AYN Odin Emulation & Tips (GameCube/Wii/PS2)

[Music] hey everybody this is roster metro game core so the other day i did a review of the ayn oden and this video here is going to be a compliment to that one so if you haven't watched the review video i would encourage you to start there i'll leave a link in the video description now in this video we're going to cover some of the aspects i wasn't able to get to in the review mainly i'm going to show off additional footage when it comes to game performance so potentially if one of your favorite games wasn't shown in the review i might have it in this one and additionally i'm going to show off a couple behind the scenes things for example how i actually have my home screen set up and what i found to be just the most intuitive with the interface and additionally i'm going to show off a couple different configuration tips now i'm still working on a starter guide which will walk you through the entire setup process in the full configuration but there are a couple things that i think you should be aware of just here in the beginning and so we'll cover that stuff and talk a little bit about how to get the best gamecube and ps2 performance and then i'm gonna cram in as much gameplay footage as i can so without any further delay let's just jump right into it [Music] okay so this is how i have my actual home screen set up and surprisingly i end up using the android interface more than anything else i've moved all the apps over onto one page like this and then also organize the apps by different sub folders on the far left i have launch box because that's the main launcher i use for all my retro gaming and then on the far right i have the odin launcher in case i want to use that one as well on the bottom i have all my system apps for easy access and i also hid some of the other functions that i don't really want to see obviously on the left i have my standalone emulators as well as retroarch and depending on the systems i may have variations of the different emulators and i have a lot of things going on in my streaming folder i'll go through these one by one here in a minute and obviously the games folder is self-explanatory but i do have some android games in here that i've been testing out and then finally i have just a few different front ends i've been experimenting with trying to find that best solution for the device itself but in general i've been using launchbox the most and so i'm still working on the whole front end experience but i plan on doing a video on this once i've got a better grasp on everything honestly it's a pretty complicated subject now one thing i've been doing that's unique with this device in particular is that i've been using it for more multimedia than just games for example in my streaming folder i have a plex movie server which i showed off in the review but i've also added music to it too and i never really gave it a fair shake except for with this device but it is kind of cool to be able to stream music while you're playing games for example just jumping into apple music here and then when i start up an album it's going to continue to play in the background even when i'm playing a game and so what i did in retroarch is i set up a hotkey with select and left and right to increase and decrease the game volume this allows me to get a good balance between the game audio and then my own music and so this has been just a nice little feature that i've been enjoying for the past few days you know i can plug my headphones in listen to music and then also play games at the same time okay so let's take a quick look at each of these launchers and just spend a few minutes talking about these options i'm going to start with the reset collection now i'm using a pre-release beta version right now just because it has some increased features but in general this is what it's going to look like you can navigate through your games and it has some pretty nice and beautiful system art to go with it and you can also swap out your own images and kind of create your own themes within this one as well so there's a lot of customization available with reset collection now dig i showed off in the review as well it's very similar to reset collection but this one is not quite as updated the other thing is i'm not a big fan of the game navigation menu here it just kind of looks a little bit clunky and all the other different options don't look that much better either now the arc browser is one of the more expensive it's ten dollars and this one's pretty good too it has a couple different clean interfaces you can use but unfortunately i'm not a big fan of how you have to organize your systems for example it's all organized by a letter so i can scroll through and look at all the b's or the cs and things like that but it's just not a very intuitive process for me when navigating through a larger library but it does scrape all your box art and it has a pretty nice interface too so this one's definitely worth considering as well and finally we have the atv launcher which is one of my preferred launchers for a lot of different handhelds and that's because it allows you to have easy access to all of your apps in this kind of grid tile interface and this is actually very similar to the baked in odin launcher and i think the odin launcher is actually a little bit better than the atv one because in addition to having all these nice pretty tiles you also have quite a lot of different customization options in each of these different sidebars but for the most part i prefer to use the android interface just for that ease of access and the ability to make subfolders and then when i want to actually do retro gaming then i prefer to use launchbox now unfortunately launchbox doesn't have a lot of customization options but all the same how it works out of the box is pretty good this is one of the easiest ones to set up and you can set it up with 100 games for free but it does