Green and white handheld with Mortal Kombat game in progress

Charity shops are great. You never know what you’ll find, but you know it’ll be a bargain.

A few days ago, I came across this Leapster GS, in good - but not great condition. It was a fiver, and came with battery pack and charger. I snapped it up.

Leapster games reatil for around £40 each, there aren’t very many of them, they’re Flash based, and they’re aimed at kids - clearly not for me.

But the Leapster GS is a surprisingly competent beast. It runs a 500 MHz processor that can be overclocked to 880MHz, and about a gigabyte of internal storage. Oh, and it will also take Linux.

After digging out an ancient mini USB cable, it took half an hour to flash the device with Retroleap, and load it up with console ROMs for GBA, Snes, megadrive etc. It can also handle some games for first gen playstations, but gving the limited internal storage, I don’t think I’ll bother.

Earthworm Jim, Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, and Road Rash II will do just fine for now.