Hey Guys, Taki here. There are a
ton of companies sailing the seas on pirate boats packed with hard drives,
but this is the smallest and cheapest one that I’ve seen. Since I’ve never looked
at a product like this on the channel, I want to see how they work with gaming handhelds
and whether or not they are worth considering. So this thing is the HyperBase Mini,
and it’s advertised as having 43K games, which I’m sure are all 100% legit licensed games.
There isn’t a lot of information about which games they’ve included, but they state that this is
plug-and-play and that it runs on Batocera 35. They also have some cloud downloading
service, but I have no interest in testing it. This USB drive retails for $40 on Amazon. A
normal 128GB USB drive goes for around $10, so we can value the games and the Batocera
configuration that they did at $30. The packing for this looks nondescript. The
only thing that this has is the branding on the drive itself. If you saw this, you’d
just think it was a normal USB drive. Now that we have the drive out of the package, we need something that can run this. I’m
going to use several devices for this video, but I’m going to start with a PC since that’s
how this thing was marketed. I’m going to use the SER 7 for this for no other reason besides
the fact that I already had it on the bench. I don’t know the systems that are included on
this USB drive, so I don’t want to use a PC that might cause a bottleneck. Realistically,
this mini PC should have more than enough power to be able to do whatever this drive
has. If it can’t, I’ll get a better PC. With everything hooked up, it’s time to insert the
drive into the computer and head into the BIOS. In here, we need to go to the boot override menu,
and I’m going to select the SMI USB Disk option. Once we do that, we are into Batocera. I’ve already gone ahead and mapped a controller
for this with the help of a keyboard. I did have one problem getting to this point
off-camera. As I mentioned before, this came with Batocera 35. I am not on Batocera 37, which is the
current version. 35 would not boot on the SER 7, so I ended up using a Ryzen 5000 series Mini PC
just to check if this could successfully boot. Updating to 37 was a bit more annoying.
Essentially, all you’d need to do is come over here to updates & downloads and start the
update when you have this connected to Wi-Fi. The problem is that there was not enough free
available storage to complete the update, so I ended up deleting a PS3 game to move
forward. Transfer speeds are atrocious for Batocera where I live, so I ended up routing
the traffic through a VPN to finish the process. That state that this should come with
Batocera 37 going forward, but I still wanted to mention what I had to do, especially
with needing to make more space on the drive. The next thing that I did was come over
here to the user interface settings to customize the theme. By default, this is
going to be set to the Carbon theme. This is a decent theme because it has logos and
graphics for each system that is installed, and it shows you how many
games you have in each system. I made a minor tweak to how the
games are displayed using this theme, and I think it looks nice with the
boxart that was preinstalled. We can also cycle through these systems
easily with the trigger buttons. The theme that I want to use is almost perfect,
but it doesn’t have artwork for all of the systems that are installed in this image. For
example, here’s a system that does not have a title or artwork. You have to go into the
section to see what the name of the system is. Not ideal, but the theme does have
the majority of what this came with. I also modified the UI a bit to make this
better for a bigger screen. I have the boxart on the right side with the metadata overlaid
on the bottom. The games list takes up the left side of the screen, and it’s easy
enough to read the titles from the list. In terms of what you get with this drive,
the whole system was put together pretty well. They have a ton of ROMs in this
and almost all of them are scraped with artwork. For some reason, Super
Nintendo wasn’t scraped and it also has what looks like the entire romset.
We can fix this with the scraping menu, but something like this should probably be done
by the company that makes this drive before it gets to you since you are paying most of the
unit price for the convenience of everything. I don’t to spend a lot of time talking about
the specific ROMs that are included in this since there are so many. Generally, you
are going to have full libraries for a lot of the systems that they included. Some
of the systems only have a single game and I already said that I removed a PS3 game to have
enough available storage to download the update. That wasn’t the only system with
a single game and I almost feel like these could have been avoided to
have more space for other systems. I feel like this was done to pad out the
system view more than anything else. When it comes to systems that are fully included
on this drive, it’s awesome. If we take Game Boy for example, you can see how nice this collection
looks out of the box. If you want to find something quick like Pokemon, just use the search
feature and you can get to the game you want. If we launch Pokemon Red, you’ll see that
this system has bezels applied to the screen in the style of a DMG. The center image is the
original aspect ratio of Game Boy. This makes the UI a decent option if you are going to be
connecting this to a TV in a living room setting. Some of the systems will also have
some shaders applied by default, and there’s a lot of room for customization. For these Game Boy games, I tend to like
going with a different colorization option, but that’s easy to fix. All we need to
do is exit out of the game and go into the advanced system options menu. Here, I’m
going to change the colorization to Super Game Boy. When we reboot the game, you’ll
see it is using a different color palette. The cool thing about this is we can even use it
with the Steam Deck. If you want to do this on the fly, all you need to do is hold down volume
up while you press the power button. In here, you’ll be able to select the USB drive
from the boot list and then you’ll be able to use the drive. If you don’t want
to go through this hassle in the future, you can make a separate change that
will do this for you automatically. In order to do this, hold volume down while
pressing the power button. In the new menu, go to the setup utility and then head down
to boot. Under the add boot options menu, you need to change that to first
from the default setting of auto. After that’s done, select the exit
saving changes option and the Deck will now boot into a USB drive as the
default option if one is inserted. After a reboot, we are back in Batocera
again and we’ve got the same system that we were just using ready to go.
I have already gone ahead and mapped the controls just like I did with my wired
controller. Everything else is good to go. From a fresh boot, we can jump into
a new game in just a few seconds, so this entire thing is super convenient. I am noticing in this N64 game that
our render resolution is pretty low, and this was probably done as a default
option since they don’t know the kinds of hardware that this drive will run on.
