- I wasn't gonna make a video on this. There's just so many emulation
handhelds out right now. How many times have you
seen a horizontal layout? This thing just seemed unremarkable. It's got the biggest four-by-three
screen that I've seen so it's got that going for it. Then somebody on my Twitch
tried to convince me otherwise. "When are you gonna get a 405m, Bob?" I have one, actually. Convince me to make a video on it. Why should I make a video on this? Because it's better?
That's not very convincing. The same as a Retroid Pocket 3+? Really? That's kind of sick. Then
I can name the video, "Get This Instead of a Retroid." (snaps fingers)
Look at you. Look at you. You came in here and I was like, "You gotta convince me,"
and then you convinced me and now we're on the same page. I'm not very happy with Retroid right now. The Retroid Pocket 3 was a dud, The 3+ should have just been the 3, and the flip had a bad hinge,
it was an overall bad design. And now, they're remaking
the 2 for some reason. But regardless of my gripes with them, Retroids are among some of the cheapest and easiest emulation
devices to get going. Their launcher is one of the best and it makes things easy
for an emulation novice. It's Android, which most
people are familiar with and it just downloads
all the stuff you need and everything is more or less just there with minimal setup. But I would love to start recommending another device to people, and this is pretty much the same specs as a Retroid. The same CPU, the same GPU, the same ram. Hell, even the same
amount of internal memory. And it comes with Android already set up with all the emulators you need, but for some reason, it feels like it gets a
little bit better performance and there's a new custom
firmware we can try to make things even better? This might just be the new recommendation. (light, cheerful music) (music fades) Ooh, Waifus. They sent me Waifus. Ooh. This video is sponsored by REDMAGIC and their REDMAGIC 8S Pro. Whoa! That's a cool-looking phone. Powerful enough to play games in Dolphin with its industry-leading
Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor and up to 16 gigabytes of LP DDR 5X ram. A gigantic 6,000-milliamp-hour battery gets you actual days of usage according to some independent tests that I just found on Google right now. It even fits the backbone controller. With this guy, you don't need all those
gaming devices in your bag. You just need this. It even has touch-sensitive
shoulder buttons that you can map to anything. - Wow! What type of phone is that? - The REDMAGIC 8S Pro. - The who, what-now, 8S, huh? - It's an Android phone. - Android? How am I supposed to
send you my Wordles now? - The same way you always do? (device whooshes)
- (gasps) They're green! (man in red screams) (door opens and closes)
- Is that all I am to you? Just a colored word bubble?
- Yes. - The REDMAGIC 8S Pro is
the best Android device, probably the best phone you
can get for gaming right now and you can check it out right now at the link in the description below. I got the RG405M from
keepretro.com who sent it to me and it came with Android already set up and all of the mostly-optimized
emulators on there already. The only thing I had to
do was point each emulator to what folder it needed
to read games from. Like this. And that's it. You're ready to game. (muffled game music) Wow. This is pretty good And I've gotta say, I don't love the bare-bones Android OS. It's very ugly aside
from the... The Waifu. But I was very impressed with the stock-emulation experience. It took me seconds to start
getting into some games and F-Zero on N64 ran smooth as butter which is an anomaly for an N64 game, let alone a 60-frames-per-second one. And even Smash Brothers
on GameCube ran fantastic. I don't remember it ever running this good on the Retroid Pocket 3+, and this is straight out of the box. It did come with Aether, the PS2 emulator, so I tried to push it a little more and we definitely found its limit. I wouldn't consider this
usable for PS2 games. Okay. I love that The Retroid's 16-by-9, but a four-by-three screen
is not a deal breaker. 16-by-9 is really only gonna be usable for like PSP games on here. Most of what we're gonna be
playing will be just fine if not even better at four-by-three. This even includes GameCube games. There's not many that I
would wanna play widescreen. I'm already willing to recommend this because of that stock experience but I'm a little hesitant to recommend it to emulation noobs because
of that stock experience. That Android is just very ugly aside from the waifu but they gotta know what emulators to open to play whatever systems
that they wanna play. They also gotta point each
emulator to each ROM folder. See, the Retroid does
require a little setup which could be intimidating
