i doubt this is going to surprise you guys but i like playing retro games because to me
they ain't retro
anyway one of the best options for retro gaming these days is of course the
nintendo switch but if you're not that into the limited library of older games
and the exorbitant prices that nintendo charges for games that have been out for
30 years then i guess all that's left for you to
do is grab a pc load up an emulator and uh
oh i guess somebody thought of that
this is the creo code lira
it's a diy that is if you diy side the
side oh terrible to build it yourself or
you can actually get it as a pre-built it's a raspberry pi based handheld
console and my expectations for it
actually just got a lot higher from initially opening the box
that looks slick private internet access has fast
multi-gigabit vpn tunnel gateways worldwide so if you're looking for a vpn
you can learn more about pia at the link below
okay i'm assuming this is the diy one ah yes
do it yourself this is pretty cool so
download and play your favorite video game surf on the internet watch movies
uh do it yourself so it's an ARM cortex a53 1.2 gigahertz bass chip one gig of
lp ddr2 RAM and an 800 by 480 resolution
display uh that is some not uh hd resolution but
given that it's only five inches it should still be okay wow this one is a
lot less assembled than the other one oh boy
i've got an sd card to microsd adapter we've got it
that's cool raspberry pi compute module three plus just like that
this looks pretty straightforward i have to confess i do not know what
this micro sd to what looks like usb
spacing on four contacts is it's exactly that
oh all right so here's all the parts i guess first things first i'm going to
take the protective bubble wrap off of the battery oh was i even supposed to
take that off it looks like it's already attached okay then
look ma i'm building my own game console aren't
you proud oh wow so the general purpose io is all just
mapped out to these contact points here i guess if you just have it assembled on
a test bench maybe i mean that's pretty cool so you've got all that you know
raspberry pi functionality here's a bunch of five volt and ground that you
could theoretically just like wire stuff
up to i don't know RGB your lira maybe we should do it oh i just powered it on
well then i'm gonna turn it back off since we're back here that looks like a
speaker here's the contact pads for our buttons so this is probably the d-pad
and then this is our abx y over here and then back to the other side there's our
micro sd card slot another button or
several headphone jack nice
and then this looks like the display ribbon cable receptacle it's powered off
now right yeah good okay let's put in the compute module well first i go in at
the wrong angle then i awkwardly pull back out and
take another run at it basically like installing a sodium
memory module and that's it that's the whole brain of this thing doesn't even
need active cooling shoulder buttons cool there's one
oh lordy did i lose one nope there it is stop hovering i'm gonna figure it out i
hope there's the back probably the battery sticks to these
adhesive doodads here before you do that can we
just pause for a second for a little a little moment here so this right here
is my first problem with this oh wait i'm putting this in backwards well
there's another problem yeah but that's your problem right but if you kind of
look here there's only four screw holes so if you look like um
here's the back to a ti-83 right that's
a calculator yeah you can see six screws
clips in between them lots of ribbing for you know
reinforcement yeah lots of stiffness i strongly think that the whole thing
was designed by electrical engineers play screen here oh it must go in this
way all right
no no that's not it okay hold on hold on i can't i swear to
you i can figure this out this has to go through
yes there we go
should i just suggest something uh reading the instructions no i don't want
to do that i was going to suggest just disconnecting the battery until it's
needed no no it's fine okay it's not it's not powered on should be fine
there we go all right so that goes there that means our battery sits right about
yeah wow that is a very small amount of 3m tape
stuff's expensive well do you want to know the price difference
between the diy and the not diy version
uh sure why don't you hit me with that so originally it was thirty dollars okay
but now it's zero at the same price i think i would just get the pre-assembled
one because then at least i can play with it for a bit before i break it what's that attached to
oh screws we need screws wait why would you screw that in
uh that doesn't thread into anything um why
are there four nuts please tell me you know the answers to these questions alex
well i'm going to use one of the nuts for this i see what you mean about the
whole design by electrical engineers thing this is not a great way of attaching a shoulder button now it's
gonna come off for sure it doesn't even have like loctite for the washer like
