100 Days With The PowKiddy RGB30 Handheld

this is the pal Kitty RGB 30 it released about 4 months ago and despite getting positive reviews and ending up on a lot of best handhelds of 2023 lists I didn't initially see the attraction it kind of just looked like a squashed pow Kitty RGB 10 Max 3 Pro with worse specs but it turns out that I might have been too quick to judge and after spending a bit of time with it I actually think that in a way this represents the future of handheld devices but we're getting a little bit ahead of ourselves here so let's take things back and ask why would you want to buy a device like this when there's so many other more powerful options available and what's the big attraction with this weirdly shaped screen well let's take a look when you get your Ms on a fresh emulation device you're probably excited to get it set up and start testing it out listen I get it I've gone through this process a few times myself but something that's easy easy to overlook when you're lost in a sea of pixels is the fact that you do actually need to eat something that's where today's sponsor comes in hellofresh is a recipe box delivery service which provides you with everything you need to make tasty meals from scratch in the comfort of your own kitchen it's so easy to get stuck in a routine with food whenever I go to the supermarket I tend to stick to the same old boring meals week after week which then increases the temptation to get takeaways which are expensive and probably quite unhealthy but with hellofresh this temptation and boredom melts away you can pick from loads of different delicious meals that you wouldn't ever normally think of cooking and all of the ingredients come measured out so it takes the stress out of the preparation process and you can get stuck in with the fun part these recipe cards make the entire thing a breeze and the end result is always stunning I mean just gaze upon this creamy tomato cajun chicken before you start drooling all over the floor you too can get started with hellofresh just click the link in the description or use the code on screen now and get 16 free meals and free desserts for Life while your subscription is active you can also scan the QR code on the screen or visit hellofresh.com for more information now if you don't mind I need to finish off this cajun chicken the actual build quality of the rgb3 isn't really anything to shout about it's fairly light and the plastic shell feels a little bit cheap but the buttons and d-pad are surprisingly nice to the touch they have a rubber membrane connection which gives them a good amount of resistance and the satisfying to press the analog sticks on the left and right are very similar to the switch joycon style ones that a lot of devices like this use these are set back into the shell of the device so they shouldn't snag on anything if you're putting it in your pocket or inside of a bag on the top we've got inline shoulder buttons the volume controls a reset button and the power button along with a mini HDMI out which I love to see on devices like this because it gives them slightly more versatility on the bottom we've got two USB ports one for connecting peripherals and the other for charging there's also two micro SD card ports one for the OS and the other for your ROM files and we've even got a headphone jack too overall despite the sort of cheap plastic feeling of the shell there's a lot to love here po Kitty haven't skimped out on any of the ports here and some of these are sometimes missing from other devices so I would say that so far things are already looking pretty good if we delve a little bit deeper and take a look at the specs we'll find an RK 3566 CPU 1 gig of RAM and a 4,100 milliamp battery in terms of the raw power offered here this isn't very impressive this basically means that you're not going to stand a chance of playing PS2 or GameCube games and even certain demanding Dreamcast and Nintendo 64 titles might struggle a little little bit in terms of extras we also have built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and it runs using jealous as its operating system this basically means that you can use it right out of the box with very minimal tinkering because everything is preconfigured pretty well the thing that really saves the rgb3 though is this weird screen it's a 720x 720 resolution which considering it's only 4 in big is going to look absolutely stunning but the real secret weapon here is the fact that the aspect ratio is 1 by one this means that it's perfectly Square something that's very uncommon with devices in this price range and kind of uncommon in general now you might be wondering why you would even want a square screen like this in the first place and the most obvious answer to that question is to play any systems that utilize a one by one aspect ratio or at least something that comes close to that so now let's go ahead with a little bit of game testing and see why you might want to pick this up over certain other devices the console that immediately Springs to mind to test out first is of course the Game Boy which if we're getting super specific actually has a 10x 9 aspect ratio but that's very close to 1x one and it's going to look great Game Boy games are going to almost fill the entire screen and look absolutely insane with a 720p display because that allows for an upscale of around four times the native resolution if you set the rgb3 to have an your scale instead the pixels will be perfectly upscaled to fit on the screen with no stretching or Distortion but this does resol in some bigger black bars on the top and bottom this is due to the fact that you are still working with a 10x 9 aspect ratio which won't perfectly fit the screen personally though I don't actually mind not having this perfect integer scale with this system because it's so close to matching the one by one screen anyway that it doesn't really affect anything by stretching it that tiny bit more other systems that closely match the RGB 30's display are the Neo Geo pocket and The Game Gear which are going to look incredible on this device but what about all of those other systems that don't quite match up with a one by one display any systems with a standard 4x3 aspect ratio are going to be playable on here but will of course have black bars on the top and bottom because they weren't designed to be displayed on a screen This Tall what this results in though is the equivalent of a screen that's 3.5 in if you only count the area of the screen that's being used by gameplay now this is small but it's not unplayable by any means and the high resolution of the screen actually makes some of these games look really crisp it's clearly not an ideal setup but if you didn't have another option to emulate these games it would definitely get the job done where things get even more interesting though is with Game Boy advanced games which can be upscaled to three times the native resolution while maintaining a perfect integer scale thanks to its 240x 160 resolution this means that the pixels aren't going to be stretched here at all and things are going to look just as good as they do on the original Hardware if not even better the only thing to consider is that you are still going to have those black bars on the top and bottom of the screen but you're even going to get those on devices like the analog pocket that's just the nature of having a square screen or even a 4x3 screen and attempting to play