Remember when handheld gaming devices basically stopped existing?
You know, after the 3DS and Vita sort of went away and smartphones started taking over.
Thank God that time is over and we have handheld gaming devices go lower.
We have way more that we can handle and today we are unboxing the Ambernic RGDS.
As the name implies, it's basically like a little DS.
That's pretty cool. ShortCircuit done, we did it. In the box, you get your device.
You get a stylus. This is a really ginormous stylus.
It's a really big stylus. I don't see a place for this to fit.
This goes back here. In the box we have our wrist strap.
That's pretty nice, I had that back in the day. Maybe I'll try to put it on later.
We have screen protectors. Did that come default in this box?
Yes. That's kind of nice. Thank goodness I'm not taking this anywhere
because I don't like putting screen protectors on, so bye.
But that's actually really cool and it feels like tempered glass if that's pretty high quality.
We have the version that comes with a 256 gig micro SD
from very well-known brand Leaders Logic.
Guess it's nice to have the convenience of it coming with your device,
knowing that it'll be compatible. It does not come with any games by default
just so they can sidestep any copyright issues.
We also have a little quick start guide and then type A to C,
three-foot cable that is about as cheap as they make them.
That makes sense. This whole package, minus this, starts at 95 US dollars.
You heard that right. Less than $100 gets you a pretty nice looking DS-like device
with fairly modern hardware as well as some nice quality of life stuff
that just makes this a better than DS experience.
I can't believe these things are this cheap, especially with this pretty okay plastic finish.
It looks a little bit cheap. It also is already scratched
and I think people have been fairly careful with this, so I expect this not to be the most durable material.
I like the more matte finish on the bottom. It actually feels more Nintendo console to me,
like almost like the Game Boy Advance SP plastic. Neither is super bad.
However, seeing as clamshell designs for handheld consoles is the peak design
because it has a built-in little case and screen protector.
It would be nice to have this be a little bit more not sticker-esque.
On the top of the device, we have our micro SD slot. We actually already have a micro SD card,
so we're gonna keep that one in the box. We have two USB ports, one presumably for charging
and one for kind of more of the full-featured USB accessories,
you know, display out or controllers. We also have four shoulder buttons,
which is two more than the original DS had. And that's because even though this is clearly DS inspired,
it's not locked to just DS games. You can play all kinds of stuff up to a certain point
because of the technical limitations, which we will get to, but that would include PS1,
which did have four shoulder buttons. On the bottom, we just have our screw holes.
Looks like hex screws, which means that it's not impossible to fix,
but it makes me wonder how hard the whole thing will be.
We have our 3.5 millimeter jack on the front, which is pretty nice.
Although I could see having it on the side,
getting in the way of the way you wanna grip the device.
Not the end of the world. It's far enough that it should be fine for most people,
but I could see some people kind of wanting a more vertical stance and then being forced out of it.
Side's got nothing, which brings us to the inside. We have our stereo speakers.
We have two matching 480P IPS displays,
which is exactly two and a half times the resolution of the original DS's screen.
That's okay. Presumably we can run the games at 2.5x resolution,
but it does worry me that it's not an even multiplier
because the really well thought out retro handhelds
usually have a screen resolution that is a multiple of four or five,
exactly of the original display. So then you can do just like 4x,
have it be super clean upscaling, either pixel perfect or you can do scaling
that looks even better. Then we have our D-pad.
Oh, no. That's so friggin' mid man.
Oh, shit. The face buttons feel similarly clicky
to the point where I almost wonder if it's like exactly the same kind of switches underneath.
The joysticks are very small,
PSV-sized and they're recessed so that the whole device can actually close neatly.
However, that means that these are not gonna be the greatest feeling joysticks in the world.
This is not too bad though. The recess is big enough that I think I could make it work.
It's not the most comfortable gaming experience, but should be fine.
We have four buttons that'll matter more once we're in software, which we're gonna do after I tell you about our sponsor.
