pocket-sized game consoles have been around for a long time but you've always
given something up for the privilege bad screens compromised gameplay and
controls juggling game cartridges
what if there were a way around all that let's enter the world of unofficial
handhelds that actually promise a good pocket gaming experience and if you're
after a good toolkit experience
ifixit has just the right thing for you learn more about the manta toolkit and
it's 112 steel bits with two premium drivers at the end of the video
when you think gaming handhelds depending on your age you might think of
nintendo or sony or sega
probably in that order you know big companies from japan
the first mental image you probably have of anything else is something like what
soulja boy was passing off as his own designs and yet these devices
came from a different country entirely none of them came from japan and each
has a different design and gameplay philosophy at their core they all share
one common trait they're designed for running retro console emulators but
that's not all they are they're fully functional computers built around ARM
processors running Linux or Android the ann burneck rg 351m is easily the most
premium feeling of the three with a solid aluminum enclosure twin USB-C
ports and premium feeling sticks and buttons the retroid pocket 2 is a much
lighter unit with a larger 4x3 display more ergonomic shoulder buttons and a
micro HDMI output finally the odroid ghost super has a massive screen
full-size usb type-a port and is that a
gpio header yeah it is so let's play a game without
looking any of these up where did they come from
one of them is from south korea and the other two are from china i'll tell you
which at the end of the video let's start off with the amber neck rg 351m
this is a really chunky unit it's a unibody aluminum enclosure
it's got twin usb type-c ports on the top one for charging and one for
peripherals although you can use the charging one for peripherals as well the headphone jack
uh on the bottom we've got a reset button a
micro sd card slot which they label tf because of course they do it's for trans
flash on the right hand side we've got this volume wheel and
the placement is really unfortunate this is where your hand's going to go when
you're playing games maybe you're on a bus or something and you hit a bump
it's just going to either blast you with something out of your headphones or it's
going to blast the entire area around you with noise on the front we've got
our d-pad feels alright it's a little stiff
the sticks here they feel pretty good they're rubberized
and they click in
nice and we've got our four face buttons start and select
on the top we've got those usb type c ports again but we also have two l r buttons they're
staggered this way instead of vertically so it's a little awkward to get to then
around back all you've got are four hex screws which can be opened with a number
four hex screw on an ifixit kit or an allen key and we've got these two
actually rather nice little rubber pads they don't look like they do much but uh
they do much all right let's turn it on this is running three five one elec it's
actually a version of mu elec that is specifically designed or specifically
modified for this system and it's plastic version and they all share the
same hardware under the hood in this case it's a rockchip 3326 soc that's a quad
core with a mali g31 mp2 GPU for those
of you who actually care now this
came with a number of games
preloaded which is not necessarily the
most legal thing in the world but uh you know what we'll we'll go with it the
interface is basically the same as what you would get on a raspberry pi running
emulation station and that's because it mostly is
it's just there's not a whole lot of operating system happening underneath
you can set game settings globally or by game so right now we've got the game
ratio the aspect ratio of the screen set to be core provided so it'll change
depending on which system you're running and we've got the scaling set to sharp
bilinear which i'm sure taren will appreciate it looks the best on these
low resolution screens as far as i'm concerned speaking of the screen it's
480 by 320 pixels and that's a two by three ratio that means your scaling is
not going to be clean for 240p games so that sharp bilinear filter will come in
handy however what this 480 pixel width is perfect for
is psp games that's a one-to-one scale with a little bit of letterboxing it's a
good compromise it's not the most loud thing in the world this is
100 volume you're probably gonna want headphones input lag
by default is usually pretty bad here uh and this is common across all these
consoles you're going to need to set up your emulator in order to get the best
possible results from it usually that means setting up power GPU sync and
setting up run ahead that'll get you a little bit better of an experience it's
still got some input lag but for the most part is
pretty much fine input lag will be a little bit worse
with netplay yeah this thing has wi-fi built in so it can actually either
connect to other amber nick devices that have wi-fi
or it can connect to retroids with wi-fi
or it can also connect to theoretically a pc or a raspberry pi
running retroarch because that's what's behind all of this here press these two buttons
in and you get retro arch unfortunately not all cores support netplay
your mileage may vary but it's a pretty cool feature that honestly is
something that i would have loved to have as a kid that's not to say that all it can do is
16-bit games like super nintendo this will actually run n64 games playstation
games and i mean depending on your definition of run they'll run dreamcast
games as well although those will run at about half speed it might be okay for
some games but the console's library is primarily made up of faster paced games
so it's not that great but i mean that is asking a lot unfortunately and this
may or may not be a deal breaker for you the usb type-c ports cannot be used for
display output only for peripherals and charging so there's no way of getting
capture off of this that's why we're recording with a second camera now let's
take a look at the retroid pocket 2. this handheld is
significantly more plastic in fact it's all plastic except for the screen which
is tempered glass it's got a different kind of feel to it the face buttons are
all micro switches including the d-pad not something i'm a huge fan of however
