Anbernic RG35XX H/Plus Review: So Good (Now)

[Music] hey everybody this is R Metro gamecore a few months back I did a couple reviews about some AIC devices the RG 35xx plus and then the rg35 xxh now in those videos I said they weren't going to be final reviews and that mostly had to do with Amber Nick software I didn't really find it to be that great and I wanted to wait for some Community solutions to come around well at this point we've got a few different custom firmware options so in this video we're going to do a dual final review after all these have the same chipset and screen and so they're very similar because they're going to be using the exact same software in fact you can actually swap the SD card between the two so in this review we're going to look at the good and the bad for my previous videos and then figure out where we are today and whether or not they're going to be worth it and I'll give you the spoilers right now I think they are absolutely worth it at this point the software has fixed almost all the issues that I had before and they're much cheaper than they were at launch as well so we'll go over all that stuff in this video without any further delay let's go ahead and dive [Music] in okay let's start this story at the very beginning and talk about how we got here in the first place and it's all really due to this little guy it's called the Mi mini this came out in late 2021 and by 2022 it had kind of taken the handheld World by storm they ended up selling a ton of these devices and and I think the other companies am bernick included paid attention and so by the end of 2022 and all through 2023 we saw a bunch of different other releases we'll start with the one on the left that's am bernick's answer to the me mini it's called the RG 35xx this one came out in late 2022 and followed a very similar kind of spirit as the Mio mini and that is that it's a relatively small and low powerered handheld with a vertical form factor and with the help of custom firmwares like garlic OS this one really did Shine now not long after that the Mio Mini Plus came this was a larger size than the Miu mini it's about the same size as the 35xx and this one is very similar to the original Miu mini but larger with a bigger screen and has Wi-Fi and these two devices sold like hot kaks all throughout 2023 and then by the end of last year amernick released a refresh and that's the one we're reviewing today the RG 35xx plus and while it physically does look very similar to the other two there are quite a few things going on here it's almost like The Best of Both Worlds between them because it has the Wi-Fi of the Mini Plus but then it also has HDMI out like the RG 35xx and it also comes with Bluetooth and a battery compartment and I think this is a great move the idea of keeping a similar form factor but upgrading all the components meanwhile they kept all the same components that make these amberi devices great they are super sturdy and have reliable d-pad and face buttons and then finally they also upgraded the CPU to make it quite a bit more performant as we'll see later in this video so all told when I made my first initial review I thought that this was basically better in every way over the original RG 35xx but then about a month later they announced another one this one is the rg35 xxh and this little guy is basically the same as the one we were just looking at but in a horizontal form factor so it's got the same chipset and screen and retains all the other features like HDMI Wi-Fi and Bluetooth but that horizontal form factor does come with its own benefits to start we have a dual analog stick setup I'm not really convinced that we need a second analog stick for most games but I do love having a single analog stick on theist left especially when it comes to playing Nintendo 64 and arcade games and the other major difference with the horizontal version is that we have room for dual stereo speakers as well and so that's really kind of how we got here with the rg35 XX plus and H they are both very similar devices at the end of the day so what we're going to do next is I'm going to summarize all the things I liked and didn't like about these devices in my preliminary reviews and then go over each of these and see what's changed and what's the same and we're going to go line by line starting with what I liked and we'll start with the size and the weight and in terms of weight they're about the same 182 G for the horizontal version and 184 G for the vertical one so we're looking at around 6 o alog together per device that is super lightweight now I wouldn't consider these to be like micro or tiny devices but they are very Compact and pretty small I would consider them both to be pocketable and I think between the two I prefer the pocketability of the horizontal model yes it's a little bit taller but when you look at them side by side you can see that it's a lot thinner as well the shoulder and Trigger buttons on the 35xx do jut out a little bit from the device so it can get snagged on your pocket as you're pulling it out and so if I had to choose between the two just from a pocketability standpoint I think the H is just a little bit better now another thing I liked about this device is its fairly standard 3 and 1/2 in 480p display it has a 4x3 aspect ratio which is going to scale really well for most games and some are going to look better than others either way these screens have been around for quite some time on many other different devices but I've never really seen it quite as good as on these devices here I really like the color balance and I think that the saturation has been tuned very well too I also think that it gets super bright and dim and so it's got a good range to it as well now 3 and2 in is not a huge display but I think in most context it's probably going to work pretty well and so among all the other compact screens for Retro Gaming I think this is one of the best out there and the next point is probably one of the biggest if not the most important because the price on this is surprisingly affordable especially