Anbernic RG35XX Plus: Better in Every Way

[Music] hey everybody this is Ruster Metro gamecore and this here is the amberik RG 35xx plus and this just arrived in the mail a few minutes ago and so we're going to do a quick Impressions video right now now generally I like to do a full review when one of these devices arriv however there's a bit of a story here in that the amberik review units were all delayed in Hong Kong and so as a result this device is already up for sale right now but all the reviewers are just getting their devices today and so what we're going to do is a quick Impressions video right here and now with the device that I have in hand and I think later down the line once we have more time for testing and trying out different software we can do a full review then so I'm going to try to keep this as simple as possible and my goal is to make this video under 20 minutes we'll see how we do to start here's a look at the box and as you can see there are three different color options gray transparent black and white and like I mentioned the device is already up for sale right now and you can see the starting price is about 58 bucks but this is only during the initial first few days while it's in pre-sale after that it's going to go up to $64 and that also does not include shipping so in the end we're looking at a device that costs about $70 to $80 altogether depending on where you live and how much shipping is going to cost now I don't want to dive too far into the specs but I do want to give you a quick overview of this device and this is an upgraded version of the original ambern RG 35xx which came out late last year now the big changes here are going to be an upgraded chipset this is running an H700 with a 1.5 GHz clock speed in addition it has a gigabyte of lpddr4 RAM and every device is going to come with a 64 GB SD card but you can also buy a larger card with more games on it if you'd like other upgrades include Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.2 and the battery is also a little bit larger at 3300 Mah hours anyway let's go ahead and take a look inside of the box and see what we have to work with and first and foremost underneath the device you will find a screen protector and then also a quick start guide which will walk you through the stock operating system and it also comes with a usba a to USBC charging cable of note I did try a USBC to USBC cable and it did not charge so you will have to use something that has usba on one end and then USBC on the other and while it's charging you will see a red indicator light up here on top anyway I'm getting ahead of myself let's go ahead and look at the RG 35xx plus so first impressions here it is exactly the same size as the original 35xx but one of the things I first noticed is that it has a different texture to it it actually has a more matte feel to the plastic and so it's a little bit grippier and grittier and I kind of like that now on the front you can see that we have glossy buttons just like the previous version but these are now labeled with ab and XY in a rainbow color pattern other than that the front does look pretty similar to the previous model now a lot of the changes are actually on the back number one you can see that there's a battery compartment right here and these shoulders have also gotten a redesign they now have a sloped angle to them vertically and this is very similar to a lineup buttons on Etsy called the better buttons and so I think they might have borrowed that design either way I do like this slope of the buttons here and it does make it more comfortable for your index fingers to rest on so I do think that is a welcome change and finally the last big Hardware change externally is the d-pad if you ever tried the original 35xx or watched any video about it you know that this one had issues with accidental diagonals and so we'll test that in a minute but I did want to say that my initial Impressions here that it is a little bit softer to the touch in fact it almost kind of feels like a halfway point between a miu Mini Plus and the original RG 35xx so I would say among all of the d-pads that I've tested from Amber bernick this one might be the softest and I really like the feel of it it still has a good amount of pivot to it as well so of course let's go ahead and test it starting with the Contra test here I'm going to press down on the d-pad and then rock it left and right and see how much the character moves and as you can see the character just barely moves every once in a while and this is actually kind of the perfect place to be in with this game in particular this means that when you want to press a diagonal you will but if you don't and you want to duck down without moving your character it's probably going to be pretty easy to do so and so this is kind of an ideal situation when it comes to playing Contra or other similar platforming games another standard test I like to do right off the bat is a Street Fighter game to see how it's going to work when it comes to shukin and hukin and I can tell immediately that it's pretty easy to press these diagonals although it is taking me a little bit of time to get used to this different feel when it comes to the d-pad pivot as well as that softer membrane all the same even in this first round of playing the longer I played even after a few seconds I did start to feel it a little bit better and so I would call this d-pad haduk andure yuk canable with a little bit of practice and overall yes this is a big Improvement on the d-pad and I think it's a lot better than it was before now the face buttons are exactly the same nice rubber membrane connection and feel really nice and retro so really no complaints here when it comes to the controls it all feels pretty good the start select and menu buttons all have a rubber membering connection as well and feel nice and retro too too now in terms of the rest of the externals everything's the same so on the left side we have our volume up and down and then on the right side we have