cost 25 after that for a lifetime license but as you can see here it's very easy to jump into your system and then your game and you can customize it to launch whatever app you want when you start that game now across the board when i'm using a launcher like this i definitely prefer to use retroarch and that's because of the robust hotkey system for example i have select and start setup to be able to quit retro work and that allows me to jump in and out of my games without having to do any sort of swiping and for me that's a pretty big deal i don't like having a bunch of fingerprints all over my device and so i prefer to use the control pad when navigating through my systems on top of that i've set up retroarch to have auto save states so i can jump in and out of my games at the exact moment that i close them and to me that's all super handy in fact some of those higher end systems that work better on standalone emulators i often try to get them to work on retro arc first and often it won't work out for example with cruise in usa this game kind of chugs on retroarch there are some moments when it does run at full speed especially if there are no other cars around but as soon as you get into some traffic it does start to bog down and so games like this or killer instinct gold they are going to be better served by using the standalone emulator and in launchbox you have the ability to change per game which emulator opens which game but when possible i do prefer to use retwork because one it's gonna have that auto save state and auto load and i can use hotkeys but on top of that systems like nintendo 64 also support retro achievements and i always find it really nice to have a little pop-up happen when i do something cool but yeah in a nutshell that is my front-end and just kind of overall menu navigation experience and i'm sure this will mature over time but as it stands right now i prefer to use launch box and then retroarch whenever possible but speaking of retroarch there is one bug that i need to talk about and that is the fact that the odin screen actually runs at 61 hertz instead of 60 hertz and what that means is by default many of your emulators are going to have these tiny little micro stutters in them when you're playing the game for example the footage i'm playing here is running at 120 frames per second and then i slowed it down to quarter speed so it's running at 30 frames per second right now but if you look in the background of super mario world you can see a little bit of stuttering that happens in those mountains far off in the distance and i'll leave this on a loop so that you can check it yourself now you may not notice this right here in the video and you may not even notice it at full speed but i've seen a lot of chatter from other people who have noticed it and they have said that it does create a less smooth experience and personally once i started looking for it i couldn't unsee it myself and i would say this only really affects a lot of the classic games when you play something like a gamecube game you're not going to notice the difference at all but with something like nintendo or super nintendo it becomes very apparent but luckily there's a way to fix it in retro arc which is where you're going to be playing your retro games anyway first thing you want to do is go to vsync vsynctester.com and it'll run a test here and it'll show you at the top what your actual display rate is mine is 61.004 so what we're going to do is go into retroarch here in the video settings and then go down and turn off threaded video from there go into the output section and then under vertical refresh rate input the figure that you got from the website 61.04 now retroarch has a built-in estimated screen refresh rate but i found that that isn't completely accurate so i would use the vsync tester website instead anyway once you have that set up all you have to do then is just go into configuration file save current configuration and from now on retroarch will run at the actual refresh rate of your screen and as you can see here super mario world is running nice and smooth and same goes for all my other retro games so i do recommend doing this when you first get the odin and you only have to do it once and once you've done it that one time you're good to go okay i'm not going to spend a lot of time on retro gaming just because the fact is that all these play really well once you adjust that screen refresh rate you don't really need to do anything other than just pick whichever retro core you want to use and then just run it from there and so i'll cover all these systems more in detail when i do a starter guide and i'll give you some configuration tips and hotkeys and things like that but for now let's move on to some other subjects number one let's talk a little bit more about game streaming and some of the other options you have available outside of what i showed in my review but first let me do one quick correction in my review video i said that the xbox game pass app had the a b and x y swapped and there was no way to fix it well it turns out the reason why they were swapped was because i was using the keymapper tool at the same time as you can see right here what i did is i mapped the xbox button here on the top left to one of the back buttons on the device itself but it turns out when you use the key mapping option it creates a bug where the a b and x y are going to be swapped no matter what and once i remove that key mapping option the a b and x y functioned as i wanted i have it set up as xbox style controls in my odin settings and now they actually function in that same way and so what that means is that both xbox remote play from a local xbox is going to work really great and secondly cloud streaming via xbox game packs works really well too in fact this is an excellent xbox streaming machine at this point and so i now wholeheartedly recommend using both the xbox and the game pass apps they work