Quick Summary
The GamerCard is a different kind of retro gaming handheld.
Powered by a Raspberry Pi, it’s superslim, extremely light (at 100g) and is roughly the size of a voucher card you can buy in a supermarket. It’s available now priced at £125 / $125.
Retro gaming handhelds are so popular today that we seemingly see a new one pop up every week – even two. However, bar a couple of exceptions, they tend to be similar to one another and invariably produced by Chinese manufacturers.
There’s a new one coming that’s quite different, though. Developed by a British entrepreneur and his company, it truly bucks the trend – even though it has the potential of running classic games from numerous decades.
The GamerCard is a different sort of handheld. Highly pocketable and designed to be displayed in stores like a voucher card, it is the brainchild of inventor Grant Sinclair, and if his surname rings a few bells that’s because he just so happens to be a part of retro gaming royalty.
He’s the nephew of Sir Clive – the wizard behind the ZX80, ZX81 and, most significantly, the ZX Spectrum – and there are few more pivotal to the rise of video gaming in the home, in the UK, at least.
(Image credit: @grantsinclair.com)
The handheld forgoes the usual button configurations for dual silicone control pads. You also get a 4-inch 1:1 IPS display with a 720 x 720 resolution and fast frame rate of 60fps.
It is superslim – much more so that other Game Boy-alikes, measuring just 6.5mm. It also weighs just 100g, so could be an ideal travel companion – especially when you realise what it’s capable of.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the hardware is that it is powered by a 64-bit Raspberry Pi Zero 2W and a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor. That not only gives it a decent level of oomph for game emulation, it runs on Linux system software, so many of the emulation tools out there should work instantly.
(Image credit: @grantsinclair.com)
Indeed, Sinclair claims it will happily run Recalbox, RetroPie and Lakka, which open up 10s of different classic gaming systems. It’s also fully compatible with PICO-8 for even wider game support, while developers can create their own games or adapt custom emulators to work on the device.
Dedicated Pi games will run on it too, and the GamerCard comes with a USB-C port plus an HDMI output to play games on a larger screen.
(Image credit: @grantsinclair.com)
Unusually for this sort of thing, the GamerCard is not going through a crowd funding phase, it’s actually available to purchase now – via the inventor’s own website at grantsinclair.com.
Priced at £125 / $125 you can order one now for delivery in “8 – 10 weeks”. I’ll let you know what I think if I manage to get hold of one in the meantime, including how it stacks up to the retro gaming handheld alternatives I own already.
