Chinese Emulation Handhelds are Weird

as a guy who poses as a gamer on YouTube I've come to gather my fair share of trinkets designed to play video games and honestly the fascination with these things doesn't pass me one bit gaming handhelds are really cool and for a lot of people they're the best way to feed a few games here and there into a busy schedule anywhere you go but there's a hard pill to swallow here especially if you want to relive some of the best Classics on older platforms and that is the cost of maintaining a collection of hardware and software for every single platform you might want to buy play on as a society we've collectively decided that we can't have nice things anymore and even something like a Game Boy Advance which holds a special place in my heart can easily go for double what they were worth 20 years ago new short of getting an old Nintendo switch or Ps vaita and sopt modding it both of which are completely valid it just didn't seem like there are a lot of options for this kind of thing at least it didn't until I became aware of the capabilities of these weird Chinese knockoff emulation handhelds and a huge Thanks goes out to Crazy Ken at the computer clan for helping me to get my hands on this thing he did an in-depth look at these handhelds which were being resold by a pretty shady outfit and discussed both the merits and problems with these devices so if you haven't seen that yet please go ahead and check it out I had a lot of fun learning about this thing with them and the rest of the team as well the model I have here is called the pow Kitty RGB 20s which you can find resold at a horrifying markup by a select few companies that adverti primarily on Tik Tok no figure but typically it can be had for around 60 bucks believe it or not I spent more than that on my PSP from 2004 and that puts it at the lower end of the market for these kinds of emulation devices and the idea here is you get a nice little game boyes handheld with that's a lot of ROMs yeah I guess what you could call the the value ad in these is the inclusion of several thousands of pirated retro games scraped off various weird Chinese ROM sites just about enough to fill up 120 GB SD card in the case of the higher-end model all of this running on a modified version of Ubuntu chalk full of different emulators many of which don't work well in this Hardware at all but I don't want to make the case that you should brush these things off entirely because aside from the sketchy ROMs it's actually not a bad piece of Hardware in principle the 640x 480 IPS display actually looks really nice and it can get super bright the button layout is basically just ripped from a pair of joy-cons albeit not in the most ergonomic way uh but you've still got a gig of RAM a quad core Rock Chip RK 3326 arm processor which is a little dated but it gets the job done it feels a little lightweight but not necessarily in the cheap sense it's pleasing to hold like a bar of soap and the digital rear triggers while a little rattly are still perfectly adequate for most use cases the inclusion of dual SD card readers one for the operating system and one for all the pre-loaded ROMs is definitely unconventional but from a hardware hacking standpoint very much appreciated if you value your data though you'll probably want to Chuck these cards immediately and get some from a rapital vendor instead and while I don't have any proof for this it does seem like game the reseller of this unit actually replaced the OS card with a more reliable kokia card rather than the operand Chinese one that I believe would have originally shipped with this unit uh it's also got two USB type-c ports one for charging and one for usbg for connecting USB devices like flash drives or network interfaces as well as a 32 mm headphone jack thank you it's also worth mentioning that the power button here on the left side of the console is pretty smart it seems like they built a proper suspend and resume feature like you'd see on a switch or something so you can just put the console to sleep when you're playing a game and resume it whenever you'd like as far as the software goes pal Kitty has badged this as a quote op Source console and while Aros the embedded Linux drro this thing ships with is indeed open source they didn't actually have anything to do with the creation of it other than adding their own boot screen and of course throwing in a bunch of stolen ROMs the system boots into emulation station with the NES box theme applied by default but others are available right out out of the box and what's more is it also includes a menu entry for retro Arch where a lot of the emulators are actually hosted as lib retro cores which is definitely a welcome addition compared to installing custom firmware on a 3DS or something this is basically zero effort and if you feel the need to you can wipe the included game card and start putting your own wholesomely obtained software on the handheld instead some of the metadata for the games loaded on here is weird anyway so that's definitely a realistic thing to consider it also comes loaded with a huge amount of emulators for all of these systems provided indiscriminately whether or not they actually work well on the hardware some picks like the Game Boy emulators actually run really well as far as I can tell and this is the perfect kind of device for it with the backlit screen I think I probably prefer this over the original console but as you start to get into the later 3D home consoles like the N64 Dreamcast for example some things really can start to fall apart in terms of performance and or stability I'm not quite sure why these were included in the first place unless they weren't tested before