coming from Amber neck given the fact that we have additional features and performance I expected this to be quite a bit more expensive than the previous model but it turns out that the price difference is negligible it's about $5 if you look at the standard retail price from amernick it is about $64 for the RG 35xx plus but be mind that also does not include shipping which can be around $10 depending on where you live so we are looking at a device that's somewhere between like7 and $75 at least at the standard retail price and the rg35 xxh is a similar price point but a few dollars more I guess those dual analog sticks and stereo speakers do come with an extra cost but here's the thing those are just the standard retail prices and I've seen it go for a lot cheaper lately and I suspect that these two devices were not super hot sellers compared to the other one and I think a lot of that has to do with the software either way my theory is that because it had a somewhat lukewarm reception they drove down the cost even more for example if we jump over to the AliExpress page we can see that the RG 35xx is $615 and that includes free shipping as well so this is almost $20 cheaper than you would expect when you're looking at the Amic website and under $62 for this device is kind of amazing if you think about it that's the exact same price as a single Nintendo switch game at full price plus tax and that's just one game compared to the thousands of games that you can play on this one device and it's an even better deal if we look at the 35xx plus which can regularly be found for under $58 so when it comes down to it if you are willing to shop around a little bit on AliExpress you can find a really great deal in this device right now especially when we talk about my next point which is performance because this thing performs as well as many devices that cost $100 or more now we're going to pause on the whole performance thing because I want to talk about that when we talk about software but I do want to mention that upgrading the software does improve performance quite a bit so I will go into this more detail and talk about what it can and cannot play but it'll be later on when we talk about software another factor I like about these devices is the battery life the battery is pretty big it's 3,300 Mila hours and I found that I've gotten an average of about 6 hours of gameplay when mixing it up with both hard toplay games and the lighter stuff and I think for this type of device which is smaller and more on the kind of travel friendly side I think about 6 hours is perfect and finally the last point I had concerning the things I liked about these two devices are all the features that come packed in for most of these cheaper handhelds the three benchmarks that I usually have are does it have Wi-Fi so I can connect for retro achievements and scraping box art and then also is it capable of video out and then finally of course I like it when it has Bluetooth as well because then you can connect a different controller and have a multiplayer experience and both of the RG 35xx hn plus models do have all three of those features and they work super well the custom firmware that I'm using to make this video also works really well with HDMI out the menu and games are going to scale properly when you connect them via mini HDMI the only bug that I found so far and the developer is aware of it is that HDMI audio doesn't seem to be working instead the audio will come out of the speaker of the device itself and so I do think this is probably something we will see in a future software update and so that's a summary of all the things that I liked about these devices when they first came out and some of these bullet points have gotten even better since then especially that price point but of course I did have some issues with the device altogether it wasn't perfect so let's talk about the three major things that I didn't like about each of these two devices and first and foremost easily the biggest issue was the stock software experience now I'm not going to harp on this too bad because I did spend quite some time going over it in my previous videos but at the end of the day I would say that this software is functional in the sense that you can move around navigate through your Gam start them up and then close them down but it is not a software that I would consider to be enjoyable the menu design just looks very half-baked and some of the functions feel like they have been Lost in Translation but I do want to emphasize that everything has been functional so far so if you do pick one of these up and use these stock software it's not like you're not going to be able to play your games it's that the software experience leaves a lot to be desired especially in 2024 when I first started my channel back in 2020 I think that a firmware like this would have been part for the course and so I wouldn't had a lot of complaints back then but it's been about 4 years since then and we've had a lot of community development in that time and thankfully we now have quite a few software options so let's talk about each of those now available for both of these devices I think the first one we should talk about is garlic OS after all on the original 35xx this was like the premier operating system for me and the same developer has been working on an updated version they're calling it garlic OS 2.0 and this one is actually a multiplatform release meaning that it'll work for other devices not just the 3 5xx ones however this operating system is still a work in progress It's actually a public Alpha right now which means that it's in a pretty buggy State and they haven't been able to unlock Graphics acceleration just yet which means that performance is going to be pretty poor it can only really play up to PS1 if that and so as I'm making this video we're all still waiting for this operating system to really start to shine however there are other options out there already the next is going to be minui I've showed this off in a lot of other videos this is a very simple focused