If you have something that’s a bit more powerful from like the last I don’t know, 5-10
years or so, you are going to be better served coming into the options and customizing the
settings to improve the picture quality. We can do this just like we did with
changing the Game Boy color palette. For N64, we have the option of turning on widescreen hacks, but I’m going to keep this with the native aspect
ratio for now. To improve the render resolution, I’m going to change the RDP plugin to
Parallel RDP, and then I’m going to change the upscaler to 4x native, which should
make the game look much better on this screen. Then, all we need to do is launch the
game again and we should notice a big improvement. The game still runs just as
well as it did before with no issues. Not every N64 game is going to support
widescreen hacks in the same way, but there are a bunch that look good in 16:9
or 16:10, so this is another customization option you can do with this base image if
you have a better PC to use with this drive. One thing that I’ll point out about the
systems that don’t have full romsets is the included games are not great. For
example, PS1 has 130 games included, but you are missing a ton of the most
popular titles for this platform. I was kind of surprised that you could have a
collection this big with so many D-Tier titles. This is a limitation of having such a
small drive that cannot hold a bigger library for a CD-based system. You are
relying on the company to include a good selection of titles. At least based on
this collection of 130 games, this aint it. Because this worked so well with the
Steam Deck, I wanted to see if it would work with other handhelds that have newer
processors. I’m going to try this beast first, and I’m assuming that it should work since
the SER 7 also worked. We need the follow the same step of going into the override
options to select the SMI USB Disk option. Unfortunately, this screen is a portrait
panel that is rotated, and it doesn’t work out of the box with Batocera. This is how the
Steam Deck looked when it was on Batocera 35. If you are lucky, the rotation option in the
menu will just work on it’s own, but it did not in this case. This can still be fixed with
some tinkering, but it’s not novice-friendly. Without making those changes, the UI is
borked, but the games display as they should. As I mentioned, this system is set based on
the assumption that it will be used with a 16:9 screen, so you might have to make some
small changes if you are using a different aspect ratio screen like I am. But yeah, happy
to see that it also works on this new hardware. The final device that I tried
with this is also a new one. I had the same screen rotation issue as I
pointed out before, but this one worked after changing the menu option without
any need to mess with anything else. A lot of the configurations in this
system are meant for a 16:9 screen, so they also look perfect on this display
without needing to mess with anything else. Anyway, I ended up spending a lot
more time with this USB drive than I thought I was going to when I decided to
do this video. I feel like I have a better idea of its strengths and weaknesses
after trying it on so many devices, so I’m going to wrap up this video with my pros
and cons, as well as my overall recommendation. The first pro that I see is that this
is convenient. Out of the $30 that you are paying on top of the base USB drive, I
think you are getting more than $30 worth of value when it comes down to all of the
stuff that they added and included here, and that’s more than just slapping games
on it. Even just getting this amount of boxart would be super annoying to do if you
live in a country that doesn’t have a fast connection to the scraping servers that this uses.
Especially if you did not have a paid account. This also goes hand in hand with
my second pro which is that this is very easy to use. Once the thing starts up, you can get into any game that’s here as long
as you map your controller. If you never want to tinker with something, you don’t need to
because everything was already done for you. Even in cases where you do want to
change some settings or add more games to the drive, that is also very easy to do. The final pro is that this works on a ton of
hardware. In this video, I tested a Mini PC, a Steam Deck, and two current-gen Ryzen handhelds
and all of them worked. Off camera, I tried two additional PCs with one being an Intel system and
the other being an older AMD PC. They all worked, and this USB drive should work on way more systems
than the minimum requirements on the Amazon page would lead you to believe. You might not emulating
PS3 on something that is super old, but 90% of this drive is dedicated to retro systems, and
they should all run on older hardware just fine. When it comes to cons, I also found
a few while making this video. The first is that this used an outdated build of
Batocera. The version came from last year, and that means that it did not support
newer hardware that I wanted to use. It is easy enough to update the system
on your own, but the company did not leave enough available storage space on the
drive to even be able to update the system. The second con for me ties into that point and
it’s that there is a ton of system padding going on here, where you essentially have a single game
for a ton of systems that are on here for the sole purpose of just making it seem like there are
more emulators than there really are. In a lot of those cases, you would have been far better
off not having that single game to have more storage space for doing updates or expanding
the systems that are on the smaller side. And that point also ties into the next one which
is that some of the systems that are included here don’t have a great selection of titles, even
though they take up a decent portion of the 128GB that this drive has. PS1 was the biggest system
that I saw from my tests. If the drive was bigger, this probably would be masked a bit better because
you could include way more PS1 titles, but we are limited by 128GB on this drive, and I assume
a lot of the good titles were arbitrarily cut. I’m not going to add this as a con,
but I would be a hypocrite if I did not at least mention that this entire
thing is super illegal. Even if all of the games included here were
legit (which they are not), it’s against Batocera’s license to sell products
like this, so I just wanted to mention that. As for my recommendations, that’s tough because
this is not a product that appeals to someone like me. I have the ability to make a USB drive
like this on my own, and I also have all of the resources that I would need to populate
it with the games that I want to play. However, I do see value in something like this,
because it would take a decent amount of time to bring a USB drive from stock to the state that
this one is in if I was completely new to how these things worked. For this product, you are
paying for the convenience more than you are paying for however many thousands of games they
threw in here. At $40, it’s not a terrible value. If you enjoyed this video and you want
to see another take a look at my video on two of the devices that were featured
in this. Happy gaming everyone, Taki out.