Let's turn this thing on. Wow, that is the most Android looking slash screen
I've ever seen in my entire life. I wish they did a little bit more custom work.
I just don't want Chrome to be the first thing that's on my slash screen when I'm opening a retro style device.
However, it's really easy to get access to all the emulation stations in this bad boy.
And it gives you an idea of the variety that you can talk to. You got your PC, you have your Neo Geo,
you have your MSX, cool, that's cool, that's pre-installed, N64.
And then probably most importantly, you're gonna have your Game Boy Advance.
Then there's Drastic, which is your DS1, which is probably why you're buying this thing.
It's important to note, no melon support, which means no DSI support,
but how many of you out there are really like that DSI experience, I want that.
I guess before we get into a natural game, I should figure out how to do like dual screen stuff.
The screens actually function independently. It's not like it needs the software
to assign what the second screen is doing. You can have your Android step down here, watch videos,
open up guides, play your game on the top, or if it is a dual screen game, take control of both.
Just like an Android device, if you pull from the top, you can access your quick settings, then your deeper settings there.
If you turn RG Launcher on, you actually do get a much more retro style display.
I like the cleanness of this, but I do think it would be nice
to have a little bit more styling, not just kind of color and shadow.
I wanna see how good the dual screen experience really is.
Both screens are actually touch screen, as opposed to the original DS where it was just the bottom.
Yeah, the screen is not ideal for video watching.
It doesn't look very sharp. The motion blur is not very good
and the color is pretty underwhelming. However, if I click to the bottom screen,
I'm immediately in control of what I wanna do. Okay, we've discovered a little bit
of a configuration problem that we had where you can get emulators working
on the main operating system with ROMs, but they won't show up in this RG Launcher.
So make sure when you set it up that you configure it right. Apparently it is possible to swap
what the screens are doing, but what I'm finding is that the interface on this device
is really not well optimized between different apps.
The buttons do different things in different places, which can be fine,
but I think there's gonna be quite a learning curve if you want to get the full use of this device.
That probably means that there is a ton of control that you can get out of this.
And if you're someone that likes sort of uncovering the mysteries of weirdly designed UIs,
you're gonna love this thing. Let's try just doing a DS game,
which is sort of its core functionality. We need to figure that out.
Okay, that's a little troublesome. I assumed that opening the default emulator
and opening the game, it would all be pre-configured. But no, we are on an adventure
to figuring out how this friggin' works.
Oh no. Okay, so the trick is open the app on the bottom device
and then it'll work on both. That's one of my problems with my experience
with retro Android devices is unless they're pre-configured,
or you can install sort of a fan-made OS on it,
like you can with like the Meuse or whatever. I've always had a little bit of struggle bus feeling with them
where you gotta work a little bit too hard to make it work. This input latency is pretty bad.
I can feel it already. Uh-oh. Uh-oh.
If you're not big into emulation, input latency is a pretty common issue
across all software emulation across all devices.
It doesn't matter how powerful it is. There's just gonna be some level of input latency.
The fact that I can feel it in the menu is a little troublesome.
But let's play a game and see maybe it's not so bad.
I haven't played Mario Kart DS in a billion years, so let's see how this goes.
I forgot this. Both shoulder buttons don't do the same thing because there was many fewer buttons on the original DS.
This looks pretty okay. The colors are popping a little bit more here
than on our crappy YouTube videos. It's very soft looking and doesn't look scaled
in an ideal manner. One advantage of software emulation
is that if you have enough power, you can crank the resolution to theoretically whatever you want.
And this feels very DS resolution,
both in the foreground and the distance. But it plays pretty good
and the input latency doesn't actually feel as bad out here. Maybe there's something wrong with that menu.
That being said, totally playable and I could definitely beat all of the Mario Kart races
on this. The touchscreen on this device is not very good.
Both my finger and the pen suck. This pen makes it worse.
This is clearly designed for finger use. I'm gonna leave that for now.
I don't wanna be too hard on this device because it is a very good value.