our power and reset buttons and then down below we have two different SD card slots and like I mentioned this one will already come preloaded with a 64 GB card and it'll also have a bunch of installed games on here as well in fact all my testing are going to be done with the games on this card on the bottom we just have a single USBC charging port and then a 3.5 mm headphone jack and then finally up top we have a mini HDMI port so this means you will be able to plug this into a TV or a monitor and you'll be able to play games on a big screen just like you could with the original 35xx next let's take a look inside of the battery compartment this will require a Philips head screwdriver and inside you can see we have a typical amberik battery and sure enough yes this is rated for 3,300 milliamp hours and it has a 12.21 w capacity so this is going to be pretty easy if you need to replace the battery without having to take the entire device apart and I do like the fact that the compartment can be screwed in which which is going to make it really tightly fit with the rest of the case in fact when you have it screwed together you can't even tell with your fingers that there's a compartment here in the back it just feels really super solid so that's awesome let's do a couple quick size comparisons we'll start with the original 35xx and the face here is a little bit different you can see the start and select buttons are lower down on the device and the menu buttons a little bit higher as well you can also see that the bezels on the front are black on the 35xx plus whereas the original one depending on the model would have different color puzles other than that everything seems to be almost exactly the same in fact it looks like they're using the same design shells as the previous model so if you like the size of the old one this is definitely going to fit at home right here and really the only difference cosmetically on the outside are going to be these shoulder buttons and then that compartment for the battery now in terms of size you might not know what the 35xx is going to be like so let's do a couple other comparisons we'll start with the Mi Mini Plus which is probably its biggest competitor because they're about the same price but as I'll show you here later the 35 5 XX plus is now a lot more performant and you can also see that the Miu Mini Plus is a little bit smaller as well now if you've never tried that device let's try a couple others we'll start with the original Game Boy and then next we have the Game Boy Color so I hope that gives you a good perspective at the end of the day when it comes to Hardware I think that everything's been pretty much improved the original was a really great device already but I do like the additions of these improved shoulder buttons and it does feel like the d-pad is a lot better as well so let's go ahead and start up the device and take a look at these stock for firmware that we have to work with and sure enough the design here looks exactly like the stock firmware on the original 35xx now I wasn't a huge fan of this firmware compared to the custom options that we got later on and I do think we'll probably see a lot of custom firmware options for this here soon all the same let's look at what we have to work with at least initially now the settings menu is very similar to how it was on the original device but there are a couple new options for example we have bluetooth settings and within here we can turn on Bluetooth and then also scan for new devices and sure enough yeah I was able to find my apito sn30 Pro on the first try and after connecting it yeah it worked fine within the menu I could navigate through everything just fine however I did find that when starting up a game in retroarch it did not recognize the controller inputs and if I went into Retro workk and changed player one to be the apit do sn30 pro it actually made it so the Bluetooth controller would not work as well as the onboard buttons wouldn't work on the device either so it does look like there is going to be some software configuration that needs to be updated orix fixed in order to really work with Bluetooth at least right now and so I think that's probably going to be a challenge for the custom firmware developers as they start to work on this device now in addition within the settings menu we now have some wi-fi options and this was very simple to set up I just turned it on scanned for my network and then connect it and so you'll be able to do things like online multiplayer as well as retro achievements in addition within the settings there's Moonlight options and so you'll be able to do game streaming on this device if you'd like to do that as well and other than that these settings here seems to be pretty standard you can do things like change out the layout but otherwise there's not a lot of other things that you can do here now let's go ahead and get oriented with the software experience and how it is when you're actually playing a game to start we have two options one is called game rooms and the other one is called retroarch game and for the most part I would recommend using the retroarch one as you can see here it's going to show you an icon for the different systems that are supported and I'll go ahead and scroll through this so you can see all the different systems that are available on that initial SD card and you can see that most of these standard options are there but of note there is no Nintendo 64 option and I'm not sure what's going on here if they even have an emulator set up or maybe they just didn't put any games in here because there is no analog stick and so it may not be a great fit either way that's definitely another thing that we'll have to focus on in the final review now the other option is the game room section and within here it's going to be a bunch of Standalone emulators and truth be told a lot of these are not going to be very good but I would say among them probably the PSP one is going to be your best bet in general the Standalone