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Retrogaming Hardware

Kazin

Kazin

did i do all of that?
(he/him)
Tegan said:
I'd love to have a ROB just as a display piece.
Click to expand...

Well, I've purchased another one off eBay where the seller kindly sent me a video of it moving, so when I get it and if it works properly, I may have a base unit (just ROB, no gyros or the little attachment thingies) for you if you want to discuss things in DM, hit me up. I don't need two - even if I beat Gyromite (doubtful), I won't be leaving it hooked up haha (and certainly not with fucking batteries in his butt)
 
Mr. Sensible

Mr. Sensible

Pitch and Putt Duffer
Been replacing my Game Boy cartridge save batteries with CR1616 battery holders and noticed that my copy of Kirby's Dream Land 2 had lost its save data post-battery-swap. Using a Retrode 2, I was able to rewrite a backed-up save file to the KDL2 cart, so I decided to do a quick test. I dropped the cartridge from a height of around 2-3 feet onto an easy chair cushion, and then booted it up to find it had once again lost its save data.

After opening it up, I removed the holder and remounted it to the PCB with fresh solder. Also bent down the battery holder's positive tab just a bit so that it would keep more tension and maintain better contact with the top of the CR1616 cell. Rewrote the saves again, and this time they survived my little drop test, so I think it's fixed now.

Some folks recommend against using holders in the first place and just sticking with pre-tabbed batteries to avoid losing save data, but I feel like the convenience of future solder-less battery replacement is worth it. If installing battery holders, I believe best practice would be to do some similar testing and ensure you won't lose your saves after a slight jostle. Game Boy cart saves seem to be especially intolerant of any interruption in power whatsoever, so make sure those coin cells are held down nice and snug!
 
Kirin

Kirin

Summon for hire
(he/him)
I saw these for sale at a pharmacy over the holidays:

73422852-A0-FC-46-F1-A686-1-BE5-C0578-DB0.jpg


Oddly they look like the exact same thing in two different shells. I recognize some of the box art games from the knock-off handheld threads here. The boxes leave off obvious trademark violations like Mario hacks but I wouldn't be surprised if they're in there.
 
Beowulf

Beowulf

Son of The Answer Man
(He/Him)
Kirin said:
Oddly they look like the exact same thing in two different shells. I recognize some of the box art games from the knock-off handheld threads here. The boxes leave off obvious trademark violations like Mario hacks but I wouldn't be surprised if they're in there.
Click to expand...
Oh, these are definitely Famiclone handhelds. I found a Youtube review of one of them and recognized a few of the Nice Code titles I saw on the devices I tested a couple of years ago. That one didn't seem to have anything Nintendo would get upset about, though.

I don't think I'm willing to pay $20+shipping to try these things out, but if anyone finds a used one for a few bucks I could be willing to catalogue the contents.
 
Patrick

Patrick

Magic-User
(He/Him)
I’ve been playing Minish Cap lately, and it got me tinkering with my 3DS XL again. I found 2 new apps that are really great.

1: H-Shop. It’s a fake storefront that lets you download any 3DS, virtual console, DSi, etc. games for free. It’s way easier than digging up roms, and it got me to download a bunch of nicer versions of games I was previously emulating.

2: a DS game forwarder. It let me put all of my DS games on the 3DS homescreen instead of having to open up Twilight Menu++. I was looking through a very complicated how-to, but then I stumbled on a newer version that does everything automatically, on the system. It’s super nice.

I also got homebrew versions of Mario 64 and Sonic CD. I could probably stop buying games altogether and just use this 3DS for the rest of my life. It’s wild how many games it can run.
 
Kazin

Kazin

did i do all of that?
(he/him)
I'll have to look into H-Shop - digging up .cia files gets old. I wonder how many games they have up there...
 
Patrick

Patrick

Magic-User
(He/Him)
It looks comprehensive.

E- on second thought, I should avoid linking anything. It’s easy to find via web search.
 
Beowulf

Beowulf

Son of The Answer Man
(He/Him)
Any idea if H-Shop works for Android-based emulators, like the Retroid Pocket 3?