just fine just be sure to not use any of those key mapping options now playstation streaming is not quite perfect it works really well when it comes to ps4 gameplay but when you try to stream ps5 games it does have issues with the analog triggers which i talked about in my review now additionally we have moonlight for pc streaming i talked about this in the review as well as google stadia these both work fantastically but one i didn't touch on is geforce now and geforce now works a lot like google stadia in the fact that it gives you access to pcs out in the cloud that will then run your pc games the nice thing about geforce now is that it syncs up with your epic store as well as your steam library so if any of those games are supported by geforce now you can just log in and play all these for free you actually don't need to have a pc at all it's just going to access your games that being said there may be a weight in order to get to an available rig in order to play your actual game but i've never found myself waiting for more than a couple minutes and once you have it loaded up there's no issues at all and in fact this runs really smooth it's kind of incredible that this is playing via the cloud right now and so this is a really great streaming option for the odin especially if you don't have a pc to stream locally you can just access all this stuff via the cloud now if you do have a pc and you want to connect via your local wi-fi in addition to using moonlight you could also use something like steam link and steam link is exactly what you would think it would be it's going to connect to your computer locally and then it's going to take control of your pc and then you can just run all of your games through here and compared to setting up moonlight the setup for steam link is really really easy and it works fairly well although i will say that the moonlight streaming does seem to have better quality at least in my testing but all the same it's nice to have options and in case you don't want to use moonlight you always have steamlink too now say you wanted to do streaming of non-xbox or playstation or pc content you have a couple different options here as well one is called antstream now this is an app that's on the android play store and basically this service is going to allow you to stream a bunch of retro games via their servers the library is pretty limited i'm assuming this has to do with the licenses that they have but the thing is the streaming quality is not as great as i would like it to be unlike a lot of the other apps that i've been showing off this one had some discernible input lag that being said i don't really enjoy super star wars anyway this game is so freaking hard but the streaming experience left a lot to be desired now a few weeks ago i showed off this new project called web arcade and this allows you to access your own game library via the cloud and so i'll leave a link to my web arcade video in the video description if you want to set it up but it's as easy as making up your own game feed accessing it via google chrome and then creating a web app that you can then access and so just like that i have access to my entire web arcade library as well as all of my games via the cloud now this is not a streaming service this will actually load the entire game in your browser as you're playing it so there is no sort of streaming lag or anything else like that and so the gameplay experience between this and ants stream is night and day but to be fair we are talking about a retro handheld emulation machine so you're probably better served just actually running these via retroarch instead okay now let's talk about native android games in my last video i talked about how i didn't have a very good experience when it came to the look controls using the key mapper well it turns out i was doing something that was fundamentally wrong when i go into the key adapter settings and then i tap on the right analog stick circle here it shows a bunch of different modes the thing that somehow i just wasn't really processing in my mind was the fact that when you click on each of these modes it actually changes it to that mode what i thought was happening is that when i was going through and changing it it was just adjusting the settings but i wasn't really sure which one was being assigned but what i realized is that when you tap on it it actually does set that mode so if you set it to the adjust view mode and then you turn down the sensitivity to something like 25 it actually works really well with touch screen based games like call of duty mobile and it was just kind of a dumb move on my part but i just didn't realize that that was actually setting the mode i thought it was just going into the settings of the mode and so yeah at this point i do think the key mapping software is pretty great now i only have one complaint and it's a very specific one to me only but i use inverted controls on the y-axis when i'm playing first-person shooter games but unfortunately with this touch setup there is no way to invert those controls and so unfortunately despite the fact that i mapped every single button and everything is working exactly like it would with a console version of this game i actually don't really enjoy it because the inverted controls don't work but if you just use normal controls like everybody else you should be just fine okay now let's talk about genchin impact because quite a few people ask me about this probably the most important thing is to get the graphic settings dialed in correctly for me i set everything to low and then turned it on to 60 frames per second i also set the device itself to high performance mode now one thing i haven't mentioned yet is there is the ability to have a floating frames per second monitor on your screen and i found it isn't the most responsive there seems to be a little bit of a delay when it comes to showing your actual frame rate but it does give you a good