GamerCard Review: £99 Raspberry Pi Handheld Blends Retro Emulation With Frustrating Controls

Key facts

• GamerCard costs £99, approximately $130, and is built on an adapted Raspberry Pi Zero 2W with a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor.
• The device has a 4-inch 720p IPS screen with a 1:1 aspect ratio and a 1,600-mAh battery lasting about four hours per charge.
• It measures 128 x 88 x 6.5 millimeters, weighs 100 grams, and includes USB-C, two Micro-USB, mini HDMI-out, a Qwiic connector, and a microSD slot.
• Preinstalled games include Bloo Kid 2, Astro Blaze, and the Saboteur trilogy, alongside a beta store with indie, open source, and shareware titles.
• Controls use silicone pads over four discrete inputs per side with no connected D-pad, causing lag and making 3D games like Quake nearly unplayable.
• The hardware lacks a Home button, physical volume controls, and a 3.5-mm headphone jack; Bluetooth headphone pairing was unreliable.
• Loading ROMs requires an FTP client like FileZilla, and the microSD slot is tight enough to need steel tweezers for removal.
• RetroPie emulation runs SNES games at 60 frames per second but stretches them to the square screen, while Game Boy ROMs failed to load and SNES saves were unreliable.
• The GamerCard is the brainchild of Grant Sinclair, nephew of Sinclair ZX Spectrum inventor Clive Sinclair, and supports MicroPython, C, C++, Basic, and Pico-8.