kind of operating system and I really love it with low power devices and it is pretty cool that it also works on these two devices as well however bear in mind that minui is focused on Retro Gaming so it'll mostly play the most popular systems and it caps out at PS1 and all those systems play just fine on the old RG 35xx so by moving over to the plus and H model there isn't a huge benefit here because it has a lot more power but the operating system doesn't have any support for it but luckily there are two other operating systems that have really been pushing things to the max we're going to start with muos and this one was a originally called mustard OS and got it start on the original 35xx as well however they do have a build for the plus and the H and development is really taking off now I've talked about this operating system in previous videos but this one is a more retroarc focused experience and so if you're familiar with retroarch you're going to be right at home because it's going to run through those cores and you'll use everything through that menu and even though it's limited to the retroarch cores the performance here is pretty darn great and so if you're looking for a very simple user interface it's going to be more text based but with box art if you want it and if you really want to focus on performance and tweaking this as much as you possibly can within retroarc then I do think that this OS is going to be a great solution personally I think this is more focused for those who are really kind of deep in the emulation scene so if you like to Tinker around or this is not your first handheld then I definitely think this one is worth checking out and it's super easy to install you just flash an SD card and then load it right up and probably the most exciting feature that I've seen so far is that this is the first operating system for these devices that has Port master supp port and you might have heard of portm before from other custom firmware options on Linux based devices but essentially this is going to allow you to play older PC ports directly onto this device now bear in mind there are some limitations it will only play armhf ports but I think as of making this video there's about 80 games that'll play right now so again if you want something very simple but robust then I think that muos is a great example now for me personally I like operating systems that take care of that user experience so I tend to lean towards the ones that are a little bit more graphically impressive or maybe have some preconfiguration and that's exactly the software experience that we can get with the last firmware that I'm going to talk about and this is going to be Basera this one uses emulation station as its front end and so if you've ever used other custom operating systems like Aros or jealous you're going to be right at home and bacera has been around for years at this point and it's been optimized over the years and configured for specific handhelds as well as PCS and so among all these operating systems I would say that this one feels the most plug-and playay now amazingly the Basera build that we have for these devices is still unofficial it's mostly the work of just one developer and even though it isn't a Beta release it's really surprising how fully formed everything is it all just seems to work so far all the big stuff has been taken care of Wi-Fi Bluetooth HDMI as well as emulation station and a couple different hotkeys in fact I would say it's stable enough that if there were no other updates as of today I would still be very happy with keeping this on my device indefinitely so Basera version 40 beta is what we're going to focus on for the rest of this video video and installation of this operating system is super simple you just want to download this img.ru or balena etcher to flash this onto a Micro SD card after that take the SD card put it in your device and power it on and then once it's gone through the initialization process you can power it off and then put that micr SD card in your PC at that point you will find two different partitions one is called Basera and the other one is called share the bisera 1 is a system partition so you're not really going to need to go in here at all all the magic is going to happen within the share partition there's two folders in particular that you're going to need the first is going to be the BIOS folder this is where you're going to drag and drop all your bios files and then finally you have a ROMs folder this is where you're going to put all your game files it's going to be pre-populated with a bunch of systems so you just want to go through here add all your game files and then they will appear within Basera now this isn't going to be a full guide so I'm not going to walk you through every single part but there is a Basera Wiki and it's super helpful and so I'll leave that link down below also let me know in the comments down below if you are interested in seeing a setup guide for these two devices anyway once you have your games loaded up this is what the experience is going to be like now I've been testing this for a couple days so your experience isn't going to be like this right out of the box so I've been changing out my themes and the box art and all that other kind of stuff but this is a good demonstration of what the experience is going to be like you'll navigate through your systems then press the B button to go into the games list and from there you can navigate through your games for each system and then launch them directly and once you have everything scraped you'll see the box art and even some videos playing in the background if you'd like so all things considered if you're familiar with an emulation station based front end something like Aros or jealous or Amber ALC this is all going to feel very familiar and I love the emulation station setup because it's very robust in its settings menu as well you can press the start button to get into the main menu and it'll give you a variety of different options for example under the game settings you have the