it's just gonna come loose wait i think i figured out why i have
four small screws and two nuts or maybe you're supposed to put one in the middle
okay yeah i think it goes one nut on one side and one nut on the other side
because that gets the spacing right one cool thing about this finicky shoulder
button installation experience is you can kind of tune
how quickly the shoulder buttons rebound so you can tighten them up more if
you're more into buttons that aren't responsive
clear buttons or black buttons clear obviously it seems distinctly possible
that i'm doing this wrong because the keys don't match
and i definitely got it wrong
that is not enough tape to attach a screen and with how misaligned they are
i wish they had just gotten me to do it that's green now that's nice this goes
on the outside right yep cool okay the fit and finish is not perfect
does this thing only have a mono speaker oh i didn't notice that before that's
kind of a bummer you know what ah
there's a little nubbin thing hanging out of them i don't think that's
supposed to be there well let's look at the other ones first oh are these for
like leds or something where do these go i actually have no clue and now it goes
in perfectly oh well if you were hoping that putting
the screws in was gonna make it uh a little bit less
flexy i can put your positive
vibes to rest is the other one just as bad yep okay well i didn't do it wrong
at least i've got that to help me feel better is
it supposed to be booting up right now it takes a while oh okay cool oh wow
there it is we got a command prompt you did do that there it's gone
oh lordy this is this is
that is suspiciously slow now the shoulder buttons on the outside i missed
that oh man is this a chinese brand no
that says design in london manufactured in london as well really
yeah well i mean surely they're not making the lcd panel in london do you
want to guess the price i'm going to say
200 bucks a bit more uh 300 250 250 and that's us
dollars yup ouch hey maybe it's amazing yes
no probably not okay so there is a red light here is that red for power or red
for you don't have enough power that's red for power okay let's see if it's a
little happier if we plug it into power while we boot it it's a nice usb cable
though got the little power indicator led in it did i manage to kill it i'd be
pretty impressed if you did honestly there we go okay emulation station yay
okay so what we just charged it for 10
minutes it doesn't really you know die gracefully when it dies it just kind of
i feel like that's kind of where we were there retropie
don't go into those menus because this is you know a keyboard input
and you can kind of end up in situations pretty easily where you don't have you
know the buttons required all right so what should we do instead let's put some
games on it yay so first of all you want that thingy
uh-huh we need a little usb drive here this one right here will do just fine
okay so you go and plug it into your computer and then you get a folder on it
that's called retropie cool so here we have our wonderful usb drive
ltdstore.com i like it very nice
take it out wait so we don't actually put any games no
okay now you take it and you put it in here uh-huh gorgeous wow how ergonomic
yeah and now you just wait until it stops blinking okay which is pretty good
for something like that but if you know you have
a usb stick such as this one then you're just
guessing yeah set a five minute timer or something and hope for the best while
we're waiting have you tried downloading emulated games anytime recently uh no
it's been a while but i know there was a big hullabaloo where basically all the
emulation sites got shut down yeah it's a really bad time now we got a bunch of
games but that's just because Jake has a whole collection on his server of course
of all the games that he owns physical copies of
it's still going it's still going wait what is it actually doing okay it
seems to have stopped yeah so now we can take it out and we put it
in here we can look at what it has been doing now oh it's creating like a
directory structure yeah okay i mean that's not the stupidest
thing i've ever heard i don't really get why you can't just take the sd card and
put it in here i have some playstation i have some snes games um
pi 3 can do psx hey yeah that's pretty cool just so i
understand then now that we've copied the files to the usb drive we are now
plugging it in here and it is copying files to the microsd card yes now i see
why you said this is not the smartest way because you're right why wouldn't we
just put the microsd card in the computer yep their directions say just
do it this way well that's fine i'm going to plug it into power while it
does this i don't want it to die how long does the battery last
they say four hours given that the only instructions that you have are wait
until it stops blinking it occasionally will stop blinking for like a solid
second two seconds or so and you'll think oh
