a few months ago we built our very own arcade machine but a lot of you chimed
in to tell us that throwing together something with off-the-shelf parts from
well-known sources like ultimark and north coast custom arcades wasn't diy
enough okay well
what if i told you that this
was handmade a truly
diy creation well it is
and we're gonna have a look at it after i tell you about our sponsor mack
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okay so even though it looks the part the carry 42 isn't really diy so much as
it is someone else's diy project that
turned into a product that he sent to us and that
someone is love hulton a swedish artist
who's hand made a huge selection of limited production retro gear
some of this stuff is incredible and he's even made pc cases
so the carry 42 though is right up there with his most exciting and beautiful
ideas it's short for carrier for two and
ours which was graciously loaned to us by mr holton himself features a
mother-of-pearl inlay of miz and mr pac-man on the outer casing that's
completely flush with the wood it's entirely hand crafted from american
walnut with a vintage retro aesthetic and the craftsmanship on it is
outstanding everything fits together with a level of
precision rarely seen in wood for a commercial product anymore and certainly
with a higher level of precision than we ended up with in our own cabinet thanks
to our amateur level assembly and having to move it around multiple
times during construction speaking of which the size comparison is absolutely
staggering let's go for a tour of it so even the control deck of our full-sized
arcade machine dwarfs the carry 42 but
it includes all of the following a 12-inch 1024 by 768 display twin 10 watt
speakers a humble raspberry pi running
retropie with some pre-loaded customizations a diminutive 16 gig usb
flash drive that contains a handful of
games of dubious legality and a usb port
to plug it into allowing you then to add your own less dubious rom files should
you please while we're back here you might notice that there are no fewer
than two HDMI ports and six and a half
millimeter headphone jacks well essentially
these ones are outputs these ones are inputs and then inside
the box are small patch cables that connect them for use with the included
screen and speakers so in theory you could connect this up
to an external display and a pair of headphones or even a tv and receiver for
a much bigger picture and sound experience
though in practice not everything is as it seems more on that later something
you might have noticed missing back here is an obvious way to keep the lid
upright while you're playing and that's remedied with this here twisty pulley
thing just grab it pull it out twist it and it's locked in place there are three
separate angles you can prop it up at i think the only thing that could make
this thing more swedish is a yellow and blue color scheme i love it
but it isn't purely a piece of art right
how about the gaming experience well we got off to a pretty good start
the buttons and sticks are sharp and responsive the speakers can get pretty
loud though they are clearer and sound better in general at lower volumes
thanks to the box acting as kind of a wooden reverb chamber
but as for the screen well for starters it's a tn screen with
pretty terrible viewing angles meaning that the two-player experience is best
enjoyed with a very close friend or romantic partner and there's also some
pretty severe motion blur that while it's something you can get used to
it's far from ideal especially in shoot-em-ups and this is all before we
get to what was our biggest out-of-the-box issue the input latency
now thankfully that was something that can be controlled to a small degree by
entering the underlying emulator and making some configuration changes
however these changes really should have been the default settings while we're in
here though something else retro gamers might not appreciate is the blurry
linear filtering effect enabled by default it makes sense here since the screen
isn't super high res and the stock effect is to curve the screen to match
the bezel and it might have even masked some of the ghosting a bit but we
personally preferred our approach where some clever shader work can make for a
far cleaner more appealing image that more closely resembles an old crt
so once again this problem was mostly solved
bringing us to the one that we couldn't fix the speakers
remember that six and a half millimeter headphone jack well that's not for the
speakers it's actually power for the lcd
and the power led which we only discovered when we went to try plugging
headphones in and got a loud buzzing and a blank screen oops
the speakers ended up being driven by HDMI which would be fine except that
they were rewired for mono now some games notably arcade games and
16-bit games do actually run in stereo
and so does retropie by default resulting in actually missing sound
effects
after an also config tweak our games at least had all of the sounds instead of
just the left channel but this is again something we felt could have been done
better
with all of that said though these are problems that are probably only going to
bother purists bringing us back to the real reason the carry 42 exists to be an
artistic piece for retro gaming enthusiasts
and collectors and if we look at it through that lens even though it's not
perfect it does work out of the box and
casual gamers likely wouldn't notice anything was wrong
now that doesn't translate into a recommendation that you go out and buy
one of these especially considering that it's powered by a pie and the asking
price for a base unit without the inlay is
2599 euro plus vat
but if you're the kind of person who just straight up doesn't give a crap
about money and i know you guys are out there there are only 50 of them in the
world and mr hilton's craftsmanship is something that cannot be denied here and
that beauty and scarcity is what you're really paying for here not the hardware
and software which by the way we would love to be consulted on next time
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