per system Advance configuration within here you can go to each of your emulated systems and choose the emulator or the aspect ratio all that other kind of stuff not only that you can download new themes and then swap them out within the user interface menu and there are dozens of different themes that you can choose from just bear in mind that many of them are made with PCS in mind so they might be a little bit too heavyweight for this device all the same there are quite a few options out there so I'd recommend experimenting with the different themes because it can really change the look and feel of the device for me personally I'm sticking with the art book next one this is the same one that you can find in like Amber Le and jealous and I think it looks really nice and clean and some of my favorite aspects of bosera are all of its features for example while you're playing a game you can just tap on the power button and it'll go to sleep bear in mind that's still going to drain the battery and so you don't want to leave this indefinitely but if you're just going to be turning it off for a moment this is a great way to do it additionally Basera has a screen saver menu like with the other emulation station based systems when you're in the main menu you can press the select button and then select launch screen saver and after scraping all of your box tin videos and then setting it to launch with a random video that's exactly what'll happen I like to call this video game shopping cuz essentially it's going to show you videos of the games that are already installed and running on your device you can actually press right on the d-pad to cycle through them and if you find one that you want to play you just press the start button and it'll launch it directly and these tiny little features are the things that make me fall in love with the device overall I love the idea of just popping into Eternal Champions and getting my butt handed to me like I did when I was a teenager and if you've never played this game on Sega CD you're in for a treat because it's impossibly hard this thing is like the Elden ring of fighting games except for your opponent will basically cheat another thing I love about badera is that it has a wide range of supported systems well beyond just your typical Nintendo and Sega ones as well so this is a great opportunity to play systems that you may not have had a chance to play with in your youth for example Virtual Boy and you can even run the native version of p8 on this device as well it takes some configuration I would recommend going to the bodera Wiki page to get spun up but after you've installed it and turned on your Wi-Fi you'll be able to browse through the p8 catalog directly onto this device over the internet and this is an option that's available on other devices so this isn't anything speci but it's pretty great that we have it here within bacera on the 35xx devices in particular I've been playing a lot of this sua watermelon game Dake this is a game that I play a lot on the Nintendo switch but this Dake is a lot of fun as well and if you never played this game before the goal is to join two of the same fruits at the same time which will then expand into a larger fruit and you just kind of keep going and going from there what makes the Dake so fun is the Collision effects because these fruits are like super bouncy and spinny and so it just makes for a more chaotic and exciting experience and one thing of note is that even though I'm showing everything on the rg35 xxh this will all work on the plus as well in fact the SD cards are interchangeable between the two and finally the last note I wanted to make about bacera features is that the hot Keys might be a little bit different than what you're used to if you use something like Amber or jealous and this is all detailed on their wiki page but all the same here's nice graphic essentially what you want to do is press the menu button and start to exit out of a game and that one's pretty standard but some of the other hotkeys are different for example if you press the menu button in the bottom or B button that's going to open up the emulator menu or if you want to load or save a state you want to do that by pressing the menu and then the X and Y buttons and then finally another one that's important for me is if you press and hold the menu button and press right on the d-pad that's going to turn on fast forward and bear in mind that these hot keys are hardcoded into the software and so you can change them but it does take a little bit of work and you'd have to check out the Wiki page anyway I think I've done a pretty good job here explaining why I like Basera so much and all the features that it brings with it so now let's talk about the performance that you can expect on these two devices when running this bosera version when it comes to the handheld systems you know things like Game Boy Game Boy Color Game Boy Advance these are all going to play just fine and right out of the box they're going to scale correctly which is always great to see Nintendo DS is also fully playable on this I did have to go into the menu settings and change out the hotkeys to be able to switch my screens but other than that everything worked out of the box now playing DS on this device like with other cheaper handhelds is not the best experience depending on the game these devices do not have touch screens and also only a single screen so you have to swap between them and then use the right analog stick as a touch pointer but for the games that require only one screen and mostly focus on d-pad controls you're going to have a great time moving on to the 8 bit and 16-bit era these also are going to play great so if you want to play Sega Genesis or its add-on systems like 32x and Sega CD those all play great and same thing with Super Nintendo this really is no surprise considering the fact that these systems also play really well on cheaper devices too however it's when we get to the 3D based systems that things get really exciting for example with PlayStation 1 I found that I could