There has never been a better time to be a gamer, and a big part of that is all these amazing retro
devices that are coming out that make playing old games better than ever. And today we have the
analog duo. This is the first PC Engine TurboGrafx 16 focus FPGA console, which is pretty cool.
You might not have ever played the TurboGrafx 16 if you're in the west, but the PC Engine,
the Japanese counterpart, was actually a better seller than the Mega Drive, which is the Genesis
in Japan. And it has probably one of the most underappreciated libraries of any console ever.
It has the best classic venue in my opinion. It's got the Bonk and Arizona games. It has
the start of the Ease franchise. And finally, it's easy to play. Getting a TurboGrafx 16
is pretty expensive. You can get PC Engines for cheap, but they look like a smoker,
ate them and spat them out just like this. This white console is kind of pre-smoker colored,
and I think I kind of dig it. The console itself is very reminiscent of a Turbo Duo,
which is the combo device that they released that was both the PC Engine and the CD add-on built in,
because the CD add-on actually came later and with it brought some of the console's
absolute best game. So this is a pretty small package. It's a lot wider than other analog
consoles, but it's not deeper, which is nice. So that'll fit very well. And because there's no
cartridge going on top, you could fit this in quite a small little space on your retro shelf.
On the front, we have our power, our hue card slot, and our CD slot with the eject button.
On the back, we have our SD card slot. Ours came pre-loaded with an SD card that has some cover
art on it, but yours will not. We have an HDMI slot that can do up to 1080p60. You have your two USBs
where you can use any wired controller, which is really nice. And this one's actually Type-C,
which is sort of new for the full-fledged analog consoles. The NT Noir, the Super NT,
and the Mega SG are all micro USB, which is not a huge deal, because I'm not unplugging,
replugging all the time, but it's nice that they've entered the 21st century. On the bottom,
we have this cool little analog pattern. I think it's quite attractive, and it'll help
prevent it from slipping and sliding. It's quite grippy. And the neat little wavy pattern,
just like the turbo duo had back in the day. On the top, we have this transparent bit
that looks like you should be able to see the CD spinning, but there's actually another smoker
beige piece of plastic underneath. So you cannot. On the side, we have the PC Engine Controller
port. It's cool that you can use an original controller, but if you want to use a turbo
graphics controller, you actually need a little adapter. They're cheap, but it would have been
nice for them to include it in the box. The compromise is that they've built 2.4G,
as well as Bluetooth, right into the console. So you can use the 8-bit dough wireless ones
without a dongle. We also have our headphone jack, just like the original console had,
as well as our volume rocker and the pairing button, as well as what I believe are controller
port indicators. All right, let's see what else is in the box. We have a little analog sticker,
FPGA, and a quick start guide. We have the full manual PDF, as well as the most recent firmware,
which is nice, but even better is the jailbroken firmware that's just been released, which we will
try. Also included is a, is that what, three feet C to C cable, which works with the included block.
Analog really recommends that you use this block. There's been some reports of voltage issues with
other ones. It's a bit of a shame. I like to have four six port USB things, so I can power a bunch
of devices at once. So having to use an entire block just for this to be safe is a bit of an
issue. And honestly, I probably would risk it. We're going to be using the white analog today,
but it also comes in black. So it's just a preference thing. One thing of note is that
analog has finally caught up to their demand. For many years, it took years to get stuff that
you ordered. What isn't awesome is that there's actually no controllers included with the device.
I understand you're trying to keep costs down, but it's kind of frustrating if you don't know that
and you get this beautiful device and you can't play it. And most stores aren't carrying these.
So you have to wait another week or so to get your controller. Just something of notes. Make
sure you get a controller when you buy this. All right, let's turn it on. In terms of games,
we have the super rare Keith Courage that you don't see at every game store ever. Powergolf,
which I've never played, although I've been told it's extremely difficult,
as well as my favorite Shrek 3D. We're playing on a 1440p display, which is an ideal.
The analogs cap out currently at 1080p. And so there'll be some scaling happening in the monitor.
That's fine for today. It gives us an idea of what we're working with. Okay,
we load right into a little tutorial. Pairing is surprisingly easy once you read the manual.
You hit the pairing button on the console, then the 8-bit dough button on the controller,
and then hold select for it to flash quickly. And then it paired in just a second. And away we go.
That's not bad. Truly not a big deal. I wish the pairing button on the console was not so flush
with it. I'm not sure if I'm touching an LED or the button. For the best experience,
Duo requires a dedicated SD card. Uh, it's good that I got one in there from you.
Memory's allowed to save states, capture screenshots,
libraries, reference level database to catalog your game collection, the games you play.
This is kind of neat. In your library, every time you play a game, it'll add it,
and it'll show the time played and theoretically could have the art. So you'll have a nice little
database of all the games you've played. It's not ripping the game seemingly to the device
like a poly megawood. The whole point of this over a mister is that you want to put your real
games in. If you're buying this to rip games to this and you play other consoles, just get a mister.
Display modes. Original display modes record the appearance of the original hardware display,
such as the PC Engine LT and PC Engine GT. I'm not super familiar with the specific display modes
that they're talking about that are console-based. Um, but I do play a lot on a CRT. And that's one
thing I really like about analog consoles on modern displays is that they do a good job
approximating what a CRT would do to the very primitive sprites. Here we are at the main menu.
We got insert game. We don't have a game in right now. That's fine. We have our library,
which shows all the games that have been played on this console. If you're not familiar with the
PC Engine slash Turbo graphics, it's kind of hybrid 8-bit 16-bit. So it's more primitive than
the Mega Drive and the Super Nintendo, but it's much more advanced than the NES or the Master
system. And you can see right away with the amount of colors as well as the sprite detail.
