Ayn's Odin is the retro gaming handheld to beat

engadget.com:

There are many, many ways to play retro games today. Plenty of those options are handhelds. But you might be surprised at how many of these devices feel jury rigged, cheap or often both. Worse, there’s a mishmash of open-source emulators running on a variety of operating systems to deal with, and all of the hardware is different — in short, emulation is a bit of a wild west sometimes.

What’s more, even the better handhelds usually only emulate up to around the PS1/N64 era. If you’re a fan of the GameCube or PS2 libraries, for example, the venn diagram of handhelds powerful enough that are well made and reasonably priced is effectively three separate circles. Maybe not for much longer thanks to the Odin by Ayn.

Yep, I hadn’t heard of ‘em either, but in the retro gaming scene that’s not uncommon. The Odin was launched on Indiegogo and instantly drew a lot of attention. The premise is simple, to bring the aforementioned venn diagram together and make a more cohesive retro (and even modern game) handheld.

The Odin gets off to a good start by effectively mimicking the Switch Lite form factor. Though the Odin’s screen is a shade larger (5.9 inches compared to Nintendo’s 5.5) and, at FHD, higher resolution. Anecdotally, most people who’ve held both find the Odin more comfortable and even prefer the latter’s analog sticks and D-pad which is not bad for a company new to the space.

I’m personally a fan of how all the controls are laid out. The analogue sticks are far enough away to not interfere with the buttons/D-pad but close enough to allow for quick, comfortable switching between them. I also like that the sticks are a little shallower than on other controllers which means you don’t need to push as far to get the movement you