idea of what your performance is at any given time and so yeah i've set this up with key mapping just like i did with call of duty mobile and it runs just fine as you can see here it doesn't quite hit 60 frames per second constantly but with these lower end settings the average seems to be around 50 frames per second which for me i think looks pretty good even when jumping into combat it still does seem to stay around 50 frames per second you're going to get dips here and there but it's never going to get anywhere close to 30 which is when you would actually start to feel some slowdown so if anything the game feels super smooth and there will be some moments where it doesn't feel quite as super smooth and that's about it this is a great game for this console in general this device really does excel when it comes to android gaming especially for those games that don't support controllers natively but would work really well with controller support of course the games that do support native controls are going to work a lot better for example i highly recommend trying out the android versions of sonic 1 2 and sonic cd because they run nice and smooth and they have a beautiful wide screen to them and of course games like dead cells work really well even when you turn it up to the high resolution setting okay for the rest of the video i'm going to show off gamecube wii and ps2 settings and some gameplay footage as well we're going to start with dolphin which is going to encompass both gamecube and wii the configuration process is the exact same between these two systems other than the controls so a couple things here i recommend using the dolphin mmjr emulator and i recommend playing everything with an opengl back end and a 2x native resolution now if you have a game that has slowdown what i recommend is find a spot in the game where nothing's going on and then swipe down to get the quick configuration menu and there's a couple things in here you can toggle to see if it'll improve gameplay the first one is going to be this one here it says immediately present xfb sometimes with some games this alone is going to fix the slow gameplay so toggle this one off and on additionally the same can be said with the sync on skip idle that can either make the game work much better or much worse same thing with these two skip efb options here near the top i recommend toggling each of these one at a time and seeing if it'll improve the performance and finally if none of those work or if they don't work all the way then the next thing to do is to maybe consider changing the emulated cpu clock speed for example with donkey kong country this one works best at a 75 clock speed what you'll find is that some games work better with a faster clock speed for example f zero gx works best at 300 percent while many others are going to work best with a slower clock speed and so yeah if you want to get donkey kong country on the wii to be playable my recommendation is to do 75 clock speed and then just kind of keep it at that and for each of these games i'm going to leave a label at the top which is going to show specifically what i did outside of the default settings in order to get the gameplay that you're seeing on the screen now once you have your settings dialed in then the next thing you want to do is go into the game and actually save a per game configuration what you do is long press on the game itself go into game settings and then within here you make your adjustments now each of those quick menu settings are going to be scattered throughout the app so you'll have to figure out where each of them are for example the cpu clock speed is within the general settings even though you might think it's under hacks or advanced and so make the change here for that specific game then press the save button and now it's going to keep those settings specific to that game and not mess up your other games at the same time another nice feature is if you use save states you can long press and then select quick load and it's going to load your most recent save state too and this is really handy to quickly jump into your game okay one other configuration i recommend doing on a per game basis is going to be your inputs for example i hate the camera controls on wind waker for the gamecube they're actually opposite of what i would expect so what you can do is go into the input settings here and then under the seastic controls i can swap them out for this game only so up is going to be down left is going to be right and so on and once you've made those adjustments you can press the save button and now when you open up wind waker the inputs are going to be swapped and now they work exactly like they do on the wii u version and a lot of other modern platformers and so that's just a really handy thing for this era in particular because they often didn't have the ability to invert your x or y axis in the options menu and so i recommend doing this for things like super mario sunshine too so right now on the fly i'm going to configure one gamecube game that i haven't tried before this one is billy hatcher and as you can see there's quite a bit of slowdown with the default settings so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to go into the quick configuration menu and then i'm going to toggle that sync on skip idle option and then i'm going to jump right back into the game and just like that it's running at full speed now now not every game is going to work perfectly like this like i've mentioned before only about 75 percent of gamecube games seem to run at full speed but either way this is how easy it is to fix some games but by default many of them aren't going to need any tweaks at all and so now that i figured that out i'm going to go into the game settings menu here and then under the general settings there is this sync on skip idle i'm going to make sure that is toggled off and then i'm just going to save the game and just like that