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oh are you waiting on me

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okay well you might think that this is some

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kind of knockoff emulator handheld like an rk2020 or one of the raspberry pi

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powered ones like the g pi or the pi boy but no

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this is a real honest-to-goodness nintendo wii that can play wii games

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gamecube games and more i built it

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and you can too just like you can listen to this sponsor spot for private

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g-boy is the brainchild of long-time console portabilizer g-man and it was

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originally called the wee boy on his development blog the case is 3d printed by shapeways

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using nylon powder and is roughly the size and shape of an og nintendo game

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boy having finalized the project roughly halfway through 2019 it's now available

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for purchase as a kit on hobbyist site bitbuilt to put it all together you'll

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need obvious things like an original wii console and a microsd card to hold your

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files but you'll also need a d-pad and face buttons from a nintendo ds lite two

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18650 lithium-ion batteries just make sure you get these from a reputable

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source to avoid counterfeits and some tools a temperature controlled soldering

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iron and a rotary cutting tool are two absolute must-haves to make it work i

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mean i guess you could use a saw instead of a dremel but

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come on to make life easier here's a list of some other stuff you'll need

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with the most important being the wire and the screwdriver an ifixit protect

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tool kit can get your wii apart but isn't going to reach far enough to

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assemble the gboy as i discovered early on you'll also need some time

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about a day for a first time build and a lot of patience

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my day started with some prep work which included soft modding a stock wii

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console using letterbomb which allows it to run a homebrew software and setting

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up bitbelt's bb loader which allows us to boot into a new home screen rather

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than the nintendo default one then taking it all apart for some

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physical modding as you might imagine

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fitting one of these

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into this involves more than just removing the motherboard from the wii

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it actually needs to be cut in a pattern that's lovingly referred to as the omg

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wtf trim yes my friends this

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is literally all of the original motherboard i am going to keep there are

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components mounted to the rest of the board like the real-time clock if you

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want to play animal crossing and the bluetooth chipset if you want to connect a wiimote that will need to be harvested

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and reattached if you wanted to do that but

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that's a small price to pay time to get out the dremel

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before assembly the edges had to be smoothed out in order to prevent anything from shorting

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how do i do this you ask sandpaper

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it's recommended to finish it with no lower than 600 grit and focus on

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removing any copper on the edges by going in at an angle once that's done a

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little desoldering and relocating components later and it's assembly time

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ltdstore.com this is almost entirely just a matter of dropping things into

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place and screwing them into the chassis there's a lot of wires that need

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soldering and power needs to be attached to the correct pads and only those pads

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or else you're looking at chopping up another wii bit belt recommends using

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some extra lengths of wires impromptu cable ties to keep this mess under

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control the final step is to install a safety thermistor that automatically

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cuts power once the wii reaches 70 degrees

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that's far short of dangerous thermals and the only time this should happen is

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if it powers on in an enclosed space like a backpack or something like that

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and there you go one portable wii let's take it for a

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spin shall we and just like that here we are in an

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open space with a Linus who is currently fascinated i can't

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believe that this is all you actually need from the original

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wii for it to function that's all the logic yep the RAM the soc

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GPU i mean cognitively i know that yeah

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you know yep okay yep there's the RAM there's the CPU

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just the idea of chopping up a pcb of a device this

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complex and then just kind of trying to find the right daughter points and

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turn it into something like this is just unreal to me i love it well i mean the

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wii is one of the more researched consoles out there as far as like more

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modern machines go so it's not really that surprising that people are like hey

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we only need you know this voltage from here and this voltage from there and

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away you go you know so this is the kit that you use then yes

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this is the g boy rev3 i want to try it yeah i'll go over here okay this is kind

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of where i'm going to live for the rest of the video okay cool let's crack open

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my copy of legend of zelda twilight princess

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and uh

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yeah now would be a good time to mention that you should probably rip your games

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from the wii before you do the mod this thing's got no optical

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okay this is so cool i mean the battery life can't be

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very good though i haven't really tested the battery life i think it's a couple

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of hours like it's not amazing but so it's like the game boy

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experience in more ways than one kind of wish the screen was a little

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better than this but uh that's the screen that comes with it i think if you

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really had a mind too there are probably some ips displays that have like

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independent brightness controls and all that kind of stuff the menu where you

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were on is called bb loader and that was created especially for this kind of

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device like a portable device that doesn't necessarily have

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uh shall we say uh motion controls built in right

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so they were cut off yeah i don't remember if i put the

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bluetooth module back in that so pairing a wiimote is gonna be hit or

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miss the sound is surprisingly good even if

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the screen ain't great uh yeah if you wanted to uh turn the

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volume up you should just be able to hold the y button and the z button and

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press up on the d-pad yeah sorry is the z rear

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z uh rear right but it's above the trigger

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oh

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okay it distorts a little but that's fine it was already very loud before

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that yeah the amplifier circuit i think uh kind of goes a little bit too hot for

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those speakers yeah if you put it too high but you know that's how you know

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that's how you know it's good link a nope

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this is crazy yeah it's not an emulator it's straight

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up playing the game like what

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fun fact twilight princess is reversed on the wii versus gamecube i did know

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that because link is left-handed yep whereas the majority of the population

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is right-handed i don't know where the horse is

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one thing that you do lose with a control setup like this is analog

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triggers so those are just straight up digital

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but of course if you just wanted to play wii games on the go there are

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maybe less legal well i don't know i mean does this

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the fact that i'm running okay so i'm running ripped software but

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on nintendo's own hardware what is nintendo's take on this i think

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nintendo's take is you need to buy it again you got to buy it again but this is my

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hardware right that's your hardware but you only have a license to run that game

