Helegaly Action Pi

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Device Overview: Helegaly Action Pi

The Helegaly Action Pi is a horizontal, $59.99 emulation handheld built around Allwinner’s A527, an eight-core Cortex-A55 chip paired with a Mali-G57 GPU and 2 GB of LPDDR4. Helegaly is a small, thinly documented brand, and the Action Pi is its bid to undercut the Anbernic and Powkiddy crowd by fitting a fairly recent SoC and Hall-effect sticks into a price that usually buys a plasticky Allwinner H700 device. Two decisions set the tone: it ships on Batocera rather than a locked-down stock launcher, and it is landscape-first, so it competes with the RG35XX H and Miyoo A30 rather than the vertical, Game Boy-shaped machines. Treat it as a budget PS1-through-Dreamcast handheld with a little headroom, not a Switch rival.

Emulation performance, generation by generation

The A527’s eight A55 cores top out around 2 GHz, which puts the Action Pi a clear step above the Cortex-A53 H700 handhelds but well short of anything with big cores or a desktop GPU. Everything through the 8-, 16- and 32-bit eras, from NES and SNES to Genesis, Game Boy Advance and PlayStation, runs at full speed with room to spare on standalone cores and RetroArch. PSP is the headline: God of War: Ghost of Sparta and similarly heavy titles hold up, though you will meet the usual A55 ceiling in the most demanding 3D games, where dropping the internal resolution to 1x keeps frame rates honest. Dreamcast is a genuine strength, with Crazy Taxi and most of the library running cleanly under Flycast. Nintendo 64 is playable but the weakest of the big systems: Ocarina of Time shows tearing and the odd stutter, and Mupen64Plus still trips over the format’s per-game quirks. Nintendo DS works through DraStic’s screen-swap and dual-screen layouts, which the 4:3 panel suits better than a widescreen device would. Saturn is where honesty matters. Simpler 2D titles are fine, but the system’s twin-CPU design punishes ARM handhelds, and Helegaly’s “up to Saturn” marketing oversells it. GameCube, Wii, PS2 and 3DS are out of reach; this chip cannot touch them, and no firmware tuning changes that.

Screen, build and controls

The 4.02-inch IPS panel runs at 960×720 in a true 4:3 ratio, the right call for a retro-first device: SNES, PS1 and DS content fills the glass without pillarboxing, and the 720-pixel height carries more vertical detail than the 480p screens on cheaper units. Colour and brightness are good for the money. The Hall-effect analog sticks are the standout inclusion at this price, since they resist the drift that kills potentiometer sticks, though they sit symmetrically rather than offset, which not everyone wants for landscape play. The shoulders are mixed: L2/R2 have satisfying travel and resistance, but L1/R1 feel thin and cramped. The d-pad has slight side-to-side wobble that does not hurt in practice. At 220 g and 172 x 82.5 x 30.3 mm this is a chunky slab, pocketable only in a generous pocket, and the 5,000 mAh battery is unusually large for the class, delivering roughly two days of moderate play between charges.

Software and setup

Out of the box the Action Pi runs Batocera.linux, which is welcome at this tier: you get a real EmulationStation front end, per-system RetroArch cores, scraping and network transfer instead of a proprietary skin you have to fight. Setup is the familiar routine of dropping ROMs onto the microSD, scraping artwork over Wi-Fi and tweaking per-core settings. Two USB-C ports and a mini-HDMI output let you charge while using a controller, or push games to a TV. The caveat is the custom-firmware scene. The A527 is newer and far less widespread than the ubiquitous H700, so the deep bench of community images, muOS, Knulli, ROCKNIX and ArkOS, that you get on an RG35XX is not there yet. Batocera is the platform to rely on, and if you want alternatives you are following forum threads rather than downloading a mature one-click build. For most buyers stock Batocera is plenty; tinkerers should arrive with tempered expectations.

Price, value and who it is for

At $59.99 with a 64 GB card in the box, or 128 GB for five dollars more, the Action Pi’s pitch is simple: more chip and better sticks than the price normally allows. It makes sense for someone who wants a landscape handheld that clears PS1, Dreamcast and most PSP without paying for an RG406V or a Retroid, and who prefers Batocera to a locked launcher. It is a poor fit if you need Saturn or GameCube, if you want the safety net of a large custom-firmware community, or if you value a brand with a long support record, because Helegaly is new and lightly documented, which is a bigger risk here than the hardware. As a cheap, capable and honestly-scoped emulator for the 8-bit-through-Dreamcast span, it is one of the more interesting sub-$60 options of 2025.