I Was Wrong About The ANBERNIC RG556 (Sorry)

hello Rob from retro dodo here so some of you might have noticed that a few days ago now our review of the ambic RG 556 went live and was very swiftly taken back down again the reason for this is that I actually made quite a lot of major mistakes in that original video saying that things were issues when actually they were quite easily fixable within the settings on the device so what you're about to watch is a re-review of the RG 556 where I'm going to go through the things that I encountered in that original video explain how to fix them and also explain why I got so much wrong in the first place I do also want to just say sorry about that previous video because quite clearly it wasn't up to our standard and I just got so much wrong that it's absolutely ridiculous but without further Ado let's crack on with this [Music] re-review the amck RG 556 is a horizontally or orientated android-based handheld which retails for $184.99 but is currently available with a $10 discount if you choose to pre- purchase it ahead of its release date in March with the official website stating that the device will start shipping on the 5th for full disclosure we were provided with a review unit ahead of its public release so thanks to ambic for arranging that the RG 556 is positioned as a competitor to the retroid pocket 4 line of handhelds with it sitting in the middle of the base model and the pro model in terms of both cost and power and this might make it a pretty attractive alternative to what retroid are offering looking more closely at the specs we've got a uniso t820 CPU Mali g57 GPU 8 gigs of RAM and 128 gigs of internal storage it also has built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and features a 5,500 milliamp battery giving you around 8 hours of average use looking at the display we've got a 16x9 aspect ratio with a resolution of 1920x 1080 it's also an AMOLED screen that's 5.48 in in size and of course we've also got touch functionality which makes it easier to navigate menus now this brings me on to the first thing I want to address from the previous review I mentioned that although the screen is really good on paper it has this weird blue tint to it which ends up making the display look a little bit off at times and kind of lets it down however what I didn't realize is that you can actually fix this you just need to go into the main settings menu then display then colors and contrast and then set the screen to standard mode this completely fixes this weird blue effect on the screen and makes it look pretty incredible now to my credit here this really should have been the default display mode and it's very strange that you would have to dive into the settings to rectify this but it is fixable and I should have spotted that during my initial testing so that's definitely on me the bottom line here though is that the screen is great and actually better than what's being offered by retroid thanks to its bigger resolution and the fact it's an OLED screen too taking a look at the actual build of the RG 556 now the standout feature for me is the grips on the back of the device which give your fingers somewhere to naturally rest and make the device extremely comfortable to hold I've used this thing quite a lot now and I have absolutely no complaints with how it feels the shell is made of this smooth glossy plastic which I was worried would feel a bit slippery but surprisingly it actually doesn't slip around at all it actually has a decent amount of weight to it coming in at over 330 G which makes it feel like you're getting a premium product that isn't going to fall apart in your cold clammy hands the analog sticks are very similar in feel and size to a Nintendo switch joycon but feel sturdy and are even haul effects sticks meaning that they shouldn't drift like the joycons are prone to the action buttons offer a good amount of resistance and don't wobble in the shell and the d-pad is quite good too it is very slightly loose which could result in false diagonals but from my testing this wasn't a common issue at all something which adds a degree of spectacle to the device is the fact that there's LED lights around the analog sticks and this is where we hit the second mistake of the previous video I was saying how it's annoying how you can't d these but actually you can you just have to go to the Android Quick Settings scroll across to the ambient light option and instead of tap in it like I was doing you simply hold it and it opens up the advanced options where you can not only dim the lights but give it a fancy breathing effect too now this mistake was just down to me clearly being inexperienced with Android despite the fact that I literally have an Android phone that I use every single day maybe I'm just an idiot but I had absolutely no idea that you could hold these quick settings to go to a more advanced menu so yeah I definitely ended up learning something there thanks to everybody that pointed that out to me in the comments of the last video what I will say though is that it is still a little bit disappointing that you can't change the color of these LED lights that would have made them even better but regardless the options that you do have are pretty cool other than that though you've got all of the standard stuff like function buttons for menu navigation start and select the volume buttons on top of the device and then next to those you've got the power button which can be tapped to enter sleep mode the shoulder and Trigger buttons are really good on here too the L1 and R1 buttons are big enough that your fingers can rest on them and press them with ease and the triggers have the perfect amount of travel to them being satisfying to press but not going too far back that it feels like you're constantly slipping off of them the R1 and L1 buttons are a bit clicky though which could be annoying if you are playing a game which uses them a lot trust me you don't want to be in bed with someone playing Crash team racing on this thing but now we should probably tackle the biggest thing that I got wrong in the last video which is where I went off on one about how the L2 and R2 triggers are supposed to be analog but weren't on my device and I complained about this for ages but it turns out that you just need to activate the analog triggers in the menu by turning the Xbox mode on that's it that just completely fixes the biggest issue I had with the entire device now I'm a stud stupid for not noticing this yeah but at the same time why isn't this the default option when you initially turn the device on