If you’ve ever stared at a tangle of HDMI cables snaking across the floor of your gaming room and thought “there has to be a cleaner way,” you’re in the right place. After testing, comparing, and installing more than a dozen options in my own setup and helping friends wire theirs, I can tell you … Read more
Your retro gaming room deserves better than a rat’s nest of HDMI, RCA, and speaker wire spilling down from a wall-mounted TV. The fastest way to clean it up is with a dedicated AV wall plate, and I have spent the last three months installing, swapping, and stress-testing eight of the most popular options on … Read more
Looking for the best retro gaming controllers in ? After spending 90 days testing 10 gamepads across original Genesis, SNES, N64, Saturn, and Dreamcast hardware plus RetroArch on PC, Steam Deck, and the Switch, our top pick is the 8BitDo Ultimate 2 Wireless. It combines TMR joysticks (no stick drift, ever), a 1000Hz polling rate … Read more
Picking the best wireless controllers for retro gaming used to mean choosing between a frayed SNES pad and a Bluetooth gamepad that felt half a frame behind your input. In , the playing field has changed. After spending six weeks swapping controllers across a Raspberry Pi running RetroPie, a MiSTer FPGA, an Analogue 3D, and … Read more
Our team spent the last three months testing the best wired controllers for retro gaming across original hardware, FPGA boards like MiSTer, Analogue 3D, and full emulation stacks on PC and Raspberry Pi. We graded each pad on D-pad precision, thumbstick quality, cable length, latency, and whether it could survive a marathon of Street Fighter … Read more
Finding the best Bluetooth controllers for retro gaming used to mean digging through forum threads and settling for mushy face buttons or unreliable Bluetooth pairings. After three months of testing pads across Switch, PC, Steam Deck, Raspberry Pi, and a stack of original Sega hardware, our team narrowed down ten controllers that actually deliver the … Read more
The best controller for 2D fighting games is the one that makes your motion inputs reliable – clean quarter-circles, sharp dragon punches, and consistent diagonals on every match. After our team spent weeks testing 2D fighting game controllers across Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8, Guilty Gear Strive, and King of Fighters XV, three categories stood … Read more
Tangled power strips and spaghetti cords kill the vibe of any battlestation faster than a lag spike kills your KD ratio. I have been there, staring at a mountain of PS5 power bricks, monitor adapters, and RGB controller cables wondering how something so expensive could look so messy. After 60 days of swapping boxes in … Read more
Classic platformers live and die by the D-pad. Every jump arc, diagonal slash, and buffered dash flows through that four-way switch, and the wrong pad will eat inputs faster than a Bullet Hell boss eats hit points. We tested eight controllers over six weeks to find the best controllers for classic platformers in — running … Read more
After spending the last few months rotating between the Sega Genesis, Mega Drive, Saturn, and a Raspberry Pi running RetroPie, I landed on a shortlist of pads that genuinely nail the six-button feel retro gaming deserves. The best six-button controllers for retro gaming are the Retro-Bit Genesis 6-Button Wired Controller for original hardware, the Retro-Bit … Read more