version of that emulator usually works better than within retroarch now if we go in here and start up a game you can see that it'll start right up but if we press the menu button to get into the options you can see that we're severely limited when it comes to our options and so while this might work okay for a pickup and play experience I think that you're just going to be better suited going into the retroarc section instead and this is going to play all the same games as you saw on the Standalone emulators it's basically pulling from the same folders but the nice thing about retroarch is that you'll have a bunch of different options including turning on retro achievements and multiplayer but then also you can mess around with things like shaders and filters to change the picture as well and of course in addition you can change things like aspect ratio and turn on frames per second and hot Keys all that good stuff another example would be when starting up a Game Boy game you can just press the menu button to get into the quick menu and then here within the retroarch options you can turn on colorization and that'll give you a more green look so it looks like an original Game Boy game now I did a little bit of testing here in this initial video but like I mentioned in the intro I'm going to save a lot of that for the final review after all I think custom firmware will probably even make this a better experience but for now I do want to test out some of these stock options and I really want to focus on the high-end emulators that weren't available on the original RG 35xx so let's go ahead and jump directly into Dreamcast starting with soulcaliber and I was surprised to see here that it actually played at full speed and we got about 5960 frames per second the entire time the other nice thing about playing Dreamcast in retroarc is that it has an auto frame skip enabled and it actually works prettyy well for example with this game Marvel versus Capcom it actually doesn't run at a full 60 frames per second but as long as it stays above 30 it's going to be a pretty smooth experience it's definitely not going to be a perfect Recreation of the Dreamcast but still for around 60 $70 it's pretty incredible that we have such a tiny device that can play Dreamcast in the first place and so at least in my initial testing trying out the games that were pre-loaded on the card I did find that quite a few games here played really well Crazy Taxi 2 Virtual Tennis I would actually consider all these games to be playable they're not perfect but still it's worth actually testing out now PSP was a little bit more involved for example the settings were all hosed up so I had to go in here and make some changes number one I had to adjust the aspect ratio to 16x9 and they also had frame skip turned on by default so I turned that off so we can get a better gauge of the actual performance and so as you can see here playing Ridge Racer which is a pretty hard game to play on PSP there are many moments when it's actually playing at full speed if it will definitely lag when it comes to certain areas within this racetrack but at least in initial impressions of gauging the power of this chipset I would say it's better than the rk3326 and maybe just a little bit worse than the RK 3566 and considering the fact that the devices that usually will use those chipsets are quite a bit more expensive than this one I think we're actually in a pretty good place when it comes to price to Performance and of course bear in mind that this is a much smaller device and so it's pretty cool that we have something so small that is still quite powerful now when it comes to PSP when you play a lightweight 2D game like metal slug XX it actually plays at full speed and so there will be other games you know puzzle games role playing games that'll probably be definitely playable however I did find some of the harder to play games like Tekken 6 yeah unfortunately this doesn't play at full speed so you're going to have to either play with a frame skip on or just maybe try other games that are going to work better and so in wrapping up here with my initial impressions of the RG 35xx plus I do think this is a pretty big Improvement overall from the predor essor and I love the fact that it's not that much more expensive it's about $10 more but you're going to get a lot better performance and improved d-pad and shoulder buttons and then also Wi-Fi and Bluetooth now it's a little bit ironic that this device doesn't have an analog stick considering the fact that many analog stick style systems will now play on it but all the same I think you can find some pretty good d-pad Centric games from those systems to play on this so in the end here's the way I see it yes it's a big improvement over the predecessor but if you already have the original 35xx I'm not really sure it's going to be worth spending all this money just to get those improvements however if you're just now shopping around for a mini device around the $70 price point I do think this one's probably going to be your best bang for your buck within this price point now I still have a lot more to test for example I want to try custom firmware options as they become available and I also think we're going to have to do a deep dive comparison between this one and the Mi Mini Plus either way I do think the amernick RG 35xx plus is off to a great start and I think it's only going to get better from here once the community gets it and and they start making even better improvements on the software side anyway let me know what you think about these initial impressions of this device and let me know what other things you want me to test in future content with this handheld 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 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Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 299,388

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Id: yEr_Pjsb_iQ

Length: 15min 0sec (900 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 28 2023