play everything in a 2X up scale so everything would be a full 480p resolution and look super sharp and clear and things get even more exciting when we start moving into the other systems like Nintendo 64 because all around most Nintendo 64 games are going to play at full speed or with very minimal slowdown a great example is going to be banjo kazui this is what I consider to be a 75% game by that I mean that if this game plays at full speed about 75% of the Nintendo 64 catalog will generally be playable and so right off the bat we're already seeing some great performance another nice thing about badera is you can change your per game options and this comes in handy with Nintendo 64 so if you take panjo kazui and hold onto the B button that'll bring up a quick menu specific to this game and near the bottom there's a section that says Advanced game options and within here we can change out the emulator depending on the game that you're playing so for example I tried all of these out and I found that the mopin 64 4 plus rice core work the best but for other Nintendo 64 games they might work better with a different emulator so for example with Mario 64 we're going to do the same process but I found that the lib retro or retro art core performs the best the other ones work really well too but they have some lighting issues and so I found that this one works the best and it has great performance and I would say that for the most part the default mopin Standalone core is going to work the best and so I would always try that one first and then move over if that one doesn't work perfectly but I think you'd be surprised that the performance that we're getting here at around the $60 price point so here's a great example with the default emulator Starfox 64 plays at full speed but it seems really dark there's some sort of lighting effect happening but if we switch over to the retroarch core it still plays at full speed and the graphics are fixed so these are the kind of things I would recommend experimenting with with all of your favorite Nintendo 64 games unfortunately some games just don't seem to work well even with all four emulators so for example Mario Tennis is mostly playable it's got a little bit of slowdown but that lighting effect just looks really weird and bear in mind that there are going to be some games that won't play at full speed those really top tier games like cruising USA 007 as well as conquer bad for day I wouldn't really consider these to be playable but all the same I was surprised to find that these games that didn't play at full speed were few and far between so unless you're a stickler for Nintendo 64 emulation and you want to make sure that every single game plays at full speed I would consider the Nintendo 64 to be a playable system on the RG 35xx plus and H moving on on let's try out Sega Dreamcast now you have two different emulators to choose from there's the Standalone flycast as well as the retroarch flycast core and for all my testing I stuck with the Retro AR core and I have to say that the performance here is very similar to the Nintendo 64 now both these Standalone flycast as well as retroarch are going to use automatic frame skip so it's not going to be a full 60 frames per second experience but I've always found the frame skip on this emulator to be pretty darn good it still results in a smooth gameplay experience now I would say that compared to the Nintendo 64 emulator the Dreamcast one is a little bit less performant by that I mean that you will get some audio cracks and stuttering here and there so I would say that yes most Dreamcast games are going to play on these devices but with a couple limitations like that frame Skip and the occasional stutter and of course there are going to be some games with some significant slowdown for example resz had quite a bit of slowdown and considering that this is a rhythm game I don't think that's going to be very playable next we'll move over to PlayStation Portable and this one has a little bit more mixed results to start we're to use the Standalone PSP emulator that comes preconfigured with Basera and I found that almost all these games I had to play at a 1x resolution now there are going to be some games that play at full speed with those settings but it's kind of few and far between and if you start moving things up even when adding in frame skip the performance here is not too great if anything I would say stick to the lightweight and 2D games and you'll probably find a few gems here and there but I would not consider this to be a PlayStation Portable system overall and finally the other system that I tested and didn't find to be fully playable was Sega Saturn this one's always really hard to emulate and I just don't think that this chipset can really keep up now as far as your emulator options you only have one and that's going to be the Retro AR core of yabas San chiro and even if they did get the Standalone version of this Emulator working I'm not sure if the performance is going to get there after all these games are only playing at about half speed and so there's a lot of work to be done before I would consider them to be playable anyway that's probably the longest section of this video but I wanted to talk about that software experience and how much it's improved over time and I think that b for me and my own personal use case is a complete GameChanger for these devices we've got an emulation station focused experience that has great performance all the way up through Nintendo 64 and Dreamcast and so even though initially I definitely had software issues with this device I think that's all gone away at this point I am super happy with it so that really leaves us with just two other things that I didn't like about these devices to start we have a touchy d-pad on the rg35 xxh by that I mean that it's pretty easy to get an accidental diagonal when you're playing a game on this device so if you are playing a game like Contra which is really touchy about those d-pad controls you might have some issues here and there and I went over that in my