This Handheld May Be Our Best Hope to Relive the Nintendo DS Glory Days

Of the mass number of retro gaming handhelds available today, the one missing link is a device that can help us relive the days when dual-screen gaming reigned supreme. The best options for Nintendo DS software emulation are either too flat or too expensive. Niche handheld maker Ayaneo may have a winner with its new iteration of the Pocket DS featuring a large 7-inch screen and a smaller secondary touchscreen, all housed in a clamshell that’s so damn easy to take on the road.

The Pocket DS is essentially a revised Ayaneo Flip 1S DS, which the handheld maker launched last week. The Flip 1S DS is a Windows-based handheld PC, but the Pocket DS runs on Android and uses Qualcomm’s Snapdragon G3x Gen 2 chip instead of the high-end AMD CPU. In a Tuesday livestream, Ayaneo showed off this new handheld and its two large screens that look like the all-grown-up version of Nintendo’s first attempt at a dual-display device. Beyond the ergonomic bottom grip that may make it more comfortable to grip for longer, the real draw are the two large displays that fold down on each other.

The main display is a 7-inch OLED panel with a max 165Hz refresh rate. That means it should be able to handle Android games or upscaled retro titles at high frame rates. The Pocket DS’s 1080p screen is also higher resolution than the Steam Deck, though with a max of 800 nits of peak HDR brightness, it may be slightly dimmer than Valve’s popular handheld PC. The 5-inch secondary display isn’t OLED—it’s IPS LCD, though it has the same 4:3 aspect ratio as the original Nintendo DS’ twin displays. 

In its livestream, Ayaneo showed how users could swipe apps from one screen and swap them to the other display. The dual screens essentially allow users to open up the app drawer and performance center and run a game or YouTube video at the same time. You can also play games while running a separate app or even open two games at once. The main draw for most players will be Nintendo DS emulation, though even then users may still have issues that could be enough to ruin the experience. 

Other twin-screen devices like the OneXSugar Sugar 1—with its flip-up second display and fold-down grips—can show two screens in DS games. The problem is modern software emulators still struggle to let users use the two screens at the same time. Reviews of the Sugar 1 pointed out this problem with emulators on Android: you can’t access the bottom touchscreen while controlling the main display. Ayaneo may have a solution for this issue with a special button located along the bottom of the Pocket DS that centers control on one display or the other. 

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COCFYxX5GK0[/embed]

The other big impediment will be price. Ayaneo products are relatively high-quality, but they’re notoriously pricey compared to competitors like Anbernic, Retroid, or Miyoo. On Monday, Ayaneo said its new sub-brand, named Konkr, will offer cheaper devices starting with the Konkr Fit 7-inch handheld. Ayaneo didn’t share any pricing or a release date for the Pocket DS. We can only guess that an OLED panel won’t come cheap, though it would likely be slightly less pricey than the Flip 1S DS at its astronomical $1,300 MSRP. It’s only slightly cheaper if you go in on the Indiegogo campaign (just beware any crowdfunding campaign has a chance of failing). Even $500 may seem too steep for what’s still just an Android-based handheld.

So far, the remedies for DS gaming have been less than ideal. Retroid has its Retroid Pocket Flip 2 clamshell handheld with a large main display but no secondary screen. The same retro handheld maker also makes a dual-screen add-on that wraps around the company’s other devices like the Retroid Pocket Mini, but it won’t provide the ease and portability of a true clamshell. Then there’s the MagicX Zero40 with its vertically oriented display. This allows you to use emulators to display the Nintendo DS’ two screens at once. Again, this is less than ideal, and it fails to offer the same convenience of Nintendo’s long-abandoned dual-screen handhelds.