GBA CONSOLIZER plays Game Boy Games in STUNNING HD & ZERO LAG

hey guys metal Jesus here and today I am very excited to be back with a video review of something called a GBA console Iser and basically what it is is it takes the guts of a real Game Boy Advance and it has this own enclosure but it turns it into a real console with 720p digital video output now some of you who have been following this project may have already seen the previous version of this where they basically bolted on what was needed on to a real Game Boy Advance shell but now you can see they're taking it a step further and turning it into basically a little mini console but before we get into the actual review I do want to mention that this was sent to me for review by Jason over at game tech us now they're not paying me for this video and I'm not getting a commission off of the sales or anything like that so all of the opinions are my own and as you'll see there are some things I just absolutely love about this and there's a couple things that could use a little bit of work let's go ahead and walk around the device and talk about some of its features now the big one is of course gonna be the 720p digital video output it is absolutely glorious and I'm gonna show you a bunch of samples of that what it's doing is taking the RGB video from the gameboy advance and then upscaling that four times to 720p and in doing so there is no noticeable input lag it's phenomenal another thing that this does is 60 Hertz with vsync so there's absolutely no stutter or screen tearing continuing to walk around the console you'll see that there is a port here that is a microUSB port that's how it gets its power as well as a mini HDMI port there's still access to the audio output which is really nice if you want to use headphones but as you see later on depending on your television well you might be using it more than you expect looking at the front you can see that there is a cartridge slot and that fits both Game Boy Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance games and we're gonna check out all of those here in just a bit there is the GBA link cable port if you want to use that right below that of course is your Super Nintendo controller port now for most of this video I actually just used a real Super Nintendo controller but you can use also the wireless 8-bit doe controllers as well and then of course you need to be able to turn it on and that is the power switch right there which honestly is kind of cheap looking but I guess they ran out of room on the inside so they had to use that style kind of which they were able to use some sort of rocker or some sort of push one but whatever it's a power switch and on the bottom I want to mention that they have these rubber feet which is really nice because this thing is pretty light and could easily be knocked off your table while you're playing but these feet actually hold it in place really nicely now let's go ahead and take a look at some comparisons of the video quality on their site they have some screen captures comparing composite video which is that single yellow cable and they're pulling it from the gamecube gameboy player and then they have the same game running off of the GBA console Iser and as you can see it is just night and day difference and let's be honest I mean I think that's to be expected because composite is typically the lowest quality that most of us would probably ever want to use and upgrading to this is just night and day it looks absolutely fantastic for this video I wanted to do a comparison that might be a little bit closer to what some of you are already running and that is emulation so for this video I'm going to choose to compare the GBA console Iser to the retron 5 the first game I'm going to check out is metroid zero mission I love this game and I played it a bunch of times so it's a good test for me to compare it both on the GBA console Iser as well as a retron 5 and in this footage I'm gonna go back and forth and just notice down in the corner I'm gonna put a label there as to what you're looking at because as you're gonna see actually visually I think they're pretty close but and this is something that I didn't necessarily expect to discover and that is the lag and the stutter on the retron 5 suddenly became incredibly apparent to me now don't get me wrong I have been using the retron 5 for a couple years now and for what it does actually I think it's a pretty good value and for the most part I'm not one of those guys who is really sensitive to lag but when you go back and forth with a device like this when you play this game on the real GBA Hardware outputting to 720p through the console Iser and you go back and forth it's shocking I would never go back to planet on the retron 5 if given the chance it's night and day difference but how do they compare visually and we're gonna go back and forth here looking at the console Iser and then to the retron 5 and we're zoomed in on a couple different scenes here to try to compare the two and this is where I think it really comes down to maybe your preference because they are extremely close yes there is a slight difference maybe it's in the contrast or the brightness but for the most part actually I think that they both look pretty decent but really it's the complete lack of any input lag on the console Iser that really just blew me away it's it feels fantastic let's go ahead and check out another game this is castlevania circle of the moon now I chose this one because it has a demo mode and it plays exactly the same way so we can compare the two side-by-side and I think visually they are both pretty close I mean yes there are slight differences but you know they're not that far apart but again the GBA console Iser has zero input lag and just like Metroid before it that's hard to beat I mean it's an action game you're gonna want the most responsiveness that you can get out of it so playing it on it is just fantastic now let's go ahead and try something a little bit more challenging and that is Lego drone racers so this