MagicX Zero 40 is a $75 handheld with a vertical display for Nintendo DS emulation (and classic arcade games)

The MagicX Zero 40 is an upcoming handheld game console that's expected to sell for $75. It has relatively modest specs including a 1.8 GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor, Imagination PowerVR GE8300 graphics, 2GB of RAM, and support for WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 4.2.

But this handheld has one thing that makes it very different from most. Instead of a horizontal screen it has a vertical display. Why? For playing Nintendo DS games.

The original Nintendo DS was released in 2004 and features two small displays, each with a 4:3 aspect ratio. And that makes it difficult to accurately emulate the experience of playing a Nintendo DS game on modern devices that tend to have a single wide-screen display.

The MagicX Zero 40 gets around this problem by using a 4 inch, 480 x 800 pixel IPS vertical touchscreen display. This basically gives you the equivalent of two 480 x 400 pixel screens, but if  you put a black bar in the middle it's trivial to pretend you're looking at two 480 x 360 pixel displays, each with an aspect ratio of 4:3.

While it's not quite the same as having an actual dual-screen device, it's probably a lot cheaper to manufacture.

MagicX first unveiled the Zero 40 earlier this year, when the company shared a video showcasing its Nintendo DS emulation chops. Of course, the hardware should be good enough to handle other games too… the trick is finding titles that look good on a vertical screen. So last week the company released another video showing off the handheld playing 30 classic arcade games made for vertical screens.

The handheld measures 136 x 105 x 17mm (5.4″ x 4.1″ x 0.7″) and weighs 182 grams (6.4 ounces). It has a 4300 mAh battery that MagicX says should provide up to 7 hours of run time. Other features include stereo speakers, a microSD card reader with support for up to 512GB of removable storage, and game controllers that include an analog stick, D-Pad, action buttons, and shoulder buttons. There's also a vibration motor.

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