we now have billy hatcher working every time i start it up okay i've got quite a bit of gamecube footage to show now and so what i'm going to do is let most of these games just play out and like i mentioned i'll leave the label up top which will show any of the configuration changes that i did in order to get it at full speed and fair warning some of these games are not going to be at full speed for example nba street vol 3 i could never get this one to work despite any hack that i tried so i'm just going to quit talking here for a minute and i'm gonna let the games speak for themselves and i'll see you back in a minute when we get to the ps2 section we have no time for this follow me i know a safe place where we can race relax that was gross foreign mario mario [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] uh [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh [Music] oh look at that ball spin okay for ps2 we're going to use the ether sx 2 app and setting this up is very similar to dolphin you're going to want to open up a game and then go into the settings and then adjust things to see which works best the number one thing you want to change is going to be under the system section and it's going to be your ee cycle rate as well as your cycle skip by default they should be at 100 and normal but if you are experiencing some slowdown with the game i would recommend going in and doing some mild underclocking and then increasing it one step at a time to see if you can find the right balance now underclocking is a little bit weird it's going to make some games run faster while others playing smoother and even more strangely it'll make some elements of a game run faster than others and so i recommend fiddling around with this to find something that gives you a good balance now if none of that works your next step is going to be to change your native upscaling i recommend using a 2x native scaling for most games in terms of performance the difference between 1x and 2x isn't that much but the graphic fidelity is a big difference so i recommend keeping it at 2x and then adjusting the underclock instead now if you make all those adjustments and it still doesn't feel fast enough to you the next thing is to toggle off the frame rate limiter what this basically does is it tells the system that if it can run at a faster speed than just to run it and sometimes this last ditch effort will fix some things the problem is it may speed up some parts of the game while keeping others still slow and so you end up with a yo-yo effect when it comes to slow moments and fast moments and that can be a little bit of a jarring experience and unfortunately some games just don't work honestly only about half of ps2 games seem to run at full speed anyway and so some games like madden 2005 seem to be a lost cause and unfortunately same thing with nba live 2005. say we go in here and we maximize the underclock altogether you do get a little bit faster of a speed but not a lot and surprisingly the commentary starts to speed up a bunch despite the gameplay being very slow and that makes it a really weird experience and so say we go and turn off the frame limiter and then also set it to a 1x native resolution even then it's still not running at full speed it's just kind of a weird experience so i would say this game is unfortunately unplayable and that performance is really going to be dependent on that specific game that you're trying now much like with dolphin you can also do per game settings changes when all you have to do here is long press on the game go into game properties and then set whatever individual configuration you want for each game and for many games you don't have to do anything at all for example silent hill 2 runs it 100 full speed with the default settings while others like shadow hearts does require just a mild underclock in order to get it to run at full speed with just relatively minor hiccups and so just like with gamecube here i'm going to let these games play out and i'm going to show a label up here on top of all the things that i had to do in order to get them to run at the speed you see here and some of these games are not going to be super playable but i do want to give you an indication of what to expect when you start to play ps2 games on this device so let's get on to the gameplay part oh [Music] [Music] okay [Applause] no 86 oh [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] okay and then wrapping up here i'm gonna show off a little bit of 3ds gameplay here as well there's a couple unique things going on here for example you can use the gyroscope controls with some 3ds games like mario tennis and in general i prefer to use a 2x resolution when playing these games they just look a lot better and it's going to be hit or miss which games work the best i would say don't have high expectations but maybe about half of games are going to be relatively playable and unlike with the dolphin or the ps2 emulators there's not a lot of setting tweaks you can do to improve performance so a lot of this is going to be luck of the draw anyway that's about it for this video i just wanted to show off a little bit extra gameplay that i wasn't able to get to in my review and show you a few things that i did to help me get here in the first place like i mentioned before i'll have a starter guide coming out here in the future and as soon as i'm done with this video i'm going to start working on video out capabilities and the dock for the odin 2 to see how it is as a dockable solution as well so let me know if you have any questions in the comments below and as always thanks for watching be sure to like and subscribe if you found this helpful and we will see you next time happy gaming

Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 197,327

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Id: PliCqMdmUbM

Length: 30min 57sec (1857 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 08 2022