rg35 xxh video as well there are Hardware mods that you can do to make it a little bit less sensitive but I always prefer to have a great outof boox experience and also bear in mind that the vertical version doesn't seem to have these issues quite as much however the vertical one does have an issue that the other one doesn't and that's the fact that it lacks analog sticks now don't get me wrong depending on what you're playing you may not want analog sticks in the first place for example when playing like Game Boy games this is a very fitting form factor however things start to fall apart when you try to play any analog Centric game using the RG 35xx Plus for example when trying to play a Dreamcast game with analog stick controls it's not going to work out of the box instead you'll have to go into the retroarch menu and then go into the control section within there you'll have to map the d-pad controls to the analog stick controls instead from there you want to save a game remap file and after that yes you will be able to use analog controls using the d-pad it is a little bit weird especially if you're used to playing with an analog stick but thanks to retroarch you can actually map these controls unfortunately Nintendo 64 is a worst case scenario even when trying to play a game with a retroarch core when you go into the menu for some reason the menu doesn't actually show up so you're not able to go in here and remap the controls within retroarch there were quite a few games especially the most beloved ones that relied on analog controls and using a standalone emulator is just is bad because these don't have menus so you can't go into the menu and change out these controls now it could be possible if you SSH into the device and then manually configure the button mapping but that's a lot of effort to get these games to work especially considering the fact that by doing this you're eliminating the ability to use the original d-pad controls as well another time that I missed the analog sticks was when playing arcade games with the RG 35xx plus thankfully these are already mapped to the d-pad and so you can definitely make it work but any day of the week I would rather use an analog stick when playing arcade games and so one thing to bear in mind if you want to play games that rely on analog sticks I think the H model is going to be better than the plus especially if you're a big fan of like dual shock games on the PS1 like opea scape one thing of note with this game in particular if you want to enable the analog controls you have to press L1 R1 and select at the same time that's going to be the equivalent of pressing that analog button on the old PlayStation dual shock controller okay so that's all the stuff that I originally liked and didn't like about these devices and how it all kind of plays out today and now that we have a firm understanding of the experience I think it's time to talk about which one is probably going to be the best fit for you after all both of these devices have the exact same screen and chipset and performance and so the choice between the two may not be super clear-cut but if you ask me I think that the distinction between the two is very black and white for me it comes down to three major factors number one I think that the horizontal model is a little bit more pocketable and considering that these devices are very pocket friendly I think that the H is going to be a better choice in that regard next I love the additional features that the H has that the plus does not there have been plenty of times when I've benefited from having the analog sticks and I also love the stereo sound as well so again I think that's another check mark for the RG 35xx and then finally between the two I also prefer a horizontal form factor for me I just find it to be a much more comfortable experience I definitely wouldn't categorize the control scheme on this device to be perfect I think I would prefer to have stack shoulder buttons but all the same I find it to be a lot more comfortable to use than a vertical handheld which always feels a little bit cramped for me so for me personally it's no contest between the 35x xh and the plus I prefer the horizontal version but if you're a stickler for vertical handhelds I think that the 35xx plus isn't necessarily bad it just has its own limitations really when it comes down to it I've been waiting for a device like the 35xx Plus for many years at this point and longtime viewers know that this is like the perfect device for me it's small it's compact it's lightweight and and it also is horizontal not only that it's got a 4x3 aspect ratio 480p resolution which is going to scale very well for retro gaming and believe it or not this is the first time I feel like amberi has finally knocked it out of the park when it comes to all those factors that I prefer before we wrap up let's do One More Story Time talking about how we got here when it comes to this horizontal form factor and all these features for me this all started with the RG 351p which I picked up back in 2020 this thing was so close to being the perfect device for me it had emulation station at its front end for the first time and it also had some pretty comfortable controls and was plastic and compact but there were two things about it that held it back the first was the low resolution screen and it's a 3x2 aspect ratio that works great for Game Boy Advance but doesn't scale really well for the other systems and those I play a lot more in addition this one lacks Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and HDMI out now Flash Forward the following year amernick released an update this one's called the RG 351 MP this one was a step forward in some ways and a step backward others to start this one had the ideal screen 4x3 aspect ratio 480p resolution in fact the screen here is very similar to the devices we're reviewing today however this one's made out of metal and even though that is very premium I want something plastic that reminds me more of the 9s and this one also lacked Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and