I want a windows handheld where I can easily play gog games, mostly dosbox, in a price of about $300 or less.

The games I want to play are forgotten realms, ravenloft, waxworks, legacy, lands of lore, might and magic, anvil of dawn, alone in the dark, realms of the haunting, sanitarium, undying, and vtmb. Mainly 90s and a few 2000s.

Thank you

I would get one but I have heard most gog dosbox games don’t work on it even if you get the heroic launcher

SteamDeck is fully compatible with Windows (you just need to provide installer on your own). And yes, considering price to performance ratio there is nothing even remotely close at the moment.

I don't play any DOS games but I find that VERY hard to believe. I'm 99.99% sure it can run it because DOSBOX runs natively on Linux.

Well, I’m basing this on the YouTube review by metal Jesus. Can anyone confirm whether it works? The only reason I care about windows is for gog galaxy.

Of cource it can run DOSbox. The problem might be controls though, due to lack of physical keyboard and when you want handheld you probably don't want carrying keyboard and mouse around for it.

In fairness, it's true some out of the box dosbox configurations from GOG will not work.

With that said, DOSBox does have Linux builds:
https://www.dosbox.com/download.php?main=1
https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.dosbox.DOSBox

Which means, you could extract the game and just throw it into the Linux build of DOSBox (with your own configuration) if you have the know-how.

If not, there's always lutris:
https://lutris.net/

Which will often take care of such things for you.

One last thing I mention, before you jump to trying to use Steam Deck for such things, give Linux a spin on a regular computer and see how it goes, if for nothing more than giving yourself some "hands on" experience.

Do you really care about Galaxy? Or would you be OK downloading the offline installers or using Heroic to download the games? Because Galaxy itself does have issues running on Linux. The games run fine. But the galaxy client has problems.

Ok, thank you. That’s probably too complicated. I just want plug and play Well he used heroic but apparently that doesn’t work for most

Lutris would be the "plug and play" solution there, once installed you can login to your GOG account, it has scripts for setting up most gog games, so you just hit "install", and the rest is taken care of for you.

GPD WIN 3 ?... Not really budget friendly, but does have a integrated keyboard (compared to the SteamDeck), which will be good for all those Dos games that need keyboard access/input...

I have Lands of Lore. Give me a bit and I'll what it's like trying to get it running Linux.

Ok thanks

Actually I also just found this:
https://www.gog.com/forum/lands_of_lore_series/has_anybody_run_lol1_successfully_on_steam_deck