for a new user, but at least they sort
of walk you through it. And when you're done, you've got your GameBoy,
N64, GameCube Games all laid out in nice,
easy-to-navigate folders. The RG405M expects you to know that if you want to play GameCube games, you gotta open up Dolphin MMJR. If you wanna play 3DS games,
you gotta open up Citra. If you want to play N64
games, you gotta open up Mupen and so on and so forth, but at least the RG405M comes with ROMs. That's a big plus. That's a hurdle that you're
gonna have to go over if you're gonna get a Retroid. You can very easily just take this device and slap a front end on here which is one of the best
things about Android. You can take Dig, you could take Lemuroid you could take Daijisho
which is what I have here, and just slap it on here and make the whole
thing look a lot better. Well, we're gonna take it one step further because there's already a whole firmware that was created by the
community called Gamma OS, and that comes with a
frontend already on it. It comes with Daijisho, which
is what I have right here. It's also gonna give
you optimized emulators and it's gonna give you
some performance tweaks and stuff like that, which is usually what these custom firmwares do. You'll see. I'm not sure you need it. I opted for the light
version of Gamma OS this time which does not come with any
of the Google Play services. Normally, I would love access
to the Google Play Store so I can download the
emulators I always have, or I can have fricking Dead
Cells on here if I wanted to but this time I decided I wanted to see what a lighter, maybe a little
faster OS can do on here and it should come with
all the stuff that I need. The setup was a bit more
involved than I would've liked. Of course, they use Retro
Game Course Guide on it which is great, but I still
had to do things multiple times because I... I just, I don't... I don't know why. This whole thing involves
using developer tools to connect to your 405m to your PC, which sounds harder than it is but it is still more involved than say, putting Garlic OS on an
RG35XX, which is as easy as just putting one file on a
micro SD card and rebooting. I wish they were all that easy. One thing that is cool about
the light version of Gamma OS is that it just loads right into Daijisho. You're just ready to go right
when it's done installing. On the other version, you have
to do the whole Android setup which is a bit annoying. Of course, there's no games there though, so you've gotta pop the
microSD card back in which will keep all the games
that came pre-installed, but the one thing that I've
always hated about Daijisho is that you have to point
each system to its ROM folder. Every single one of them. Daijisho devs, if you're
listening, just... Just let us use a generic file system. Like, every emulation device
uses like GB for GameBoy. Just, you should just know that that's where the GameBoy games are. That shouldn't be that hard to figure out. To be fair though, I did discover that this new firmware had a file system on the device itself, but I mean, the games come pre-installed on an SD card so I'm gonna wanna use the
games that were on the SD card. I'm gonna wanna use that file system. One thing that I noticed was that Daijisho did not have any options for
N64, Dreamcast or GameCube, which is very strange. Some people are gonna
be getting this thing for stuff all the way up to GameCube. You can download the additional
platforms in the settings so that's not really a big deal, but I didn't see an option
for PS2, which I guess is fine because PS2 ran like
absolute garbage anyway so you're not gonna wanna play that. Then you gotta go ahead and
sync all those damn folders. I'm also a bit annoyed that Gamma OS, maybe just the light version, but this thing didn't
come with Citra, Dolphin or anything to play any of those games. I know that you're the light
version, but that's too light. I wanna still use the (beep) thing. Team Retro left a link for the Retroid versions
of Dolphin and Citra in the description of their video so you gotta put those back on the system but it wasn't necessarily
easy to put back on. I had to do a lot of finagling. I don't know why. The
APK just wouldn't load. I had to try a bunch of
different ways to get it to open. This is particularly annoying because they were already
on the stock version of the RG405M. They were on the stock
Android, and you know what? They worked great. Honestly, I think Dolphin might
have worked a little better on the stock Android. The Retroid Dolphin runs fine in Gamma OS, but maybe I should have been
using a different version. The one that came on here,
stock, was a little better but I'm pretty sure that's
the one that came stock. I mean it's fine, but it makes me think maybe
this all wasn't worth it. I think if you're gonna be