I broke down and paid $25 on eBay for a pair of My Arcade Go Gamer handhelds. Expect a thread of what's on them at some point.
 
Patrick

Patrick

Magic-User
(He/Him)
I’m not sure. It’s a 3DS app, but it also has a website where you can get qr codes to download .cia files.
 
ArugulaZ

ArugulaZ

Fearful asymmetry
Thanks for the suggestion. I used this software to try the 3DS version of Tekken, which wasn't all that different from the PSP game, except with less ornate backgrounds. I seem to remember being able to knock your foe into sheep in the alpine stage, but on the 3DS they're permanently glued to the horizon where you can't reach them. The characters look a teeny bit more detailed on the 3DS, but I think I'll just stick with Dead or Alive Dimensions.
 
Troa11

Troa11

Interestingly Twilight Menu seems to run way better on a DSi. My only problem with DS forwarders is the 3DS counts them as DSi software and you're limited to 40. Nowadays I just use the 3DS for 3DS and the DSi for DS stuff.
 
Patrick

Patrick

Magic-User
(He/Him)
I have not hit that limit yet, but I'll keep it in mind.

I've been going back and forth on selling my SNES and GBA stuff for a while (maybe Wavebirds too?), and I realized that I'd probably go ahead and do it if I could run SNES games better on my 3DS. So I think I'm going to start looking for a New 3DS XL. If I'm going to stick with a 3DS as my main retro machine, that extra bit of power would be nice.
 
Troa11

Troa11

That's definitely the way to go. IIRC SNES VC was limited to the NEW models only, so that's Nintendo's stamp of approval.
 
ArugulaZ

ArugulaZ

Fearful asymmetry
The New 3DS XL was a must for Miiverse. I remember there was a RAM bottleneck that kept you from posting images in certain games, particularly Smash Bros., unless you did a couple extra annoying, time-consuming steps. Plus, a regular sized 3DS is just no fun at all to draw on due to the smaller screen.

(Of course, it's been at least five years since Miiverse was shuttered for good...)

Bubble's Super NES emulator should run well enough on either a regular 3DS or a super-sized one... but if you want to sink your teeth into the SuperFX games like StarFox, yeah, the 3DS XL is the way to go. Same deal if you want to play Sega CD games in the Genesis emulator.
 
Patrick

Patrick

Magic-User
(He/Him)
I found a new 3DS XL in really good condition. I was considering getting a 2DS Xl or a Japanese 3DS LL to save a bit of money, but I was able to see this one in person and it's almost flawless. The only mar is a tiny scratch on the hinge. Otherwise it's like new. I'd rather not gamble based on ebay photos, so I got it.

The screens are in super good shape and the top one is IPS. The body is a lot more solid and the buttons are clicky instead of mushy compared to the old 3DS. It just feels and sounds nicer to use. No more creaking. It's faster and the 3D actually looks good. It's the black model, but in person it looks a bit silvery-grey. Even aside from SNES games, lots of little things about it feel better.

But, I just realized that the rest of my game stuff is packed up, so I can't test out any games on it yet. And, I need a micro SD adapter to hack it, so I can't do that either. Plus, I'm like 3/4 of the way through the Minish Cap and I'm not sure if I can port over the save. So I'm not going to really get to use it for another week or two. Still, I'm excited. It feels more deluxe and it's going to be great once it's set up.
 
ArugulaZ

ArugulaZ

Fearful asymmetry
Having similar issues with my mini Namco Museum arcade cabinet. Basically My Arcade put an Android device and a gig of storage into the system, making it ripe for hacking... BUT it also has a combination D-pad and joystick that's just miserable to use. A plastic joystick is screwed into the center of the pad, but there's not enough force from tilting the stick to make your onscreen hero move reliably.

So now I've got to find a way to plug a second controller into the system, with just one USB port, and that port is used for power since the damn thing doesn't use batteries. There's a second USB port, but it's buried within the machine and can't be reached without surgery.
 