systems with that wider aspect ratio and it is what worth mentioning that if you're playing a GBA Game on an analog pocket the screen is actually going to work out to be smaller than on the rgb3 because the analog pocket screen is only 3.5 in and the added black bars on GBA games will make that even smaller whereas on the rgb3 GBA games are effectively being displayed on a 3.4 in screen when you take into consideration the black bars so yeah both the Game Boy and Game Boy advanced stuff is very good on here and it might legitimately be a great alternative to the mighty analog pocket NES and SNES look pretty great out of the box because typically they would default to having a standard 4x3 aspect ratio it makes it the same as playing something like a PlayStation title but if you wanted to get technical here you could change the aspect ratio to 8x7 which will fill much more of the screen without distorting the visuals in any majorly impactful way in fact Some people prefer this aspect ratio for these systems anyway this isn't a perfect integer scale though so you are going to see some very minor visual Distortion but I feel like most people wouldn't even pick up on this with SNES specifically you can actually use a three times integer scale by over scanning the image so that it crops off the very edges of the game play however this is only getting rid of a tiny amount of pixels on the left and right which means that you're getting a near Perfect Image that's has taken up almost the entire screen and it just looks insane other systems you might be interested in are ones that feature a vertical aspect ratio or utilize multiple screens the square screen having a taller aspect ratio than most other devices would mean that these systems should make better use of the space available and you would think that the DS would be a good example of this but the problem is that the RGB 30 doesn't have a touch screen meaning that a lot of games would be rendered unplayable or lose some of the functionality so unfortunately I wouldn't rarely recommend this for DS stuff and yeah you can obviously play a lot of games by using the right stick to emulate the touch screen and use the single screen mode to fill up more space on the display but even so it's still not exactly an ideal setup for this particular system however when we look at vertical arcade games the rgb3 once again shows how amazing this screen is normally when you play these games on a 4x3 display the black bars on the sides of the screen are massive this is because a 4x3 display is wider than it is tall but here we have a display that's just as tall as it is wide which means that those black bars are reduced and the screen appears more filled out then we have p8 which is a system that never actually physically existed but is a madeup fantasy console which is used by passionate Indie developers to create small creative experiences while being being Limited in terms of power and graphics and wouldn't you know it the aspect ratio of these p8 games are a perfect one by one making the rgb3 the perfect p8 player now you do need to buy p8 but it's a one-time payment and once you've purchased the software all of the games are completely free and there's huge amounts of them you could literally get the rgb3 just to play p8 stuff and you would never run out of things to be trying out so to some up it turns out that a screen this aspect ratio and resolution has a lot more utilization than I initially thought it turns out that devices like this that have more of a specific niche in mind are the ones that I potentially find the most interes in while we all enjoy devices that offer a lot of power and can play practically any system Under the Sun a lot of the time because they aren't based around playing any particular system specifically they can end up underperforming in some key areas most of the time this comes down to the feel or placement of the d-pad or maybe the trigger and shoulder positioning being bad but here we have a device that seems almost purpose-built for a specific set of systems and it caters to those games perfectly you don't need loads of power because you're not going to want to go up to PS2 or GameCube on a device like this the d-pad is placed in the prime upper left location which makes it more comfortable to use than on most other devices and yeah the shoulder buttons are in line but the vast majority of the consoles aims to emulate either don't have shoulder buttons or only use one on either side so that's not even a problem here I'm actually struggling to come up with anything bad to say here because it just does what it's intended to do and does it almost perfectly even the jealous front end looks great and is easy to navigate and configure the price is amazing too it's currently $90 on the PO Kitty website and when you consider that the closest Direct competition to this at least in terms of its screen is probably the analog pocket the rgb3 is $130 cheaper and potentially more importantly this is actually always in stock so that's got to make it worth at least considering as an alternative the only negative is that the screen could potentially be a little bit bigger and I do think that the plastic shell makes it feel a little bit cheap at first it could also potentially have slightly more power just to be able to play more N64 and Dreamcast stuff a bit better but honestly if you're wanting to play systems that require an analog stick you might as well go for another device entirely where the stick is positioned in the top left the PO Kitty rgb3 has to get nine Doos out of 10 literally give this thing a more premium shell and maybe have it be half an inch or maybe even a full inch bigger and it would be perfection even as it is now though it's so damn close to Perfection that I would recommend this to anyone one that's looking for a device catered for Game Boy systems or those pre fif gen consoles I think we need more handhelds like this that are more specifically crafted for a certain era or style of game I suppose another example of this would be the AO flip DS which would be the perfect DS 3dsm Wii U emulator and also the amenic RG Arc which is tailored to Sega Saturn and Mega Drive games I think this stuff carves out a really good niche in a Marketplace that often boils down to which devices are the most powerful but the rgb3 shows that this isn't always the most important thing to be looking at but what do you think of the pow Kitty RGB 30 have you already got one and if so what's your favorite system to play on it and if you haven't got one yet then are you tempted to pick one up after seeing what it's capable of let me know a big Thanks goes out to today's sponsor hellofresh for keeping me fed throughout all of this game testing remember to check out all of their d details in the description below to take advantage of all of the deals also remember to give the video a like if you enjoyed it subscribe for more retro stuff coming soon and I've been robbed from retro dodo and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Retro Dodo

Views: 37,296

Keywords: rgb30, powkiddy, powkiddy rgb30, powkiddy review, powkiddy rgb30 review, powkiddy rgb30 game testing, powkiddy rgb30 gameplay, rgb30 game testing, rgb30 gameplay, game boy, game boy emulator, analogue pocket alternative, square screen, handheld review, handheld emulator review

Id: cWNHZSxYaPQ

Length: 14min 43sec (883 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 26 2024