Crazy Expensive Retro Gaming Briefcase
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,448 words · ~7 min read
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a few months ago we built our very own arcade machine but a lot of you chimed
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in to tell us that throwing together something with off-the-shelf parts from
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well-known sources like ultimark and north coast custom arcades wasn't diy
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enough okay well
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what if i told you that this
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was handmade a truly
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diy creation well it is
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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
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it is someone else's diy project that
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turned into a product that he sent to us and that
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someone is love hulton a swedish artist
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who's hand made a huge selection of limited production retro gear
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some of this stuff is incredible and he's even made pc cases
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so the carry 42 though is right up there with his most exciting and beautiful
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ideas it's short for carrier for two and
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ours which was graciously loaned to us by mr holton himself features a
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mother-of-pearl inlay of miz and mr pac-man on the outer casing that's
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completely flush with the wood it's entirely hand crafted from american
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walnut with a vintage retro aesthetic and the craftsmanship on it is
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outstanding everything fits together with a level of
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precision rarely seen in wood for a commercial product anymore and certainly
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with a higher level of precision than we ended up with in our own cabinet thanks
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to our amateur level assembly and having to move it around multiple
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times during construction speaking of which the size comparison is absolutely
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staggering let's go for a tour of it so even the control deck of our full-sized
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arcade machine dwarfs the carry 42 but
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it includes all of the following a 12-inch 1024 by 768 display twin 10 watt
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speakers a humble raspberry pi running
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retropie with some pre-loaded customizations a diminutive 16 gig usb
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flash drive that contains a handful of
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games of dubious legality and a usb port
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to plug it into allowing you then to add your own less dubious rom files should
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you please while we're back here you might notice that there are no fewer
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than two HDMI ports and six and a half
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millimeter headphone jacks well essentially
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these ones are outputs these ones are inputs and then inside
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the box are small patch cables that connect them for use with the included
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screen and speakers so in theory you could connect this up
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to an external display and a pair of headphones or even a tv and receiver for
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a much bigger picture and sound experience
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though in practice not everything is as it seems more on that later something
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you might have noticed missing back here is an obvious way to keep the lid
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upright while you're playing and that's remedied with this here twisty pulley
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thing just grab it pull it out twist it and it's locked in place there are three
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separate angles you can prop it up at i think the only thing that could make
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this thing more swedish is a yellow and blue color scheme i love it
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but it isn't purely a piece of art right
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how about the gaming experience well we got off to a pretty good start
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the buttons and sticks are sharp and responsive the speakers can get pretty
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loud though they are clearer and sound better in general at lower volumes
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thanks to the box acting as kind of a wooden reverb chamber
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but as for the screen well for starters it's a tn screen with
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pretty terrible viewing angles meaning that the two-player experience is best
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enjoyed with a very close friend or romantic partner and there's also some
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pretty severe motion blur that while it's something you can get used to
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it's far from ideal especially in shoot-em-ups and this is all before we
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get to what was our biggest out-of-the-box issue the input latency
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now thankfully that was something that can be controlled to a small degree by
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entering the underlying emulator and making some configuration changes
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however these changes really should have been the default settings while we're in
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here though something else retro gamers might not appreciate is the blurry
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linear filtering effect enabled by default it makes sense here since the screen
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isn't super high res and the stock effect is to curve the screen to match
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the bezel and it might have even masked some of the ghosting a bit but we
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personally preferred our approach where some clever shader work can make for a
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far cleaner more appealing image that more closely resembles an old crt
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so once again this problem was mostly solved
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bringing us to the one that we couldn't fix the speakers
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remember that six and a half millimeter headphone jack well that's not for the
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speakers it's actually power for the lcd
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and the power led which we only discovered when we went to try plugging
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headphones in and got a loud buzzing and a blank screen oops
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the speakers ended up being driven by HDMI which would be fine except that
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they were rewired for mono now some games notably arcade games and
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16-bit games do actually run in stereo
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and so does retropie by default resulting in actually missing sound
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effects
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after an also config tweak our games at least had all of the sounds instead of
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just the left channel but this is again something we felt could have been done
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better
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with all of that said though these are problems that are probably only going to
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bother purists bringing us back to the real reason the carry 42 exists to be an
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artistic piece for retro gaming enthusiasts
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and collectors and if we look at it through that lens even though it's not
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perfect it does work out of the box and
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casual gamers likely wouldn't notice anything was wrong
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now that doesn't translate into a recommendation that you go out and buy
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one of these especially considering that it's powered by a pie and the asking
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price for a base unit without the inlay is
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2599 euro plus vat
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but if you're the kind of person who just straight up doesn't give a crap
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about money and i know you guys are out there there are only 50 of them in the
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world and mr hilton's craftsmanship is something that cannot be denied here and
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that beauty and scarcity is what you're really paying for here not the hardware
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and software which by the way we would love to be consulted on next time
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brown bears on the other hand can be aggressive but that's as a last resort
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LTT so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but it
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was awesome get subscribed hit the like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video
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description also link down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like
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this one and our community forum which you should totally join