patching happens on a computer before the ROM ever reaches the handheld - so a hack that only ships as BPS is a five-minute problem on a laptop and a real annoyance if you planned to do it inside the device's front-end.

The clock. Some hacks key events to the cartridge's real-time clock - the MBC3 clock on Game Boy and Game Boy Color hardware - and an emulator has to implement it and persist it in the save file, which is exactly what BGB documents for its own MBC3 emulation. A front-end built around quick suspend-and-resume sometimes handles this badly: the clock resets, events never fire, or the save carries a timestamp that no longer makes sense. Our index grades emulation quality per system, not emulator feature support, so this is the one thing you cannot read off the table above.

The save. GBA-era cartridges used several save chips - SRAM, flash memory and EEPROM all appear in the format - and a core that guesses the type wrong tends to lose progress on exit rather than at the moment you notice. Test with a throwaway save before you invest ten hours.

The shape. A Game Boy Advance game is landscape, 3:2. On a vertical handheld it plays letterboxed in portrait, which is fine for a 20-minute train ride and less fine for a 40-hour hack with a mission log. This is the single most under-discussed difference between two devices that carry identical grades, and it is why the shortlist below carries both shapes.

The shortlist

The G28, $30. The cheapest handheld in the catalogue that takes a straight A on the Game Boy Advance, tied with the U8. It is horizontal, which means a GBA hack fills its screen the way the original did, and it is a straight A on the Game Boy, the NES and the SNES as well - 49 priced devices hit the Game Boy and GBA double for $60 or less and this is the cheapest of them. Its DS grade is a D, so it is the end of the road at the GBA era. If Unbound and Radical Red are the whole plan, the plan costs $30 and this is the device.

The U8, $30. The same money as the G28 and the better buy for most people, because it spends it differently: straight A on the Game Boy and the GBA like the G28, a straight A on the PlayStation 1 the G28 does not have, and a B on the Nintendo DS instead of a D. That B is not a footnote - it makes the U8 the cheapest device in the index that runs a DS hack at all, at a third of the price of the cheapest device that runs one properly. If you want to try Blaze Black 2 Redux before committing to a DS-capable device, this is how you do it for $30.

The R39S, $40. The winner, and the cheapest handheld in the catalogue that is a straight A on the Game Boy, the Game Boy Advance and the Nintendo DS at once. That grade sheet covers all four hack eras this guide can answer - Unbound, Radical Red and Prism at full quality on the first two columns, Blaze Black 2 Redux at full quality on the third - for $10 more than the GBA floor. It is vertical, which is the compromise: a GBA hack plays in portrait on it. 202 priced devices manage the triple, so the feat is common; $40 is where it starts.

The X35H, $60. The landscape answer to the same question. It is the cheapest horizontal handheld that takes a straight A on the Game Boy, the GBA and the DS, which makes it the device to buy if the R39S's portrait GBA is a dealbreaker and the $20 between them is not. It adds a B+ on the Nintendo 64 and a straight A on the PlayStation 1, and it grades the GameCube a D, so it is still a cartridge-era machine. If your plan includes a DS hack and any memory of holding a Game Boy Advance, this is the shortlist entry that matches the memory.

The Pocket Air Mini, $70. The cheapest device in the catalogue that runs a 3DS hack at all, at a B, on top of straight A grades on the Game Boy, the GBA and the DS. That makes it the first genuinely four-generation device on this list, and it is $90 cheaper than the first device that runs a 3DS hack at full quality. A B is playable, not full quality - frame pacing and shader compilation are the usual complaints - but for someone who wants to see whether Prismatic Moon is worth the effort, $70 is a far better answer than $160.

The Mangmi Air Y Pro, $160. The complete answer: the cheapest handheld in the catalogue that is a straight A on all four of the Game Boy, the GBA, the DS and the 3DS. 112 priced devices carry that quadruple and only 11 of them cost $200 or less, so $160 is the floor of the top tier rather than a mid-range compromise. It is vertical, it is a straight A on thirteen systems through the 3DS and an A- on the PlayStation 2, and it is the only device here that runs every hack in this guide at the top band. If you want one purchase that ends the question, this is the one.

What to look for

1. The platform of the hack, not the size of the hack. Unbound is a bigger game than Black 2 in ambition and it runs on a $30 device, because it is a GBA ROM. Work out which base game your hack patches before you look at a single price.
2. The grade on that one column. Not the headline grade, not the price, not the chip name. 70 of 443 devices miss the top band on the GBA and 165 of the 373 that hit it miss the top band on the DS. The column is the decision.
3. The shape and the clock. A landscape game on a portrait device is a different experience, not a worse one - decide which you want. And if the hack keys anything to a real-time clock, check that the emulator front-end exposes it before you order, because no grade sheet will tell you.

The honest counterpoint

For most people reading this, the answer is $30 and the rest of the page is unnecessary.