Octopus Prime

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
Okay, got some Virtual Boy games on the Retroid; and the Red and Black visuals are still kind of rough on the ol' peepers even when it's not deliberately jacking up your perception to give you 3D visuals. I know there's a way to change the default colour scheme so it's a much gentler greyscale, but FOR THE LIFE OF ME, I can't find the option to toggle that in the menus anywhere.

Anyone know how to fix this?
 
Octopus Prime

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
AHA!

By pressing Start and Select I can pull up a per-emulator options menu and it was buried in there.

The Virtual Boybis much more playable in greyscale. Telero Boxer is also brutally difficult and the controls are kinda weird
 
Patrick

Patrick

Magic-User
(He/Him)
I hacked my New 3DS XL, added a big micro SD card, transferred my data from my Old 3DS XL, created tickets for my non-official games, downloaded a bunch more games, and found a new way to set up DS game forwarders (it uses CIAs instead of DSi, so there’s no 40 game limit).

To do: I want to figure out how to inject virtual console games. It only works on windows, so I’m setting up a virtual box & installing windows on my mac. There’s a way to patch DS games to automatically run in pixel perfect mode. There are also patches for DS games to use the circle pad & C nub (Mario 64 DS, Metroid Prime Hunters, and the Zelda games especially). Plus screen badges for folders, emulators for games that don’t work otherwise, and some more games I want to download.

This has turned into a pretty big project!
 
Beowulf

Beowulf

Son of The Answer Man
(He/Him)
I thought the Powkiddy Q90 was running the same OpenDingux as the Anbernic RG350, because it had a similar front-end and basically the same emulator suite. I was wrong! It’s actually running Bittboy firmware, essentially the same OS as the Miyoo Mini. And there is a new version of it I could download and, with the help of a few SD card utilities, flash onto a new microSD card I could swap in and use.

(This was prompted by my transferring a new rom and save file for Lufia: The Ruins of Lore and having it be glitchy in the GPsp emulator. Which sent me down the rabbit hole in a fit of pique.)

On one hand, this new frontend swaps out the icon-based view for a page-based view, which I like less. On the other hand, it adds a bunch of new emulators and replaces a bunch of the existing ones with new versions. The SNES emulation (especially with the new port of PocketSNES) is smoother; and the scaling for GBA games is definitely improved. There’s also a bunch of new ported and packed-in games, and when I copied my rom collection from the old card over to the new one I took the opportunity to update it a little.

I already liked the Q90 as a “toss in my pocket when I ride the subway or go to the dentist” handheld, and this gives it more variety and a bit better performance. Fantastic for a device that’s still for sale on AliExpress for $30, right?
 
ArugulaZ

ArugulaZ

Fearful asymmetry
Do these things run arcade games well? Because I'm currently on a big 1980s arcade kick, and if there's one thing the Playstation Vita does abysmally, it's emulate games in Final Burn Neo. Half the games run at terrible frame rates, even games like Black Tiger which had already been ported to the PSP officially, and worked quite well there. It's a shock playing Black Tiger on Final Burn Neo and watching the game get permanently trapped in bullet time.

I don't get the Vita, man. The PSP had so much going for it with regard to emulation, and the Vita just disappoints by comparison. The PSP could emulate Neo-Geo and CPS2 games! Its successor should be stomping through anything and everything you can throw at it short of polygons, and it just doesn't. Vita-specific emulators are underwhelming, in contrast to the 3DS where that Bubble guy emulated Genesis, Super NES, NES, and Turbografx-16 games to near perfection.
 
Beowulf

Beowulf

Son of The Answer Man
(He/Him)
ArugulaZ said:
Do these things run arcade games well? Because I'm currently on a big 1980s arcade kick, and if there's one thing the Playstation Vita does abysmally, it's emulate games in Final Burn Neo. Half the games run at terrible frame rates, even games like Black Tiger which had already been ported to the PSP officially, and worked quite well there. It's a shock playing Black Tiger on Final Burn Neo and watching the game get permanently trapped in bullet time.

