Are RaspberryPi Hand-Helds worth it?

this video is brought to you by lenode link down below for a 100 60 day credit more on them a little bit later this right here is the pie boy XRS a case for the Raspberry Pi 4 that resembles the look and feel of an old school game boy but unlike a Game Boy because it has a Raspberry Pi 4 inside you can use it to play games from N64 PlayStation 1 and of course a variety of other systems in this video we're going to be talking about what you need to do to put this thing together run their custom version of retropie and talk about my overall experience using it as a gaming handheld And discussing whether or not if it is actually worth it and quick spoiler if you already have a Raspberry Pi 4 yes it's probably worth it if not for the price there are probably some better options out there so first the unboxing and some of the specifications here opening it up we were greeted with a small HDMI adapter some stickers from experimental Pi the company that actually makes these devices and of course a separate box with the case and opening up this box we have the pie boy some extra tools and some other items we're going to need such as a USBC charger and it is crazy there is an entire Raspberry Pi 4 in here and not the actual compute modules we have the full size thing here making it a rather thick boy internally we have a fan a heat sink two separate 2800 milliamp hour batteries which of course depending on the game and how much power you're using on the pi gives you anywhere from three to five hours of light or the display here this is a 3.5 inch IPS display with a resolution of 640 by 480. on the bottom here we have USBC charging as well as an audio jack port and right here there's a spot for that optional HDMI adapter it does ship with the little cover for both if you don't have it and if you do have it right here we have a small speaker on the front and of course when the actual Pi is installed we have access to the four USB ports as well as the ethernet port when it comes to the actual buttons and everything we have kind of the standard Nintendo layout we have a d-pad over over here we have two small little joysticks here that actually feel pretty good to use and maneuver we have both shoulder and the trigger buttons here on the top and then we have our menu select and start now I will note unfortunately there isn't a dedicated button that you can go ahead and program to your hotkey which could very well be a problem depending on the actual game you're wanting to play and now getting on to assembly it's actually a fairly straightforward and easy process there are eight screws on the back keeping this together with the four screws in the middle kind of doubling as what is going to be holding your pie in place so all you need to do is pop this off and I do need to know you need to be careful because these trigger buttons aren't really like in place they're being held together by a little metal like probe looking thing they're just kind of resting in there and being held in place by the actual back cover so if you pop it off like that they're going to go flying now in that little bag of extras we actually have a little thermal pad that you can apply either directly to the Heat heatsink or right to your CPU and actually putting the board in is kind of cool because everything is powered with the Pogo pins so you need to make sure and push that in there without bending or breaking anything and that's really all you have to do if you have the optional HDMI thing you plug that in kind of position it with this and before you do slide it in you're going to want to make sure that this face plate is kind of in the proper location and once you have everything lined up and together properly you could go ahead and plug in the two batteries go ahead and put the back plate back on making sure you're not going to be pinching any wires or there's nothing in the way screw it on down and then you're good to go I did start with the four in the middle just to make sure the actual Pi board was in place properly right here on the bottom there's a little slot that comes out here exposing your SD card now what you're going to want to do is uh flash their little custom version of retropie it's just your basic stock version of retropie but they did add a couple scripts and little additions just to make it run and function really good on this device including the button layout and you can kind of see on the top there there's other scripts and add-ons that you could do so you can see your battery percentage the load code what clock you're currently running at and flashing is as straightforward as a process as anything else really I just threw it in etcher Flash to the SD the first flash didn't quite work for me I was having trouble booting it up I was getting this red indicator light flashing at me they reached out to their support they said simply re-flash the image I did and ta-da it worked and loading games is going to be the same as any other retropie install you just go ahead and connect to it either via FTP or if it's connected to the same Wi-Fi as your Windows computer it should be able to or should be detected in network discovery and you could go ahead and load it up that way drag and drop your games in and you should be good to go the experimental Pi website has a lot of different documentation and little guides resources things like that to go and help you out and even if you don't want to use their image of retropie they do have the scripts and all that available so you can use your very own images if you do so see fit and with the scripts they do have their own kind of customized configuration and whatnot I did go in here