is a 3d racing game for the Game Boy Advance it's very unusual and as you see here when you put it into the retron 5 it won't run it at all and this is not the only game that is kind of unusual on the Gameboy Advance that the retron 5 doesn't run some of these 3d games just don't work at all but again on the GBA console Iser because it is actual hardware it runs just fine although it's a little bit weird looking a little bit washed out and I think that's just to be expected because again the game really pushes the hardware so probably now is a good time to talk about the features built into the console Iser so that you can get the most from your games you can bring up the menu at any time by pressing select and down on the controller and we're gonna go ahead and hop into a video options here smooth is probably fairly self-explanatory but basically what it does is it tries to smooth out the overall image this is very common on a lot of emulators and we're gonna check it out here so here is Spider Man and we're gonna toggle back and forth between smooth on or off and as you can see it's really just a preference thing personally I'm not crazy about it but some people you know probably like it and it's good to have the option zoom is another preference that you can mess around with if you wish now by default it's gonna be at 4 times and that is because that's the perfect resolution for that original RGB signal coming off of the GBA and then being up scaled to 720p but it does leave small borders and so you can push that to four and a half times if you wish just be aware that some games you might be cutting off a little bit at the top or bottom but as you can see here in Pokemon it doesn't really matter actually it feels a little bit more of the screen it's a nice option to have and then you can go up to 5x if you really want to push it shader is kind of interesting because with that you can try to emulate different display types so for instance you'll see GBA Nintendo DS the PSP things like that so you can very quickly choose a style or a look that maybe you prefer notice one of the shaders is called cw-1 if you select that and go back to the main menu then you can go into the color wizard and in here you can completely customize the exact colors of the game you can be very subtle with it or you can go completely crazy it's all up to you rounding out the video options you see gamma which is kind of like a fancy brightness setting so it's good to have that and then you see palette their palette are those color palettes that you would use when popping in an original Gameboy game so you can be very specific as to what you want that to look like and then of course you have scan lines a lot of people love having scan lines turned on for that kind of retro look I got to be honest for me I typically don't use it but I will say the scan lines on this are pretty cool because they are horizontal and vertical and they make it look a little bit more like the original Gameboy LCD display it might be kind of hard to tell on a compress to youtube video like this but trust me if you get one of these things turn it on and take a look at it because it does look really cool let's go back to the main menu and go into system and I want to point something out that is very important at least it was to me and it kind of bit me in the ass and that is see this option here which says DVI in you have another option here it says DVI plus what that means is do you want it to just send the video only the DVI video only down that HDMI cable to your television or do you want it to also include the original Gameboy audio down the HDMI cable sounds like it'd be simple right mmm not so much because the Gameboy audio is kind of funky and so if you try to send it down the HDMI cable your television may not recognize it and display nothing that's exactly what happened in my game room and also in my living room I actually had to turn this option off just to even capture the gameplay footage my Elgato Game Capture didn't work initially because it didn't understand what that audio was coming over the cable but your mileage may vary your television might support this mine didn't and that's why they have that audio jack on the outside of the console so again not a deal-breaker but it was kind of annoying to have to use the analog audio instead of actually just getting it all from the HDMI cable if they could change that in the future somehow that would be great that would be my preference so that's my review of the GBA console Iser now if you want to learn more about this you're gonna want to go to game - tech us I will put a link down in the video description below and then the way that this works is that they sell it as a kit so you go and you select what color of case you want and then also some of the additional things that you might need to put it together yourself and Jason the owner of the website has mentioned that perhaps in the future they will sell pre-made versions of this so you wouldn't have to know how to solder or put all this together you would just go and just buy a complete which would be pretty sweet because this is now currently the best way for me to play my original Game Boy Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance games on an HD TV it's fantastic I would love to know what you guys thought about this video please post a comment down below and here is crossing my fingers that the Neo Geo pocket color is coming next that would be so so cool alright guys thank you very much for watching thank you for subscribing and take care

Channel: MetalJesusRocks

Views: 909,124

Keywords: metal jesus rocks, metaljesusrocks, metal, jesus, console, system, review, gameplay, video, game, cartridge, reviews, retro, retrospective, gaming, collection, collector, game boy, gameboy, gameboy advance, gameboy color, game boy advance, game boy color, GBA Consolizer, Game-Tech.us, Woozle, FPGA, HDMI output, GBA with HDMI output, Nintendo

Id: FTS4Mh-YP7M

Length: 12min 19sec (739 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 12 2019