I don't get the Vita, man. The PSP had so much going for it with regard to emulation, and the Vita just disappoints by comparison. The PSP could emulate Neo-Geo and CPS2 games! Its successor should be stomping through anything and everything you can throw at it short of polygons, and it just doesn't. Vita-specific emulators are underwhelming, in contrast to the 3DS where that Bubble guy emulated Genesis, Super NES, NES, and Turbografx-16 games to near perfection.
Click to expand...
It's kinda weird, but I've actually had better arcade emulation experiences with lower-end handhelds--like, the PowKiddy "X" line does a very respectable job with most arcade titles, but the Anbernic RG350 (which I love for most things) sometimes has compatibility issues that must be software-based. (And now I'm going to make myself a note to specifically try Black Tiger on a bunch of devices.) I generally avoid arcade games on the Q90 (and would on the Miyoo Mini) because the 2.8" screen is just too small.
 
Beowulf

Beowulf

Son of The Answer Man
(He/Him)
ArugulaZ said:
It's a shock playing Black Tiger on Final Burn Neo and watching the game get permanently trapped in bullet time.
Click to expand...
For the record, Black Tiger runs fine on my Anbernic RG350 in FBA. I don't have the rom on the other handhelds I checked, but if there's a specific device you're curious about, I can juggle cards.
 
ArugulaZ

ArugulaZ

Fearful asymmetry
I appreciate your doing the research. All I know is that with low power devices like the Vita (it is after all from 2012...) and the Namco Museum cab I was fooling around with, you've got to scrape by with MAME 2000 to get anywhere. Even Final Burn Neo is often too demanding for these systems, although peculiarly, the 16-bit powered Libble Rabble DOES run well on the Namco cabby using FBN. And the Vita seems to outdo the Namco cab in performance, at least in MAME 2000. Scaling and rotation tends to bring that system to its knees, but OutRun actually runs acceptably on the Vita... maybe not full speed, but close enough that you wouldn't notice a difference without a direct comparison.
 
Beowulf

Beowulf

Son of The Answer Man
(He/Him)
KinHank X3-Plus

This was originally listed for $100 on AliExpress as KinHank Super Console X3 Plus Retro Video Game Consoles Built-in 114000 Classic Games 4K Output Mini Game Box For PSP/PS1/SNES. It’s a mini-console, not a handheld, and comes with everything you need to plug it into your TV.

And as the Wicked Gamer Youtube channel puts it, “You know it’s almost like your birthday with a package from China.”

So, I first plugged this into my portable monitor and tested it right out of the box:
  • The system is only slightly larger than my Roku box and probably weighs less than the Anbernic RG552 handheld. I think you could squeeze six of them into an original NES.
  • This has a few dozen systems available (mostly older, but including a lot of weirder ones like the Intellivision and 3DO) and the emulation is generally running RetroArch via an EmuElec frontend. Many of them use frames or borders to deal with the aspect ratio of a monitor or HD TV versus an old CRT TV. Nothing defaulted to being stretched, thankfully, so I didn’t spend much time fiddling with video settings.
  • When plugged into my portable monitor (via HDMI) it doesn’t give me any sound.
  • The packed-in controllers are knockoff PS1 controllers that feel kind of light and hollow, and run on AAA batteries. The system also comes with a remote control (for the TV setup/alternate Android frontend) that also needs AAA batteries.
  • I appreciate that there are separate sections for NES games and NES hacks, SNES games and SNES hacks—if you’re going to load those up, segmenting them is nice. I don’t appreciate that this thing is loaded with duplicate roms—and not even multiple regions, often just half a dozen copies of the same game with the same name. It certainly makes scrolling through looking for something take a while. At least there’s a search function?
  • That said, I might go through the card to beef up my main rom collection; at least the PS1 selection was better than I’ve seen elsewhere and there are a lot of hacks that might be worth trying.
  • When I reviewed the RG351, I mused on the “tiers” of games that are easier and harder to emulate. This (disappointingly) seems to match the RG351 and original Retroid Pocket in that it can do Tier 2 well (SNES, Genesis, PS1), and can try Tier 3 (PSP, N64 and DS) with only limited success. This is most disappointing because the Retroid Pocket 2+ and the RG552 can play Tier 3 well, and the Retroid Pocket 3 can make attempts at Tier 4 (PS2, Gamecube, 3DS). This lags badly on Super Smash Bros (N64) and had some choppiness and input lag issues with Dracula X Chronicles (PSP), and crashed when I tried New Super Mario Bros (DS). Not that the DS games would be very playable anyway, as there’s no touchscreen.
  • The default hotkeys include Start+Select to reset to the frontend, R3+L3 to bring up the RetroArch menu, and Select+L1 / Select+R1 to save and load states. The latter was a major issue because several of the systems just defaulted L1 to “load state”…systems that otherwise used the L1 button.