it does have staggered l r switches
which is much more ergonomic in my opinion this actually feels really nice
in the hand we've got a micro HDMI output here that is gonna rub some
people the wrong way but uh it's the only one here that has any kind of
display out but it does do usb type-c charging and i believe this also
supports peripherals as well this is a traditional type stick i don't know why
but this is just a slider yeah it's like the 3ds it doesn't feel
great it kind of like hitches a little bit and also it kind of turns a lot more
than you might expect nothing on the sides and on the bottom we've got a headphone
jack and a micro sd card slot which is
held in by this uh nice rubber grommet under the hood this thing runs a
mediatek mt6580a it's still a quad core soc but the GPU
is much weaker than the rock chip and so is the CPU it's it's just slower across
the board is that going to hold it back though maybe maybe not let's power it on
you probably notice the display is a 4x3 it's actually 640 by 480 so this makes
most scaling completely straightforward everything pretty much will scale up to
that no problem however i still recommend the sharp bilinear scaler
because nes and snes titles those run at
a weird resolution 256x224 it uh it takes a minute to boot there's
a reason for that though it runs Android yeah this is Android 6 with the play
store included it is upgradable to 8.1 if you want to do that but you probably
don't want to do that one of the things about this is that you can change the
controls to either emulate a mouse a touch input or a gamepad and that might
seem like a great idea but in reality it's
not so good because you kind of need it to navigate throughout the operating
system there are some things that you just cannot do with the gamepad alone
and there are some things like gaming that you cannot do with the mouse alone there's a few things pre-loaded on here
none of them are pirated so that's a big plus in its favor if you you know prefer
not to pirate your games there is a game that nintendo did take down
though am2r unfortunately nintendo
completely nuked that from orbit but it's here it also includes flycast which
is a dreamcast emulator classic boy a gameboy emulator n64 emulator
psp emulator and of course retro arch it also has moonlight which is a NVIDIA
shield kind of emulator so you can cast to this
device as well as steam link i don't know if you want to do that do you want
to play your games in sd at 4x3 probably not but the option is there if
you really want to the start of the show is of course retroarch just like before
unfortunately because this runs Android none of it feels very cohesive in order
to load content you need to go through your sd card and kind of just manually
pick it all out so it's more versatile than you would think but at the same
time because it has Android it's a lot clunkier than you would expect and
hope there is one thing that kind of redeems it there's an icon here for
what's called retroid hit that
reboot to retro pocket operating system yeah let's do it it's like an older
version of Android i think it must be ice cream sandwich or something it has
the hollow ui but it's running a custom launcher and presumably it has very few
background tasks running so it's similar in spirit
to what you got on the amber neck unfortunately as you might see here we don't have any
games installed that's because it actually uses a weird folder layout that
is different from the folder layout that you would normally be using so you kind
of have to choose whether you want to use it in retro pocket mode
like this or in Android mode like before the problem with Android mode of course
is that if you've got wi-fi connected google play is going to do stuff in the background and there's just going to be
all kinds of things that will make your experience less
good oh yeah and the screen is not a touch screen
and uh these sticks do not click in that'll
also make your experience a little less good and considering that it runs Android and none of it's pre-customized
it means you have to set up all your emulators all the settings for them pretty much as soon as you get the
machine you you can't quite just plug and play it some things will work like
that but for the best experience you should actually set all your emulators
up they agree overall though it's pretty
solid once you get it all set up i mean it can do a lot of the things that the and bernice
can do they can play n64 games and it's not much of an issue but
it just takes a little bit more doing which is where the odroid go super comes
in if the amber neck was a chunker this is significantly larger although it's
not quite as heavy i don't think because it's made of plastic it's kind of like a
switch light except the analog sticks are hanging out down at the bottom and
those analog sticks unfortunately like they rock okay
they're kind of smooth but the sticks themselves
they're hard plastic with a sharp edge they dig into your finger they're not
pleasant to use the rest of the buttons feel okay with the d-pad being a little
mushy it's kind of weird to feel a diagonal like that it feels like
nothing's moving but yeah these are all membrane buttons
these are tactile switches these are just rubber
and uh these shoulder buttons on the top those are tacked out as well also on the
top we've got volume controls kind of a
weird spot for them you can't really there's there's no way to get at them
during gameplay so that's a bit of an issue and we've also got a usb type-c
which is for charging only as far as i know
as well as a full-size usb type a
that is interesting
what's even more interesting is this
yeah those are gpio pins this is actually based on
the odroid single board computer it's like a raspberry pi it's just they've
got the rock chip down on the bottom we've just got a uh micro sd card slot
i'm just going to steal the one out of the retro on the back we've got
a rather large vent here there's no fan and i can't see heat sinks either so
it's kind of weird that that's there and there's the speaker the first thing you'll notice when we power this thing
on is it's got a 16 by nine screen it's
a five inch screen i think a 480p wide
so 854 by 480 it's pretty bright it looks
great why the oddball resolution well having a 16 by 9 screen at this
resolution means that you can actually use 16x9 games so say you've got a
widescreen hack for super mario world or you've got playstation portable games
