Polymega's $199 Remix drive brings your physical retro games to PC

Playmaji is opening pre-orders for the $199 Polymega Remix on April 16. The external USB drive lets you digitize and play physical retro games on Windows 11 PCs and handhelds. The company is also overhauling the hardware inside its flagship Polymega Base Unit, promising a free upgrade to anyone currently waiting in the pre-order queue.

I think the Polymega is a great concept. I do not actually own one, but I am wildly intrigued by the ecosystem Playmaji has built since founders Bryan Bernal and Eric Christensen first pitched the idea in 2015. When it was originally announced as the RetroBlox in 2017, it was meant to be an FPGA console. Field programmable gate arrays recreate classic hardware at the silicon level, much like the MiSTer project. The company eventually pivoted to software emulation running on a custom interface, but the core appeal remained intact. They built a modular system with a built-in CD drive and swappable cartridge adapters that rips your physical media to a local database.

A $199 disc drive for Windows 11

The Remix is essentially that exact experience decoupled from the around $550 Base Unit. According to the latest update from Polymega HQ, the device has finished mass production. You plug it into a PC, an Intel Mac, or an Atari VCS via USB, boot up the free Polymega App, and insert a PlayStation, Sega Saturn, or Sega CD game. It reads the disc, identifies the game against its internal database, and lets you play it right there or rip it to your hard drive. The Atari VCS compatibility makes sense, given that Atari bought a minority stake in Playmaji in July 2023.

If you buy the separate Element Modules, you can rip cartridges too. You just slot the SNES, Genesis, or NES module into the Remix exactly as you would with the main console. The Polymega App itself has been in the works since early 2022. It handles the heavy lifting of organizing the digitized games into custom playlists and applying virtual display modes. Because the Remix relies on your computer's processor rather than onboard silicon, the performance ceiling is entirely dependent on your own hardware. A modern gaming PC will have no trouble running Sega Saturn games at full speed, a task that often trips up lower-end emulation boxes. Playmaji plans to add support for iOS, Android, and Apple Silicon later.

Double the RAM for the pre-order queue

The original Base Unit launched in 2021 after years of delays, and production bottlenecks have kept it hard to find ever since. Playmaji is addressing the current backlog by completely re-engineering the motherboard. The revised console has more CPU cores, higher clock speeds, double the RAM, and more internal storage. It also runs quieter.

The immediate benefit of the new hardware is better Nintendo 64 performance. The Nintendo 64 is notoriously difficult to emulate accurately due to its complex architecture. The original Polymega Base Unit handled 8-bit and 16-bit systems flawlessly, but the leap to 64-bit 3D games pushed the older processor to its absolute limit. The new multi-core setup should provide the necessary headroom to smooth out frame rates in heavier titles.

Anyone with an existing Base Unit pre-order gets the new hardware automatically at no extra cost. If you want to jump into the queue fresh, Playmaji plans to reopen pre-orders for the upgraded console in early summer.