And a lot of these problems, in fact, probably all of them are solvable
with enough tinkering and problem solving ability.
But when I buy a standalone device
to do very limited amount of things, I wanted to do it out of the box and well.
And although you're seeing me struggle a little bit here,
this isn't the first time someone has struggled with this. Figuring how to make the two screens friggin' work
and I don't think he particularly likes this device. At the end of the day, the only thing that matters
is that playing games pretty well. And so far, it's playing them well enough
that I could have a pretty good time playing them. That makes sense.
It has a pretty decently powered quad core cortex processor.
Has three gigs of RAM, which obviously isn't enough if you're trying to run modern stuff,
but for emulation, we're totally fine.
Comes built in with 32 gigs of storage. It has Bluetooth 4.2 and Wi-Fi 5,
which again are fine for this device. However, that extra lag from the Bluetooth 4.0
means that I probably would not, this feels horrible. Oh no.
It just feels a little slow. And this is a game that I've played 100,000 times.
I'm very familiar with the way it's supposed to feel. Certainly not unplayable and I could definitely get used to it,
but I am pretty sensitive to input latency
in 2D platformers. And so if you're like me,
this is probably not the ideal option. You're probably gonna want something like a analog pocket
where it's pretty much zero lag. The last aspect we haven't really talked about
is battery life. It's a 4,000 milliamp hour battery,
which they claim is good for six hours of gaming. Obviously if you're playing less demanding stuff,
it should be even less. If you close the device,
it's supposed to go to sleep and pop back up. It obviously paused my game, which is great.
Oh wait, does each screen get different scaling?
So that really blurry text is a scaling issue,
which I can adjust. However, when I did that,
it only adjusted one of the screens filtering
so that the bottom screen looks pretty okay.
And this one is blurry mess city.
It's not immediately apparent how to change the top one,
even though I've been changing the bottom one. So I'm gonna close the app, see maybe that's how you do it.
Okay, thankfully closing and resetting the app got the scaling to match on both screens
so that this is significantly closer to what do I expect at a 2.5x resolution scale.
Looks totally fine.
Just enough input latency that it's a bit hard
to play a rhythm game on this. Which is fine, there's not that many rhythm games
I wanna play on the DS. Most of all I wanna play is RPGs and Zelda and stuff,
and I can live with a little bit of input latency on that. Okay, I'm calling it rhythm heaven,
not a super great experience on this. Let's play a game that might do better for us.
Let's play Legend of Zelda Spirit Tracks. Let's see, maybe some of the scaling
will actually look good here. Ah, first impression, this is fine.
You can totally play it. It looks sharper than I did on the original DS.
It's responsive enough, you could play a game like this. If you're looking for a way to play DS games,
this is gonna pass the bar mostly.
I'm curious if I can fix some of the softness with one of those visual filters that I hated before,
but maybe I'll come around and on. Catchy, where were we? That high resolution 3D rendering, that's kinda cool.
It seems like the sharp 3D mode is slightly sharper.
Let's just see if I can see it this time.
This is off.
What do I think of the Ambernic RG DS?
Pretty unbeatable deal at this price. And if you're someone that needs the device
to be under $100 for you to buy it, I actually think this is pretty cool.
The screens are totally decent. The fact that it comes jam-packed with ways
to play a bunch of games, super cool.
I think that the UI needs a complete rework, which is really hard on any budget and or device
where there isn't an entire team making this a really good experience.
However, I do think that it's a pretty solid option
for $95. The fact that you can get this kind of emulation for under $100, it's pretty freaking sweet.
And yes, you want the SD cards if you want entire libraries of games,
but you can get most of the games you wanna play at once on this thing built in.
I think I'm gonna hold off a little bit more for something that's a little bit more polished
and high-end. However, what I'm not gonna hold off on
is telling you you should watch more ShortCircuit. If you like retro devices
and you want something that's more accurate, we just unboxed the Super Station One,
which is a PlayStation One form factor, Mr. FPGA style retro device, and it is awesome.