these emulation handhelds – which often come pre-loaded with hundreds of games
I can only speak for the retroid pocket I have. It’s not far off from a stock android phone, sans camera and modem, plus d-pad and sticks.
It only came preloaded with a few open source emulators available on play store for free in addition to GApps (with official play store support).
Anbernic devices in particular are known to ship with an SD card that’s preloaded with a fairly large game library. I own a RG351M which did indeed include a cheap card loaded with both the OS and a collection of games by Nintendo, Sega, and many others, plus some strange rom hacks. I immediately swapped that card out for a better one with a better CFW and my own files.
Most other notable names in the emulation handhelds space like Retroid, Ayn, and Ayaneo expect users to be able to provide their own files instead, which I’d say makes more sense.