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on that disk on that disk whereas you know there are laws that say that format

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shifting is a thing that you can do nintendo doesn't necessarily agree with

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that nintendo doesn't agree okay so then you know since we're doing something

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nintendo doesn't approve of anyway here there's definitely ways that you can

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more easily and more cheaply play wii games on the go so this is going to have

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to justify its existence in some other ways fortunately it is homebrewable

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af so why don't we go back to that launcher and have a look at what else we've got on here just power it off and

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back on again oh is that the only way i don't know if it's the only way but

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there's not a whole lot of documentation on the like button shortcuts does it

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have like an ac plug-in so that you can

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uh just run it not on batteries oh i guess it's got type c yeah oh that is so

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cool and when the unit is off type c actually automatically switches it over

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to the internal storage so you can just connect it up to your pc and browse the

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files this just blows my mind okay

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so right now i only see gamecube games okay if you use the right stick yeah

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that'll bring up a radial menu so you can choose wii games uh the hbc

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logo is for homebrew channel games which would be things like snes emulator and a

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few other things uh i think this early version of the

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software doesn't currently support running weware titles and virtual

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console but that is something that's going to be coming okay so virtual

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console okay so that's gamecube games for some

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reason uh yeah the virtual console menu doesn't work so it'll just keep you where you

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are i see okay what about wii games wii games don't work oh hey there we go wii games

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do work wow sick

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so like yeah mario kart wii suckas this

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uses a compatibility layer slash hack called

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hedra which allows it to actually emulate the

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wiimote so you don't have to worry about having to

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hook up an external wiimote you can use the sticks actually not crazy worm

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no it shouldn't get that hot well i don't know i mean it's a

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home it's a living room console like i i didn't i've never given much thought to

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how much heat it outputs well the full unit only really has a

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tiny little heat sink and fan on it yeah i guess

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that's all we got on there now nah i missed

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okay no

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come on so lame

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who blue shells you right before the finish line bad people that's who

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mario you piece of human garbage

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well we all know and have known forever that the ai cheats in mario kart yeah

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just like oh stop

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all right yes i reigned supreme

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so how's the experience with wii games great

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perfect yeah the fact that it's actually a good experience is the result of quite

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a lot of community effort it's not just gman i believe um

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some of the pcbs that were custom built were made by aurelio

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on the bit built forums and there are several others who contributed um all

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kinds of research and time and effort into all of this

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so it's really a very team effort kind of

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thing it was just all kind of put together by gman

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9x gx is the super nintendo emulator that you can use in lieu of virtual

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console which currently doesn't work sick

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most of these menus don't do anything yeah this is really early software got

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it they just released it back in june okay

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got it yeah so it's nest nine and next gx

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holy smokes this is it this is everything

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okay what i need to know though is

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super mario world does it actually run well

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i have my doubts love this 4x3 display

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well yeah i have my doubts because like getting the latency good is

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something i've seen a lot of people screw up

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there would be more latency with a wiimote though okay we're going to try

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it we're going to try playing super mario world with a

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analog stick i've never actually done this before and it feels a little bit

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a little spongy

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i guess the nintendo ds light had kind of spongy buttons anyway didn't it it's

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hard to play super mario world on anything other than a snazz controller especially if you're

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used to that sort of thing like to be clear it's not like i'm

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missing my jumps and stuff here

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but these yeah these buttons are really not they're really really not great that

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may be a side effect of the 3d printed shell maybe some sanding would help with that

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what other consoles can you run emulated games for uh

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well anything that has a wii emulator for it so

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dosbox is available scum vm so like old lucasfilm or lucasarts games

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uh psychogenesis regular nintendo uh

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there's an n64 emulator that's sorta okay

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uh what else gpa

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regular game boy game gear master system

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okay so yeah the the wii is actually a really

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good like retro console emulating emulating system why this over someone

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like one of those super portable pcs well i mean there's the simplicity of

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the interface for one and two i mean

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did you build that super portable pc okay that's fair

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oh no oh wow that was some hardcore slowdown

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right there yeah this

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this d-pad leaves a lot to be desired

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it's starting to heat up a little bit too i can feel it

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the good thing about the d-pad and the buttons and everything like that that's all stuff that you can swap out yourself

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so you can get different rubber membranes you can get different

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you know d-pad face buttons that kind of stuff

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if you really didn't like it ah no not the big crushing things i

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thought these were swamps for the longest time because i was a little kid and i

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couldn't actually like get very far in the game

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and uh like i read the manual obsessively remember when like reading

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the game manual was as much fun as playing the game i used to do it in the

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car all the time oh yeah it's not that heavy no

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oh well there's your cooling problem we have tape over the vent

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come on boys let's give it some breathing room

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there we go and look if i get straight onto the

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camera that actually gives you guys a better look at what it looks like if

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you're straight onto it it's not that bad

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no yoshi

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very cool i don't know that i would personally put the time and effort into

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building one of these versus like you know using a um a gpd type

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device or something like that instead but

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there is absolutely nothing else like it

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and look at that it's got a headphone jack

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at 325 plus the cost of batteries sd

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card face buttons and a wii this project

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is not for the faint of heart it's really less of a practical thing

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and more of a passion project sort of like building a ship in a bottle except

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you actually get to play with it in the end are there more capable portable consoles

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out there for a lot less absolutely

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but you didn't build it did you thanks lg for sponsoring today's video

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great lg ultra gear prizes it's gonna be good so get down there thanks for

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watching guys if you're looking for something less diy and more

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diy why not check out our recent cardboard case challenge i swear it's a

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lot more fun than it sounds and also let us know if you want to see more videos

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like this that are a little bit more i don't know diy project d

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it's kind of a different video for the channel