Remember when handheld gaming devices basically stopped existing? You know,
after the 3DS and VA sort of went away and smartphones started taking over.
Thank god that time is over and we have handheld gaming devices galore. We have
way more than we can handle and today we are unboxing the Amberick RG DS. 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. Uh
maybe I'll try to put on later. We have screen protectors. Did that come default
in this box? >> Yes. >> That's kind of nice. Uh, thank goodness
I'm not taking this anywhere cuz I don't like putting screen protectors on. So,
bye. But that's actually really cool and it feels like tempered glass. 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 3FT cable. That is about as
cheap as they make them. That makes sense. This whole package uh minus this
uh starts at $95. 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 uh
Nintendo console to me, like almost like the Game Boy Advance SB plastic. Uh
neither is super bad. However, um seeing as clam shell designs for handheld
consoles is the peak design because it has a built-in little case and screen
protector. Uh it would be nice to have this be a little bit more not
stickeresque. On the top of the device, we have our micro SD slot. We actually
already have a micro SD card, so we're going to keep that one in the box. We have two USB ports, one presumably for
charging and one for kind of more of the fullfeatured USB accessories, you know,
display out or controllers. We also have four shoulder buttons, uh, 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 uh 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 uh makes me wonder how hard the
whole thing will be. We have our 3.5 mm 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
want to 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. Sides got nothing.
Which brings us to the inside. We have our stereo speakers. We have two
matching 480p IPS displays, which is
exactly 2 and 1/2 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 wellthoughtout 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. Uh, then we have our D-pad.
Oh no. That's so freaking mid, man. Oh, 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, PS Vita sized, and they're recessed so that the whole device can
actually close neatly. However, that means that these are not going to 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
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below and save $15 by using code ShortCircuit. Let's turn this thing on. Wow,
that is the most Android looking splash screen I've ever seen in my entire life.
Uh, 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 splash screen when I'm opening a retro style
device. However, it's really easy to get access to all the the emulation stations
in this bad boy. And it gives you an idea of the variety that you can tackle.
You got your PC, you have your Neo Geo,
you have your MSX. Cool. That's cool. That's pre-installed. N64. Uh, and then
probably most importantly, you're going to 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 an actual 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 stuff 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 get access to your quick settings, then your deeper settings there. If you turn RG Launcher on, you
actually do get a much more uh retro
style display. I like the cleanness of this, but I do think uh it would be nice
to have a little bit more styling, not just kind of color and shadow. I want to
see how good the dual screen experience really is. Both screens are actually
touchscreen 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. Uh the motion blur is uh not very good and
the colors are pretty underwhelming. However, if I click to the bottom
screen, I'm immediately in control of what I want to 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. uh which can be fine,
but I think there's going to be quite a learning curve if you want to uh 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 uh
designed UIs, you're going to 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. Uh, I assumed that opening the default emulator and opening
the game, it would all be preconfigured. But no, we are on an adventure to
figuring out how this friaking work. 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 preconfigured or you can install sort of a uh fan-made OS on
it like you can with like the Mi or whatever, I've always had a little bit
of struggle bus feeling with them where
you got to 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. Uh, if you're not big into
emulation, input latency is a pretty common issue across all software
emulation. uh across all devices. Doesn't matter how powerful it is.
There's just going to be some level of input latency. The fact that I can feel
it in the menu is a little troublesome. Uh 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. Forgot this. Both shoulder buttons don't do the same thing
cuz it was uh there's much 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. Um, 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 touchcreen
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 going to leave that for
now. I don't want to 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 um and although you're seeing
me struggle a little bit here, this isn't the first time someone has struggled with this. We had Reese uh
figuring out how to make the two screens freaking work. Uh and I don't think he
particularly likes this device. >> I hate it. >> At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is is it 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 a pretty decently powered quad core Cortex processor. Has
3 gigs of RAM, which obviously isn't enough if you're trying to run modern
stuff, but for emulation, we're totally fine. Comes builtin with 32 gigs of
storage. It has Bluetooth 4.2 and Wi-Fi 5, um, 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 a hund,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. Uh and
so if you're like me, this is probably not the ideal option. You're probably
going to want something like a analog pocket where it's pretty much zero lag.
The last spec 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. Uh,
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 uh 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, uh even though I've
been changing the bottom one. So, I'm going to close the app. See, maybe
that's how you do it. Okay. Thankfully, closing and resetting the app got the
scaling to uh match on both screens. So that this is significantly closer to
what 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 want to play on the DS. Most of what I want to 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 could totally play it. It looks sharper than it 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 going to pass the bar mostly. Uh, 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 on catchy. What we do
that high resolution 3D rendering. That's kind of cool. It seems like the
the sharp 3D mode is slightly sharper.
Um, let's see if I can see it this time.
>> Is it off? >> This is off. >> Okay.
What do I think of the Amber Nicknick RGDS?
Pretty unbeatable deal at this price. And if you're someone that needs the
device to be under 100 bucks for you to buy it, I actually think this is pretty
cool. Uh 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 Android 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 bucks. 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 like
entire libraries of games, but you can get most of the games you want to play
at once on this thing built in. I think I'm going to hold off a little bit more
for something that's a little bit more polished and high-end. However, what I'm
not going to 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 SuperStation 1, which is a PlayStation 1 form factor Mr. FPGA style
retro device, and it is awesome.