HDMI out well let's Flash Forward again to the next device that they released that was kind of a contender and this is the amernick RG 353 P NPS this device had an upgraded chipset so it played a little bit more Dreamcast in Nintendo 64 and it also had a very nostalgic Super Nintendo form factor and it's got Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and HDMI out so we're really hitting most of the factors and this one was really close but the thing that it lacked was that it wasn't small and Compact and even though it's great from an ergonomic standpoint I never really considered it to be pocketable and so as a result it's just a device I didn't end up using that much finally after that we had another upgrade that was the RG 353m and this one almost got every single thing right it's got that compact form factor it's got the upgraded chipset it has HDMI Bluetooth Wi-Fi all that great stuff but the thing that held me back with this one is that it's also metal so it's heavy and expensive and just didn't seem like something I could take around with me on travel I love the premium feel when I'm playing these devices but I never feel like the metal ones are really travel friendly and then finally we have the RG 35xx which seems to be a culmination of all these other handhelds into one in fact it has basically the exact same shell as the RG 353m but in plastic this one's got performance that Rivals the 353 devices but then also now with Basera has that emulation station front end and it's got those three key features for me HDMI Bluetooth and Wi-Fi so when we're talking about the 35xx devices yes the H1 is the perfect fit for me and I think that if you pick this one up you'll really enjoy it as well but let's talk about one more aspect now let's say that you are a vertical handheld enthus iast and you are thinking about getting the 35xx plus but you've also heard about a different device called the Miu Mini Plus after all I love this one as well and I've made a lot of videos about it and given the fact that they're about the same price you might be deciding between these two as well and I would say first and foremost you're going to have a great time with either of these they're both relatively compact although the Mi Mini Plus is smaller and Slimmer and from a software standpoint both of these are really excellent right now the mium Mini Plus runs onos this is kind of the gold standard when it comes to customer firmwares it's super simple in its implementation but has a lot of robust features as well it's one of those that you can give to somebody that knows nothing about computers and they'll still be able to find their games navigate through and then start them up but it does have some really unique features for example if we tap on that menu button it'll bring up a game switcher function this allows you to browse through the save states of all the games that you've been recently playing and you can go right back into them from here the major limitation of the Mi Mini Plus is going to be the performance of its chipset this can essentially play up to PlayStation 1 and and Nintendo DS additionally this one doesn't have Bluetooth or HDMI out so if those are features that are important for you you may want to consider the 3 VIXX plus this one's going to have better performance so it's going to be able to play more of those systems and now with Basera we have a more unified operating system as well but of course bear in mind that those higher-end systems aren't a great fit for a vertical form factor without an analog stick so it is a bit of a double-edged sword in the fact that yes you got more power but you may not want to play those games that can actually run on this anyway so it's really going to come down to the features if you want to run Basera or if you want to have HDMI or Bluetooth then yes I think the 35xx plus is going to be a better bet but surprisingly for me when I'm playing a smaller vertical handheld a lot of those factors don't really come into play I'm really looking for something that's going to give me an optimal experience when playing like Nintendo and Super Nintendo and for what it's worth I actually prefer the Mi Mini Plus over the 35xx Plus in that regard if you're only looking to play up to PS1 then I still think that onion OS combined with the Mi Mini plus is the best combination and I do realize that this is kind of a tiered system in the fact that I prefer the horizontal one but if you're going to get a vertical one unless you want those specific features I do prefer the Mi mini instead but at the very least I hope I've given you all the information that you would need in order to choose between one or the other when it comes down to it at around this $60 price point we are really blessed right now I think it's a golden age of retro handheld gaming the Mi Mini Plus is crazy good and same thing with the RG 35xx plus but from my own perspective I think the cheaper handheld that I'm going to be using the most is the rg35 xxh I've been waiting about 4 years at this point for an experience like this and I'm so happy that it's here amick did a pretty great job getting this device fairly close to the finish line but it's really the community and the custom firmwares that they have built that really push it over the edge and so when it comes down to it yes at this price point these devices are unmatched and I think the rg35 xxh in particular is going to be the best smaller horizontal handheld around for quite some time it's not perfect but man it gets so many things right anyway let me know what you think in the comments down below are you going to be picking one of these up or are you waiting for the inevitable upgrade as always thank you for watching and be sure to like And subscribe if you found this helpful and we will see you next time happy [Music] gaming

Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 236,877

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Id: wDRATfZ8CfY

Length: 35min 27sec (2127 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 23 2024