While emulation gets a bad rap because of rampant piracy involved with it for most people, it's the piracy that makes it illegitimate and not emulation itself. There's nothing about emulation that requires piracy - e.g. Nintendo Switch Online has NES and SNES emulation without piracy. You can also dump cartridges [1] or buy legal ROMs [2] to play on this Odroid [3].
I understand the confusion, but please do be careful to speak about piracy when you mean to speak about piracy. Emulation is a technically interesting exercise that allows for the preservation and transformation of old video games.
[1]: https://www.retrode.org/about/
[2]: e.g. https://lesateliersphv.ca/en/extracting-roms-from-sega-mega-...
[3]: You might argue: "but few people actually do this". And you'd be right. Piracy for old game systems is just far more convenient. But that still makes piracy piracy and emulation emulation.
And related from the same author, is the effect that the emulation modding/patching community has on how we view low effort re-releases such as the recent 3D All Stars: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0d82ZJ4sd4
I think this is the appeal of modern home-brew. There's established constraints and conventions from the platform.
Saying "you can run SNES games on it" frames the product well. I'm not expecting to run games which need full keyboard/mouse or RTX3080 calibre graphics, but I do expect a good experience with little pixel-art graphics and a D-pad plus four buttons.
Related, a few years back I got in the hobby of building Raspberry Pi (Zero, 3, and 4) into Gameboy (original gen 1) shells. Economies of scale sure are nice, because even the raw materials for building one cost me more than $80.
EDIT: I found the specs (or someone quoting specs) and it looks like it is comparable to Raspberry Pi Zero and does not have wireless. That would make things like Steamlink a non-starter.
Anyway, the marketplace issue is a bootstrapping problem. None of the companies making these are set up to support an ecosystem of legitimate software delivery, and now the culture that's built up around them treats the availability of thousands of classic game ROMs as being part of the value proposition. So even if you were to try to start, it would be a challenge to break out of that and persuade owners of them not to pirate your lovingly ported indie games when they can play the entire SNES, Genesis, and GBA libraries for "free".
One final barrier is that although some do, many of these devices don't include internal wifi, I assume due to certification hassles. Instead a USB host port is included into which you plug a compact dongle. So this further complicates any delivery/DRM schemes, if you have to provide a system image with support for many possible wireless dongles, and perhaps some kind of offline-transfer scheme for those without a dongle or who don't want to use one.
All in all, it's a tough nut to crack; I'm not surprised no one has tried. The closest thing is probably Panic's Playdate, and they went with their own hardware, with much-reduced specs and a gimmicky crank, but at least having end-to-end control.
You'll be delighted to hear that that's not entirely true - there is a Linux x86-on-ARM emulator Box86 [1] that allows you to run Wine apps [2]. While your expectations should be realistic, it's made to defer as much as possible to platform native implementations so there's a bunch of things you can run!
[1]: https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86
[2]: e.g. here's Warcraft 3 on a Raspberry Pi 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85bfzDSWHNQ
Have you had a different experience? If so- what have I been doing so wrong? I’d love to get it to work on a Pi.
This model grew out of the original GO, based on ESP32. Look at how they've left GPIO accessible, offered a mini keyboard (no longer visible on the site) to slot into the GO and provided loads of examples and project ideas [1].
That makes sense when you're stretching the limits of very modest hardware. The difference is that the SoC powering the Advanced and this new variant is powerful enough for Linux distributions.
So I'd say the spirit is in the right place - they're not just smashing out cheap crap preloaded with copyrighted material. But this is their most "finished" gaming specific product, so they're not much point showing other things it is capable of. Are there really much in the way of legitimate Linux games which can be demonstrated to run on the hardware?