surely most people are going to want the analog triggers to be active when you take the device out of the box and also why is the analog trigger function tied to swapping between the Nintendo and Xbox button layout surely this button layout and the analog trigger activation should be two separate settings on the menu you've got to admit that is a bit confusing right I mean the main games that utilize the analog triggers are GameCube games which are made by Nintendo so I never would have thought that changing from the Nintendo layout to the Xbox layout would have impacted the triggers like this so yeah while this mistake is definitely on me I do think it's a little bit understandable as to why I didn't change this particular setting but I tell you what I definitely won't be making that mistake again that's for sure again thanks to anyone that pointed this out in the comments of the last video it actually ended up really helping in moving on on the bottom of the device you've got a headphone jack a Micro SD card port to expand the storage on offer and a USBC Port which is used for charging data transfer and yes it does actually support video output once again in my last video I said that the video output wasn't working and I even went as far as to explicitly put people off of getting this if they wanted a device that can output to an external display yeah it turns out that it was just that my adapter wasn't compatible with the RG 556 and using a recommendation by Russ from retro gamecore I got this anchor USBC to HDMI adapter and it immediately worked making me look even more like an absolute buffoon than I already do at this point now look should I have tested another USB to HDMI adapter before straight up saying it doesn't work yeah I probably should however this USB dock which by the way works perfectly with my steam deck does specifically State on the Amazon page that it works with any device it literally says right here Universal compatibility so I just took them at the word when I probably shouldn't have but look the good news is that because the video output on the RG 556 does work it basically means that you've got a whole portable console that you can take around with you by connecting Bluetooth controllers to the device you can even play multiplayer games too and this dramatically increases inrees the versatility of the device so at the end of the day even if I got a lot of things wrong this is all very good news okay so I think we're finally at the stage where I've rectified all of the mistakes I made in the previous video so now I want to move over to the software on the RG 556 and this is an area where I think there's still quite a lot of problems the front end that this device comes preloaded with is called RG launcher and in my opinion this is the main thing that lets the device down it just doesn't look all that great even when you go through the customization options and it's a massive pain to navigate through the settings in the last video I complained that I couldn't find a way of adding games to the front end that was stored on the internal storage and while I did actually find out how to do that I still maintain that the UI is so clunky and awkward to use that you better off just stick into the Android interface instead it would be great if amck made their own front end that not only looked looked Sleek but talked you through the initial setting up process allowing you to install upto-date emulator apps set your ROM directories configure controller bindings and hot keys and access resolution upscaling settings all without leaving the front end for now though this doesn't exist and you're basically left on your own to download and configure each individual emulator which can be a pretty time consuming process and sort of saps the initial fun out of getting one of these devices to the RG 556s credit it does come with a lot of emulation software pre-installed however I found that a lot of these were outdated and could potentially have resulted in subpar performance because of the amount of updates the software was received since these older versions released so I would always recommend that you completely uninstall everything and start again from scratch so that you have full control over your apps and you know that they're the recent versions but after you've redownloaded and configured get everything yourself manually you're finally at a stage where you can actually get playing and this is where the RG 556 starts to rarely shine any classic or early 3D systems are going to play absolutely perfectly on this device so anything from the Atari 2600 NES SNES N64 PS1 Dreamcast or any similarly powered consoles are going to run like a dream and even be upscaled without impact in performance crash team racing on the PS1 is running through the Standalone duck station emulator here with a five times upscale to make it 1080P and as you can see it's absolutely Flawless similarly Super Mario 64 on the Nintendo 64 is running through the m64 plus FZ emulator at a resolution of 1440 by 1080 and looks stunning while also performing with literally no issues Dreamcast is running through redream at a resolution of 1920 by 1440 and once again as you'd probably expect by now it runs perfectly whether you'd realistically want to upscale these games this much is up to you but personally I tend to only upscale to the equivalent of 720p on devices like these because the difference between that and higher resolutions on a screen this small is going to be very minor but hey if you do want to take full advantage of that 1080p screen you definitely can do that pushing into the more demanding console let's start by taking a look at Grand Theft Auto 3 on the PS2 which is running through ether sx2 at a two times upscale personally I found that by going up to a three times up scale here made the performance struggle a little bit when things got hectic so for these systems I'd probably stick to a two times up scale which to be fair still looks incredible on such a small display this is a reasonably easy game to emulate and as to be expected performance was great I also tested tone T Hawks Pro Skater 3 which was as smooth as butter and I was very pleasantly surprised by the performance of Metal Gear Solid 3 this is one of the more demanding PS2 games which this device ran amazingly I expected to get at least minimal frame rate dips here but it was perfect the only game I tested which did struggle a tiny bit but not to the point where it was gamebreaking at all was Ratchet and Clank where it did start to chug in certain areas however it quickly corrected itself