For my second trial, I hooked this up to my actual TV:
  • The first thing I did was fiddle with the sound settings; then I set up the wi-fi and updated EmuElec to the latest version. One of these two things solved the sound problem. The update also seemed to reduce the loading time getting into games and returning to the main menu afterwards.
  • I was wondering how much input lag is the controllers (and their Bluetooth connection) and how much is the system; and when I tried using my wired Logitec PC controller instead of the packed-in ones, there was significantly less of a problem. It still wasn’t perfect on every system, but definitely much better.
  • I needed to do some fiddling with settings to make everything work properly: I needed to remap my controller specifically so the GBA games would recognize it; I needed to switch emulator cores to make PSX and Dreamcast run games instead of throwing up error messages. Random minor stuff, really, but it does fight the “plug-and-play” nature of the device.
  • PSX (specifically using Duckstation) and Dreamcast (auto-chosen RetroArch core) run just fine at full speed. I’ve heard about music issues with PSX games on similar devices, but this seemed to work on the couple of games I tried. The way the ISO was ripped may make a difference.
  • Updating the firmware got me a better version of DraStic that successfully ran New Super Mario Bros and mapped the touchpad pointer to the left analogue stick.
  • PSP still has frame skipping and input lag issues, along with scratchy sound. N64 still runs unplayably slow and choppy.
  • Testing GB/GBA games on my big TV has reminded me how much those games were not intended for a big screen; the side-by-side of the SNES and GBA versions of Breath of Fire is actually pretty entertaining.
  • (Oh, and it runs Black Tiger just fine on FBN.)

So my overall thoughts:
  • Pros: This comes absolutely loaded with stuff, including roms and emulators for systems I’d forgotten even existed. The RetroArch setup is pretty easy to navigate and the search function actually works. RetroArch supports state states, fast forward, cheats and all that good stuff for most of the systems.
  • Cons: It can only run up to Tier 2 systems well. The rom list is clogged with duplicates that are a pain to deal with cleaning out manually. The controllers are crappy, so you’d need to provide your own. You need at least a mild working knowledge of RetroArch to get the full use out of this and to troubleshoot problems that come up. And while this is specific to me, I don’t love RetroArch overall and dislike the default choice of hotkeys—I much prefer having a dedicated menu button.
  • For the same $100, the Retroid Pocket 2+ will do pretty much all emulation better and only requires slightly more RetroArch savviness. You’d still have to buy at least one additional controller for multiplayer, but that and a USB-C splitter would turn your handheld into a mini-console with very little fuss. You would have to provide your own rom collection, but if the flood of duplicates would annoy you and you don’t care about Atari 7800 and 3DO games, that’s probably not a big hardship.
  • I suspect if I wait a few years, versions of this that actually can handle higher-end emulation will start appearing. But the fact that it’s noticeably less powerful than similarly-priced handhelds right now is probably the most annoying thing about this device.

Overall: I didn’t actually need to buy this thing. But I got a few hours of entertainment out of fiddling with it and pulling the rom list for Lynx, Pokemini, Wonderswan, the NES/SNES hacks and a few other systems gave me a lot of new things to try on my other devices without much effort.
 
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