getting one of these things, maybe just throw a front
end on it yourself, Daijisho if you really
like the look of this, but Dig and Lemuroid
are just so easy to use. And you can just download
any apps that you want if you're missing anything, but it should more or less work
great right out of the box. This is mostly great for something that just works right out of the box. It rivals how well the
Red Shores' experience works right out of the box. The 405M would be great to get for someone that you want
to get into emulation. I just recommend slapping
a front end on there. But that's basically it. You're also getting a solid aluminum shell versus the Retroid's cheap
plastic, which is a nice touch. The only downside that I can see is that because of the
four-by-three screen, you're gonna be missing
out on dual screen systems like DS and 3DS. Having that nice long 16-by-9 screen was great for having both screens of a DS or 3DS side by side. Otherwise, the four-by-three screen is great for most stuff
that you'd wanna play. And you can also just toggle screens in DS if the game mostly uses one. The other downside is that the 405M is $172 plus shipping from Anbernic and $192 from keepretro.com. The Retroid Pocket 3+ is
just $150 plus shipping from retroid.com. That's kind of not a bad deal. It would be so much
easier to recommend this if they could meet that price point even if this thing wasn't aluminum. That's fine. It doesn't need to be. You know, there is a metal
version of the Retroid Pocket 3+ and it is also $180 so this really isn't a
bad deal for the 405. The Retroid and the 405M
are both great options if you wanna play everything
up to and including GameCube and don't want to spend the price of an Odin or a Steam Deck. the Retroid is great if
you wanna save some money and you don't mind setting up Android and setting up your launcher and putting your own ROMs on there. You'll probably need a little tutorial if you've never set up an
emulation console before. The 405M is great if you just want something that works right out of the box. You'll just need to know
that Dolphin is for GameCube, Citra is for 3DS, Mupen is for N64 and RetroArch is basically
for everything else. If you know you want to put
your own front end on here, the 405M is also a great option too because it's ready for you to
do that right out of the box. Maybe you're already
experienced with Android and you know what that means. Wait, why is Megaman stretched? What the hell? There we go. Why wasn't that set like that? Just to complicate things even more, Anbernic just announced the RG405V which is basically the same thing as this, same chip set and everything,
it's just vertical. I usually love their vertical consoles. That's how I would prefer to play but this one is a bit uggo. It, it looks like those
hacked-together, portable GameCubes that people used to make. Just to complicate things even more, I just realized there's the Anbernic RG505 which has the exact same chip set as 405 and the Retroid, so... That one is significantly cheaper. I guess the reason why
this flew under my radar was because everybody said
that it sucked when it came out and it looked like everything
else I've tried before. It actually looks a lot like a Retroid. But with Gamma OS, I
heard it's a lot better. I don't know what the
stock experience is like. I assume the stock experience on this is probably gonna be
worse because it's older. So maybe it's worth spending
the extra couple bucks for that stock experience
and a nice, metal case. But if you know you want Gamma OS and something that looks
like a Switch knockoff, I mean... Anyway, what do you guys think
about the Anbernic RG405M? There's ups and downs to all
of these different consoles. I was shocked that this thing was Android and had a good stock experience and I really don't want to
give them too much credit for coming with games because
that's what's gonna ruin this whole industry for everybody. But I mean, you can't deny that
that's just gonna be easier for novices who are new to emulation. Anyway, let me know what
you think about this versus something like the
Retroid in the comments below, at me on Twitter, any and all of this other
social media garbage. I stream on Twitch.TV/wulffden
every once in a while. The best way to reach me
is to just come over there and talk to me directly in the chat. Don't forget to check out Red Magic at the description below if you want an actual
good Android experience you don't even need one of these at all. But the most important
thing that you can do to help support us right
here is just subscribe so you know when every
single new video goes up and share this video with a friend, a friend who wants to get
into emulation consoles. This might be the one to get. Thank you very much. Have yourself a very good week.