getting thrown onto an SD card and in all honesty I'm about 99.9% sure that's exactly what happened and I have to wonder if some of these compatibility hiccups might just come from the use of outdated emulators but to be fair the hardware is quite limited on its own and I can't imagine there's a great amount of optimization going on either I was happy to see that you could get some PSP games running pretty all right but not as well as an actual PSP and that's a theme that holds true for most of the newer consoles you might try to run using the stock from firware while I don't particularly mind the way it's set up out of the box you can and honestly probably should replace the operating system with a clean installation of Aros which ended up being really easy in my experience but I did find it odd that I had to use an image for a completely different emulation handheld called the am bernick RG 351 MP which is also based on the Rock Chip and while this did clean up some of the weird software stuff and got my emulators quite a bit more up to date this didn't really bring any extra function it to the system so the need for doing this is a little debatable it makes me feel better though the question that I had in my mind when I set out to test this device was to figure out if I could actually see it replacing something like my PlayStation vaita for playing retro games on the go and after putting a lot of thought into it it's definitely a mixed bag I feel like the biggest problems with the pow Kitty unit are just the lack of a few essential features like for example there's absolutely no Wi-fi connectivity which makes scraping metadata for your games a really big headache since you have to hook up an inconvenient wireless adapter and leave it sticking out the bottom of the console I also feel like the software options are a bit limited and that's reasonable for a low-end device like this all it really needs to do is run emulators but there's still going to be some difficulty in the sense that you're probably going to be stuck with the capabilities that ship with Aros since adding anything else is going to be a pain for example out of the box you just can't do things like load up a web browser to download files which would be a trivial task on a lot of other systems and while the emulation capabilities between these two systems are probably pretty similar the PS Vita does have one notable advantage in that it can actually play PS VA games and naturally PSP games really really well I feel like the RGB 20s is really good in theory but the implementation leaves a bit to be desired the buttons are all right on their own but against the tactile and perfectly laid out controls of the vaita the lack of refinement in the lowr system really starts to become apparent not to mention they put the freaking reset button which immediately reboots the console right next to the sleep button and as far as the Jank goes I feel that the ROMs are definitely a point of contention as well a lot of you probably don't care and that's your right but it still puts a bad taste in my mouth only because I fear that it actually gives copyright holders that much stronger of an argument against anyone having immunity in dumping games from older consoles for preservation what they're doing by loading a bunch of games on an SD card and using it to sell their system is the complete antithesis of game preservation and open Hardware so from that perspective I'm definitely mixed on this particular handheld I feel like it almost be better if they just simply not giv you the SD cards and Slash the price that much more but given the state of Chinese intellectual property law evidenced by the fact that literally every other emulation handheld like this on the market is doing the exact same thing with pre-loaded ROMs and it's still really easy to buy them well I don't think it'll change anytime soon so just wipe the cards and you're pretty much good to go for the Reg $60 price if you budget for a couple of extra SD cards just to keep your data safe and you want to go through the trouble of flashing your own firmware on it and building your own library of games that you actually want to play well I mean this thing is still really cool and it's affordable enough to where you don't feel like you have to baby it around like an old retro console on the flip side something like a Vita with Homebrew is really capable and generally a much Saker package and if you like VA games well I think the choice was pretty much already made before you started watching the video but I just really really like the RGB 20s there's just something about the weird combination of cheap yet capable that makes it really indescribably fun to use so I guess that's a quick look at these weird emulation handhelds and why you may or may not want to consider one of these for yourself I really like mine and hopefully I can mess around with more of them to try and find some really cool stuff and see if I can find a better one but with all that said I'm basically done here so I hope you enjoyed the video thank you very much for watching and as always have a good one H that was easy

Channel: Lowest Logan

Views: 1,127

Keywords: gaming, game console, emulation, mupen64plus, ultrahle, emulation history, video game history, video essay, nesticle, nintendo wii, nintendo switch, nintendo gamecube, nintendo wii u, nintendo 3ds, sony playstation, microsoft xbox, nintendo emulation, nintendo homebrew, wii emulation, gamecube emulation, dolphin emulator, cemu emulator, wii sports, super smash brothers, 6th generation, 2023, 2011, homebrew, console modding

Id: 5nbU_CHKu4M

Length: 9min 52sec (592 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 14 2024