and actually overclock the thing just by changing the configuration allowing it to go up to 200 megahertz making it so uh some of the 3D titles will run a little bit better so with some configuration changes all the games loaded up I went ahead and booted up for the first time all you need to do is hold down the menu button and then you're going to be in your system I'm not really going to dive too far into exactly what's going on it's retropie I have a whole separate video going over all kinds of tips tricks connecting the Wi-Fi things like that generally it's the exact same process but a couple things that are unique here this menu button if you go ahead and tap on that you are given options for your volume and brightness and it tells you if you hold it down for two seconds it's going to power off the device so you can't really program this menu button as the hotkey because it serves a very important function already and with the hotkey thing I did kind of try to go in and program my own with like one of the click buttons for a joystick it didn't really work for me it did read as a experimental Pi controller which was cool and at one point I I did plug in Xbox 360 controller into this and being that is it's just retropie after configuring it it worked completely fine now before we get into my actual gameplay experience and final thoughts again thank you the note for sponsoring this video if you are interested in setting up your very own Linux server you could do so on the Node with our 100 60 day credit you could pick between a wide variety of Linux distributions or use one other one-click installers to get a specific server or service spun up with ease great customer service affordable pricing for five bucks a month you could have a Linux server overall it's a super good deal so for the games I have loaded up on here I have a Super NES Game Boy Advance Nintendo 64 PSP and Playstation starting with the older one Super NES games ran absolutely fantastic as playing a Kirby for a little bit on here super fun no issues with lying and used very little of the actual system resources giving us of course the longest battery time and honestly for like like the SNES it is just a remarkable gameplay experience same thing with the Game Boy Advance I was playing Crash Bandicoot again with these older kind of 2D ish games this thing is remarkable and even bumping up to the uh N64 which I was playing Mario Kart on again there were absolutely no performance issues on like a 4K TV you are going to run into a little bit of lag and whatnot but being the fact that this is a super small basically a 480p display there there was no issue Flawless performer and it was the same case with the PlayStation one game I put on there which was a Pac-Man World which if you've never played is a rather interesting and fun game I remember I actually got my uh very first copy when I was a little kid in a 7-Eleven which is a rather weird place to buy video games and even on this small screen I did come into my first bit of lagging issues even with the system overclocked running a God of War on the PSP emulator that game for the console is very graphically demanding you're constantly doing a lot there's a lot going on and there was a very noticeable lag whenever I did any kind of attack maneuver and you could even hear it kind of in the audio of just how lucky it was [Applause] but when you get into the PSP that's when you're kind of Shifting Gears from more uh retro style gaming which is kind of the intent of this thing to more modern gaming for Retro Gaming handheld this thing is absolutely fantastic it is bulky it is thick it is kinda heavy but overall the feel and comfort and all that is really good the buttons aren't too far apart going from these uh buttons right here down to like the kind of look around joystick is a bit of an awkward maneuver but most the games you're going to play you're going to be using this directional pad and these buttons and for that scenario it's really good or if you're an N64 plane like Mario Kart you're using this joystick in these buttons and overall it is comfortable now I will note you might be able to hear it this thing is a the fan and all that's a little loud now is it worth it I did kind of mention in the beginning of this video if you're somebody who has a Raspberry Pi you love the thing you love playing around with them you love getting different cases it's kind of a really niche market that people are going to be buying these but if you're in that niche market and this is something you're looking for for a hundred and fifty dollars it is a fairly decent buy now if you don't have a Raspberry Pi and you're looking for something like this ah with the current pricing of the Raspberry Pi they're about a hundred and sixty five dollars I think on Amazon Plus the 150 for that you're uh into the 300ish price range after shipping and sales tax and all that for like 90 dollars more than that and a Raspberry Pi you can get yourself a steam deck a 400 steam deck use it as a not only everything that we've talked about but it could play those PSP games fine it could play switch games fine some PlayStation 3 games PlayStation 2 like a freaking dream and and um do make sure you subscribe because I'm gonna have a couple videos on the steam deck coming out and it is going to be definitely worth checking out with all that anything I have mentioned in this video will be linked down below and with that I hope you have an absolutely beautiful day and good bye

Channel: TechHut

Views: 22,407

Keywords: linux, linux tutorial, piboy, raspberrypi, retropi

Id: n0sb8ApTU9Y

Length: 10min 26sec (626 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 10 2023