We're going to go to settings, duo, system, and then we can mess around with my favorite part of
the settings. So we have our display mode. So based on the different consoles, they'll all have
slightly different color profiles. So we have our display modes. We have our mode settings where
you can adjust sharpness. Inside the size menu, we can set a custom scale with our resolution here,
or make sure that we're at integer scales of three, four, five. If you're on a 1080p display,
I don't think there's a reason to not do five necks. We have an option to show or unshow over
scan. We can choose between RGB and composite color. In terms of audio, we have the HuCard audio,
as well as our volume selector. It's nice. This can actually play every PC Engine game ever,
including the super graphics games. There was like 16 of them that were made. And so it's very
nice that it's just included here. We have CD-ROM options. We can choose the CD-ROM format if we're
trying to like lock it into one specific one. We'll leave that on auto detect. We have our
controller options. Again, auto detect. I'm going to trust that it works. That's one of the strengths
of the analog systems. When I play on my minster at home, I often have to tinker with things and
mess around with things. If I want just to plug something in and it works exactly as intended,
I generally choose an analog console for that. This is apparently OS 7, but if you have an analog
pocket, it's going to look very familiar, although it doesn't have open FPGA. And so I'm a little
bit disappointed that you don't get access to the multitude of cores that are designed for open FPGA
use. And I think that's especially disappointing considering that the card adapters for the
analog pocket have come out. And you can actually put HuCards into an analog pocket using the adapters
now. And there's a lot more options available through the pocket if you're playing handheld,
and they're even updating it to be more versatile through the dock. At the end of the day, the
thing that matters is, does it look good and does it play well? And because this is an FPGA system,
it's probably going to be friggin awesome. There's in perceptible lag. They claim it's not emulation,
but FPGA is still emulation. It's just way better hardware design specifically for this one task.
And so I could play this game, but I want to play a game that I actually know much better. And that
is Castlevania Rondo of Blood. The fact that I want to just play this game and stop talking tells
me that this is a very accurate experience. Even wirelessly, I don't feel any lag. It's an immediate
response. It looks good. I wish I had other filters I could play with to get a preferred look. But in
terms of play experience, this feels awesome. As much as I want to sit here and play through this
entire game right now, I'm going to call in Tanner, who has a whole new perspective on retro games
for me. All right, what game do you want to play? What do we have? We have, I think our best games
are legally backed up in this beautiful Shrek double dragon. We have Garud and Tetsu special,
which I don't know. And Bong 3, which is another great single player game.
One of the issues I'm seeing now that we're connected to controllers is that there's no
indicator on the controllers, which port they're plugged into. There's the indicator on the side
of here that tells you how many are plugged in. That's not necessarily the fault of analog,
but that's a little bit of an oversight for this controller. Maybe they'll make a v2 that has like
more LEDs to indicate what we're doing. Errgolf, Bong 3, what are we doing? Bong 3.
Bong 3? Two player? Two player. It's probably like Mario where it takes turns. Oh, it's like Sonic,
where we can't play at the same time. So yeah, when you jump on stuff, you have to use your
forehead to see. Oh, no. I was so excited to be giant for a second. Honestly, this picture looks good.
The sound we're using a monitor, so I don't have very high expectations for the sound.
I assume the sound is probably pretty good. Yeah, that's one of the things I like about
analog consoles is that the sound works pretty well. For my mister, there's some consoles that just
in certain situations sound off. And I never really feel that with my analog consoles. I always
am pretty darn certain that I'm getting the right experience. People that are a little more
familiar with this library games have noted that there are some audio inconsistencies compared
to original hardware. But it seems like it's nothing so serious that if this is your first
time playing PCN2 games, you would notice. Let's change the game. We're going to eject this one.
That's not bad. Apparently, some people have been complaining about how far it spits this out.
And it seems like a reasonable spot where I can just kind of pull it out. There are reports of
disc becoming scratched in the console. These are old discs, so these are not a good indicator.
Hold on. Before you do that, before you do that, let's take a look at what the bottom looks like.
You're smart. Oh, there's some chonks. Yeah, these are not well-cared for discs to begin with.
All right. Double drag. Double dragon. Let's go punch some other floppers. I think that the
PCN2 is such an interesting piece of hardware. Hold on. What's happening with the sprites here?
Are you seeing what's happening? Yeah, that flickering. I'm not sure if that's
accurate to the original experience or not, but it's definitely noticeable. I found it interesting
how neatly between 8th and 16th bit the PCN2 sits. It looks better than NES games,
but not quite as good as Genesis games. I was just playing Streets of Rage 2 on the Genesis,
and it looks so much better than this, but this is so much better than double dragon on the NES.
Oh, I forgot about price. It's $250. It seems like a lot, but for the polished experience that
you're getting, I think it's pretty fair. You'll know if that's worth it to you. Overall, if you're
the audience for this, you probably already know it. If you want a very easy out-of-the-box
experience that's very accurate, very simple to use, the analog consoles are great. If you're
someone that's trying to maximize your dollar and get every system and you're not that concerned with
plugging in real cartridges or CDs, this probably isn't the best move. Even with a jailbreak,
it makes a lot more sense to save the money on this and your next analog console and combine that
and get a mister. The mister experience is just as accurate, takes a little more work to get running
properly, but then you have access to pretty much everything all the way up to PS1. Playing this now,
I do not forget my period. I got exactly what I thought I was going to get out of the box,
and the fact that it's already jailbroken means that all of my legally backed up ROMs are easily
playable. I don't have to burn a bunch of disks to make that happen, and I'm a big fan of easy
and consistent, like ShortCircuit. If you liked this video, why don't you check out the video
where Emily unboxes the analog pocket. The device, I think, is the better option for most people.