The Supervision is a handheld console launched in 1992 by Watara, an Asian manufacturer, and sold worldwide under a multitude of brands and names depending on the distributor (QuickShot Supervision, Hartung, Travell Mate…). Its positioning was simple: offer a cheap alternative to the Game Boy, with a larger screen and a much lower price.
Technically the machine is decent for the money: a 65C02 processor — the same family as the NES one — and a 160x160 monochrome screen, therefore larger and squarer than the Game Boy's. In practice, the quality of the panel is its main flaw: low contrast and heavy ghosting make fast games hard to follow. Several case revisions followed one another, from the original model with its tilting screen to a compact Game Boy-shaped version.
The library holds around sixty titles, nearly all developed in-house or by small Asian studios, and often inspired by — not to say traced from — the hits of the day. With no strong licence and no third-party publisher, the Supervision never threatened Nintendo and disappeared quickly, which makes it a collector's curiosity today.
Emulator availability per board:
| Emulator | RPI3/RPI02W | RPI4/400 | RPI5/500 | OGA/OGS/RG351 | PC | RG353 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Libretro Potator | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
The Supervision is available on every board supported by Recalbox.
Potator is the only emulator for this system and therefore the default one. Its compatibility is excellent and it runs at full speed on every machine, including the most modest ones. It supports neither netplay nor softpatching, but it declares support for CRT display. RetroAchievements are supported on this system.
Put your games in:
/recalbox/share/roms/supervision/
Supported extensions: .sv .bin .zip .7z
The usual format is .sv; some dumps are distributed as .bin, which is accepted too. .zip and .7z archives are recognised, with a single game per archive.
Roms in No-Intro format are recommended: the library is small and clean sets cover nearly every known title.