etc these will fill the entire screen then you just need to deal with litter
boxing for other types of games if you buy one of
these for yourself probably the first thing you'll notice
when you turn it on is you don't have an operating system that's because it
doesn't come with one they recommend or at least a link to ubuntu
minimal which is frankly a terrible experience i went
and got emulek for this just like the
amber neck here so it uses a pretty similar interface it's a little bit
different but it has pretty much the same settings i don't know what's going
on with this theme but it's it's kind of terrifying like all of these things just
look wrong under the hood this thing actually has the same amount of power as
the amber neck in fact it's very similar to the and bernick in pretty much all
aspects except for the fact that it's got a little bit of a
more plastic build quality to it and it's
got that larger screen this is another scenario where you kind of have to tune
the emulator to get the best performance out of it this thing is not going to be
able to play n64 games with like the most quality possible you're certainly
not going to upscale them it's worth noting that there is an overclock option in the settings they do say that it can
cause instability and i have seen instability happen your mileage may vary
there but it might get you that extra little bit towards being perfectly
playable get back to the menus just hit these two buttons here
on the outside and yeah look at that it's retroarch again overall i'd say the
odroid is a hacker friendly but a little bit hacky
solution it's got a lot of buttons certainly a great concept but it's also
really no surprise why amber neck uses these designs to make a much more
polished product the only major downside to the odroid compared to the rest of
these consoles is that in order to get wireless for multiplayer or any other
functionality you need to buy an aftermarket adapter now they sell it for
about nine dollars on their website so it's not a big deal but it would have
been nice if they could have found a way to include it in the chassis it's certainly big enough to do it so how did
this burgeoning class of devices come to be well it all started with the gamepark
gp32 in 2001. the gp32 was the first of
its kind in offering expandable storage in a commonly available format along
with official homebrew support this combined with the relatively powerful
for the time and easy to develop for ARM CPU led to emulators and public domain
software exploding on the device and all of its successors ultimately this was a
niche in its day and game park declared bankruptcy in 2007. just in time for
homebrew on more mainstream but are also still early storage enabled handhelds
like the sony psp and nintendo ds to take off i actually used to daily carry
my psp as an mp3 player and a retro console emulator and my ps vita
continued that legacy when i got one although by then my smartphone had taken
over mp3 player duty but nintendo and sony didn't take kindly to their
consoles being used for what they saw as software piracy on still active consoles
and they played a constant game of cat and mouse with exploit developers and
flash cartridge vendors clearly there's a market for handhelds with emulation
capabilities so with the broad availability of mobile cpus thanks to
smartphones and single board computers like the raspberry pi
and low-cost microsd storage why not build your own with that in mind the
smartphones themselves may be an option if you really want to but unless you're
still rocking a playstation phone there will always be a trade-off between
carrying an unwieldy controller or settling for on-screen controls it gets
subscribed by the way because we're going to look at a bunch of weird
controllers that have been released over the years and you're probably not going to want to miss that despite this demand
and these consoles stepping up to fill it piracy is still the elephant in the room
and as much as we don't like to admit it it almost comes part and parcel with
these devices none of these handhelds come with a way
to dump your own cartridges and while there are devices like the retro to that
do it's limited in scope and the costs can add up quickly if you buy
attachments like the game boy or n64 or
or the other ones it only does genesis and snes out of the box cd-rom systems
like the playstation are easy to deal with if you've got an optical drive but
those are among the more difficult games to get running well so
you're trading one difficulty for another i can't recommend or condone
piracy but nintendo at all
don't sell roms for you to download legally and with gabe newell's famous
quote in mind you can see why it's the option most people go for even if it is
illegal but let's assume that you actually did back up your own roms can i
recommend or condone any of these absolutely the odroid ghost super from
south korea is 80 and it gets you a strong CPU the retro pocket 2 from china
is 80 and gets you a better feeling controller a more familiar os and a
smaller more thoughtful form factor the amber nick also from china
is the most expensive but features the most polished design and comes in metal
or plastic though the less expensive plastic version doesn't have wi-fi much
like the odroid these are a great relatively inexpensive way to carry your
retro game collection around in your pocket and frankly i am super glad they
exist just like i'm glad that ifixit sponsored this video because their manta
kit has 112 steel bits that can actually open either of these consoles comes
complete with standard phillips bits flathead and also torques tri-point and
game bits as well these these don't use game bits thankfully the kit includes
not one but two aluminum screwdriver handles including a hefty quarter inch
drive for full-size applications at a smaller four millimeter for precision
work and they both feature magnetic bit sockets knurled grips and silky smooth
spinning tops the toolkit's lid doubles as a sorting tray just like their ifixit
protect tool kit that i have over here and all ifixit kits are backed by a
lifetime warranty if something breaks they'll replace it for free visit ifixit.com forward slash LTT and pick up
your man-to-kit today thanks for watching guys go check out a similar
video we did a little while ago on a portable wii it's a good video i got to
dremel a wii motherboard very satisfying