If you’ve followed the news in the retro handhelds scene at all this year, you know that 2024 has been deemed “Year of the Clamshell” by many, including us. Before we dive all in on the upcoming Miyoo Flip or Anbernic RG35XX SP, we should take a moment to appreciate the clamshell we already have as the scrappy little handheld that could.

With the new MiyooCFW 2.0, the Powkiddy V90 proves that what has stood as a budget-friendly fun option for a few years, still has some life left in it yet. So let’s check out what the community has done to extract every bit of value out of this value clamshell.

I purchased my V90 a while back purely because it was a clamshell and the cost of entry was about $35 on sale. Now, you can buy one for under 25 US Dollars. This is value, people.  This is not the car you keep pristinely preserved in the garage, this is a daily driver. It’s the 15-year-old beater that might not be much to look at, but dammit it has personality and has never failed to get you where you’re going.

You can throw the v90 in your pocket on the go, and even if it were lost or damaged, swallowing this small loss is a lot easier than with the price tags on some of the newer premium devices. But the V90 was never meant to feel premium. It just feels good. The controls and feel are extremely solid given the cost of entry to play and everything about it feels like it’s punching well above its e-waste class.

The CFW

If you know your emulation handhelds you know that they are often only as good as their community dev support. Luckily, the V90 still has folks, much smarter than I, who still believe in this little device.

Super Dodgeball Advance

Download the 2.0 beta firmware from Github. The release page goes over all of the helpful and neat functionality and features of the firmware.

New Miyoo CFW features on the V90

Flash the image file using software such as Balena Etcher or Rasberry Pi Imager to write the image file to your device’s SD card. The cards that come with the device leave a lot to be desired, so as with most of these handhelds, I’d recommend picking something up from a known manufacturer for your own peace of mind. You don’t want to spend a bunch of time on a games library only to lose everything to data corruption. Keep an eye on our Deals of the Week for cheap storage options.

Balena Etcher

After flashing, insert the SD card back into the device. You should see the Miyoo flash screen and enter a setup menu. The menus will ask you to confirm the device you are using with the firmware, at this point, you definitely want to make sure you confirm you are using the V90. After agreeing to some license information from the devs, the device will continue to set up everything for you. Once you see the green scrolling Miyoo CFW loading screen ala the original Game Boy, you’ll know everything has been installed successfully.

Flashing the V90 with Miyoo CFW 2.0

From here it’s just a matter of porting over your Rom collection to the SD card. You can do this any way you choose, including the now-supported FTP and SSH transfer methods. The easiest I’ve found on a Windows machine is to just plug the device and card into your PC directly via USB-C and transfer the games over to the Roms folder in the main partition of the SD card. If you were to plug the SD card directly into a Windows PC, you would only see the boot partition, and that isn’t where you want to be putting your games. You will want to navigate to the /main/roms/ directory and dump everything in there.

Game On!

After you have your V90 stocked with your favorite games, you just need to get out there and play them. While PSX is possible, I found the experience to be hit-and-miss, so test things out and see how you like them. This device shines in the 16bit and earlier era. GBA is a joy on the console (this is an SP clone after all) and the firmware is really doing the heavy lifting for this admirable little screen that could.

Animaniacs running on the V90 Miyoo CFW

Don’t look at this device as another shelf piece to be tinkered with maxed out, and put back on the shelf. The V90, thanks to the hard work of community devs, is a capable option for playing your favorite retro games on the go with enough personality to make you fall in love.

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