i can pull it and then it just keeps on going of course now that i say that it's
not going to do it but so now what we fire up play some games
there's just one more step you got to go ahead and reboot the machine now we go
into playstation crash bandicoot and ay
look at it go oh hey look at that it works
well might as well stick with mono since we uh only have one speaker i like how
it's placed right below your thumb as well so when you grip it you're covering
up the speaker that's pretty good get the apples get the apples gotta get the apples
more apples why do we need apples oh oh no left or right
oh we're going right so what do you think of the buttons i uh
i would not say that the buttons are one of my primary complaints about this
device not great stabilization or anything like
that but i would say the d-pad is surprisingly not horrendous yeah the
only ones that i really have complaints about are the shoulder buttons oh i haven't used those yet yeah they're
pretty bad i got 69 apples now nice does it do uh
n64 yes but obviously it would be a terrible experience yeah yeah okay but
here's where it gets interesting it says you can play multiplayer games they hook
it up to a tv HDMI in sure and now
they're playing all together they've got ARM tattoos you know so they're credible
based off that footage you'd think you know you just plug it into there yep
yeah so these right here are like the 8-bit 2 controllers it says right on the
back raspberry pi bluetooth 2.0 and above i feel like there's a punch line
here yeah there's no bluetooth module oh
so if you look here it's a real sneaky one but if you look
they've got this big tether pants so so we'll go in there let's what am i
going to find in here yeah
okay we have a separate problem though this isn't actually outputting to HDMI
yeah that's another problem you need to install a whole
other thing of retropie on here for it to get
onto the screen i got to swap my micro sd card when i want to run the desktop
os yeah okay that also makes their claim that you can use this as like a desktop
computer experience on the go a little misleading
i mean yeah you can but you won't we have the raspberry pi
thing set up here so you can do that you need to take that sd card out but you
know it's fine okay
that wasn't me that was gravity okay and i can fire it up now firing it
up hey there we are yeah it's working
welcome to raspberry pi most not working uh i think this mouse
is not actually plugged into ah that would do it i don't know where the hub
on the keyboard is please tell me it supports like a hot plug oh god oh lordy
all right well let's reboot it is it is boot looping okay let's try
just let's try just a mouse okay
oh there we go click next
uh um hello it's not plugged in all right so a
lot of things that you do on your computer these days are web browser
based which is why you can theoretically get away with a super low powered
computer like this it doesn't have a wireless card it says
on the kickstarter that there'll be a bluetooth and wireless
dongle available for purchase later it's not available now i don't know if it
ever will be but you know not all that useful
neat there's nothing else really quite like it is there
well uh see there's this plant right here that's
been growing some weird fruit lately pocky
cow that guy right there is 40 bucks but
it's not great i mean you can tell just looking
at like the buttons are even worse what is bard what is commander okay this is
not comparable how is that not comparable look at it it's so cute i was
gonna ask does it have an HDMI output but i guess it's not really relevant
because that one doesn't really either oh but do you know what it does have
what does it have it's a volume knob okay but this is lagging on snes games
like you could make the argument that there's room for something a bit more premium and a bit more powerful it's
pretty cute though i will say that much creo code lyra then worth it if
hackability and cool factor is all you're after there's a decent base here
and aside from the flex issues with the body i actually
think the buttons are not bad but if all you're after is bang for the buck for
spending a little bit of money to play some retro games something like this
makes a ton more sense to me the Corsair one pro i200 gaming pc
features a compact and sexy design and
liquid cooling to minimize temperatures as well as fan noise it's got a core i9
10940x processor GeForce rtx 2080 ti
graphics four 16 gig sticks of ddr4 2666
that's 64 gigs and a 2 terabyte m.2 NVMe
SSD it also features Corsair's world-class 24 7 support either over the
phone or online and a two-year warranty
learn more at the links in the video description if you're into just checking out weird
console stuff maybe have a look at our video on the virtual boy we got our
hands on not one but two of them and tried virtual boy multiplayer pretty fun
little video oh no oh no he's gonna get me no he's
gonna get me oh wow he's gonna get me shoot
i might actually die i died