If the hacks you want are Unbound, Radical Red or Prism, you need a straight A on the Game Boy Advance or the Game Boy, and 335 priced devices have the first and 372 have the second. The G28 and the U8 both do it for $30. Nothing above them on this list buys a better version of a GBA hack; it buys the DS era, and then the 3DS era, at four and five times the price. If neither of those eras is on your list, buying the winner is spending $10 for a column you will never read.

The second honest point is that the DS and 3DS hacks are not really handheld purchases at all. A DS Lite runs Blaze Black 2 Redux natively, with two screens and a cartridge slot. A 3DS you already own runs Prismatic Moon without an emulation layer in sight. The case for a retro handheld here is one device instead of three, with save states and a screen that is not fifteen years old - which is a real case, but it is a convenience case, not a performance one.

Which leaves the case for the winner, and it is narrow but clean. Forty dollars is the price at which a single handheld stops being a Game Boy Advance machine and becomes a machine for the entire cartridge-and-DS hack canon at full quality, and the next device that does it in a landscape shell is twenty dollars behind it. That is a good deal in a market where the same question is usually answered with a $200 Android device. It is just a smaller deal than the word "best" implies.

Sources

• Lost In Consoles - the Handheld Capability Index, the per-system grades and tracked prices every number in this guide is computed from: lostinconsoles.com
• Lost In Consoles - the Pokémon guide, which covers the official games rather than the hacks: lostinconsoles.com
• Lost In Consoles - the Game Boy Advance guide, for the system the two biggest hacks run on: lostinconsoles.com
• Lost In Consoles - the Nintendo DS guide, for the Blaze Black tier: lostinconsoles.com
• Lost In Consoles - the Nintendo 3DS guide, for the tier the hacks get expensive: lostinconsoles.com
• Lost In Consoles - the device pages the grades and prices in this guide are read from: G28, U8, R39S, X35H, Pocket Air Mini, Mangmi Air Y Pro
• GameBrew - Pokémon Unbound, by Skeli, a GBA hack of Fire Red: gamebrew.org
• GameBrew - Pokémon Radical Red, by soupercell and koala4, built on the Complete FireRed Upgrade engine and Dynamic Pokémon Expansion: gamebrew.org
• RainbowDevs - Pokémon Prism and the team's Game Boy projects: pokemonprism.com
• ROM Hack Guides - Blaze Black 2 Redux and Volt White 2 Redux, the Nintendo DS hacks by AphexCubed and Drayano: romhackguides.com
• Project Pokémon - the Photonic Sun and Prismatic Moon release thread, including the requirement that the Ultra Sun or Ultra Moon title update be installed: projectpokemon.org
• Retro Dodo - the best Pokémon ROM hacks, for the releases this guide did not name: retrododo.com
• Wikipedia - ROM hacking, and the patch-based distribution model the hacks use: wikipedia.org
• BGB - the Game Boy emulator's documentation, including MBC3 real-time clock emulation: bgb.bircd.org
• BGB - the RTC save format specification, for how a cartridge clock is persisted in a save file: bgb.bircd.org
• mGBA - the open-source Game Boy Advance emulator: mgba.io
• PowKiddy - the X35H: powkiddy.com
• AYANEO - the Pocket Air Mini: ayaneo.com
• Mangmi - the Air Y Pro vertical handheld: mangmi.com

Method: every grade and price quoted here is the frozen value published on each device page in the Lost In Consoles capability index, which grades 443 handhelds on eighteen systems and carries a tracked street price for 376 of them. The tier counts are computed over that dataset in full, not sampled: 437 of 443 devices take a straight A on the Game Boy, 373 of 443 on the Game Boy Advance, 208 of 442 on the Nintendo DS and 115 of 436 on the Nintendo 3DS, with a denominator that differs from 443 only where the index has no grade for a device on that system. A straight A means the index top band, the letter A; there is no A+ in the dataset and A- is the band below it, so "playable" in this guide means a B or better, the site-wide threshold. The floors quoted - $15 GB300 as the cheapest device that runs a GBA hack at all, $30 G28 and U8 as the cheapest straight A on the Game Boy Advance, $35 R36 Max as the cheapest vertical straight A on the Game Boy and GBA together, $40 R39S as the cheapest straight A on the Game Boy, GBA and DS at once, $60 X35H as the cheapest horizontal device that does the same, $70 Pocket Air Mini as the cheapest 3DS-playable device, $160 Mangmi Air Y Pro as the cheapest straight A on all four, $114 Retroid Pocket Classic as a DS straight A far below the Android tier - are the cheapest priced device in the dataset that reaches that band, recomputed for this page. The 165-device figure is the count of devices that take a straight A on the Game Boy Advance but not on the Nintendo DS, and the 64-device figure is the reverse case. Prices are the tracked street price at publication and move with the market.