and it never got to a point where it was unplayable GameCube emulation is a similar story for this I'm using the Dolphin Emulator and found the upscale into 1080p was a bit too much to handle so going to 720p which is a two times upscale seemed to be The Sweet Spot and most games looked and performed amazingly Super Mario Sunshine was a blast and thanks to the analog triggers which yes are actually analog you can move around and use flood at the same time Mario Kart Double Dash was also perfect and Super Monkey Ball ran great too admittedly this did struggle with slightly more Dynamic stages at first but once the shaders cached it sort of caught up with itself and performance was great the only game I tested that didn't run very well was F0 GX even with the dual core mode enabled and the resolution set to Native it was running at a frame rate of around 40 or below most of the time which results in it being practically unplayable this is a very tense game though and I would imagine that the vast majority of the GameCube Library would be perfect here Wii emulation is quite similar to GameCube in the way that it uses the same emulator but here I actually found that a two times upscale was a little bit too much to handle in Mario Kart Wii and I actually had to go down to a native resolution by doing that though the performance was amazing and it still looked great too because the native resolution of the Wii isn't bad by default anyway the more demanding portable systems like the PSP and 3DS also run impressively well going straight into the deep end with God of War ghost of Sparta running in the PPSSPP emulator at a two times resolution the frame rate was impressively stable and less demanding games like Daxter could even be bumped up to a three times upscale with no impact on performance what's great about this particular system too is that it fully utilizes the widescreen aspect ratio of the RG 556 and fills the entire screen making this an awesome option if you're looking to play a lot of PSP stuff now maybe I could be doing something wrong here at this point I really wouldn't be surprised but 3DS seemed to be a bit more difficult to set up using the standard version of Citra or even Citra enhanced seemed to result in games being absolutely unplayable the frame rates were so bad that there's just no way you'd be able to put up with it like I say it really wouldn't surprise me at this point if there was some kind of setting on missing that would just instantly fix this but for now I've been using a version of Citra called Citra MMJ which is more aimed at Pure Performance I was getting pretty much perfect frame rates here with the only downside being that certain textures seemed to not be loading right in certain games this is pretty much unnoticeable but in others it's fairly distracting but if you can get over that 3DS is actually rarely playable here because of the screen being fairly large horizontally orientated and having touch capabilities it actually makes it ideal for emulating these dual screen devices now I don't usually test switch emulation because quite frankly a lot of these handheld devices just wouldn't be powerful enough to run switch games but just to be extra thorough here I tested it out with cuphead and to my surprise it was actually extremely playable now bear in mind that this is a fairly lightweight game and it was dropping frames here and there so it's not a perfect experience by any means means but any smaller less demanding titles might actually be fully playable on this just don't go in expecting to play Tears of the Kingdom or anything like that because that just straight up won't be possible but after all of this testing the question remains would I actually recommend the RG 556 for its Retro Game emulation potential in a complete 180 from the previous review I did on the ambic RG 556 I actually would recommend it I'm giving the this eight dodos out of 10 now that I'm not being a and I've sorted out pretty much everything I was complaining about this is actually an amazing device which is almost unbeatable at this price point while the retroid pocket 4 Pro is slightly more powerful the RG 556 has a better screen and a bigger battery while also having decent specs itself which will allow it to play practically everything the pocket 4 Pro can anyway surprisingly after the last video there's actually no not too much to complain about here with the only real gripe I have that's actually valid being that the front end isn't the greatest and the setting up process is a bit convoluted which potentially makes this a device that isn't that well suited to beginners if you know what you're doing though or you don't mind doing a bit of research on the setting up process then I would highly recommend the RG 556 it is a little bit of a shame that you can't change the colors of the LED lights around the analog sticks and it does struggle a little bit with the rarely demanding titles from the PS2 and GameCube generation but outside of those nitpicks this is a great alternative to the retroid pocket 4 Pro and in a lot of ways might actually work out to be the better choice but there we go those are my thoughts on the RG 556 that was a bit of a turnaround from the previous video wasn't it to be honest this whole situation that happened with the previous video has actually taught me quite a lot about these Android devices and I've definitely learned something here here next time I'm looking at one of these devices I'm definitely not going to be as quick to judge that's for sure but anyway enough about that what do you think to the amberik RG 556 do you like the look of it and are you excited for all of these new handhelds coming out that are more capable of playing PS2 and GameCube games let me know I hope you enjoyed the video this time around and if you did give it a like And subscribe for more retro shizel coming to your screens very very soon for now though I've been robbed from retro dodo and see you in the next one

Channel: Retro Dodo

Views: 38,794

Keywords: anbernic rg556, anbernic rg556 review, anbernic rg556 unboxing, anbernic 556, anbernic 556 review, anbernic 556 unboxing, anbernic new handheld, anbernic review, anbernic handheld review, anbernic rg556 first look, anbernic rg556 breakdown, anbernic rg556 testing, anbernic rg556 game testing, anbernic rg556 what can it play, what can it play, anbernic rg556 setup, anbernic rg556 set up, anbernic rg556 issues, anbernic rg556 problems, android handheld, android emulation

Id: 87AUfFRV-lM

Length: 19min 31sec (1171 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 21 2024