Actually, let's do a little story about the Dingoo A320, because it's fascinating. It wasn't the *first* handheld emulator, but by many accounts it kickstarted the cheap handheld emulator market, and inspired projects like the OpenPandora.

Imagine this: it's 2009, you're browsing through DealExtreme (back when it was still good), and suddenly you see a little device that promises to play video (in the original format!), music, and even emulate your retro games!

Keep in mind that in 2009, smartphones were still an up-and-coming thing, and most "MP4 players" still required you to use weird proprietary transcoders to convert video files into their janky device-specific format. So native video support was a big deal! It even did 720p without issues.

And then you look at the price: 60 EUR. Free shipping. What?

Turns out that it's actually a *very* cool device. Emulation performance is mixed - as is to be expected in 2009, with only PCs being capable of better performance for more recent consoles. Probably the only handheld that beat the A320 was a modded PSP.

Video and audio, however, that was the strong point. Video up to 720p played flawlessly, in basically any format - it was almost as versatile as VLC. 1080p was doable. FLAC audio? No problem. And the sound chip was of great quality for the time! The screen wasn't bad either, although the viewing angle was a bit off - it was a repurposed phone screen mounted at a 90 degree angle.

Another very interesting point was the battery. A single charge got you 8-14 hours of battery, depending on whether you were playing games, or music, or something else. It kept charge very well. Some people reported that it still booted up after being in a box for almost 10 years, without having lost their charge!

(It could play music *while* doing other stuff on the device, by the way - another pretty unique feature compared to most MP4 players at the time.)

The QA was a bit hit-or-miss, but when it was a hit, it was a HIT. I've had mine drop 4 meters onto a tile floor, fly through a train and bounce off the stairs a few times, and it never broke. Didn't even shut down.

(There was a brief scare with the "HK models" - slightly different models of somewhat worse build quality, and requiring different firmware due to a different display driver. It never became clear whether these were knock-offs, or just cost-cut models.)

But things *really* got interesting once the homebrew scene got going. We ended up with many homebrew emulators, some games, and eventually even a dual-boot Linux distribution - Dingux.

Interestingly the manufacturer was kind of under-the-table cooperative; they provided internal tools for unbricking a device after a failed flash, firmware images, and so on. They didn't provide source, but there was definitely some deliberate assistance going on.

At one point, they even flew out the Dingux developer to China to discuss the possibility of official Dingux support.

Unfortunately, things didn't last. Not long after this, there was an internal dispute of some sort, and the company split into Dingoo-Tech and Dingoo Digital. Both released an "A330", which were different devices, and neither were very good. After this, Dingoo faded into obscurity :(

It's now 14 years after I got my A320. These units still(!) regularly sell for more than the *original* retail price today, even in used condition. Probably the first device from a Chinese brand I've seen that has 'held its value' so well in EU/US.

Unfortunately the CPU is quite dated by this point, and there's not really any homebrew activity anymore either.

The A320 had some unique features that I haven't seen in another handheld emulator since: the power button had a key-lock feature (useful for MP3 player use in your pocket), there was an AV-out that doubled as secondary headphone jack, and so on.

RIP the Dingoo A320 I guess, and I hope a worthy successor appears some day.