Is The New Bittboy Better? - Rerez

a little while ago we were sent a device called the bit boy something that I really couldn't recommend because of all the piracy concerns I had with it but the company behind that device has sent us a brand new one called well it's called the new bit boy and the new pet boy's supposed to be a lot better than the old one what is it improved is it still filled with piracy let's find out the last time I took a look at a bit boy it was loaded with tons of bootleg and pirated software and although I was kind of impressed by the form factor of the hardware itself well it's just something I really can't defend and maybe just maybe the folks behind the bit boy watched my review and they learned their lesson because this brand new bit boy model from them does not have any pre-installed games whatsoever and I'm pretty sure a couple of you are gonna be like well I prefer to have my games pre-installed well you didn't actually get to play the original bit boy because there were a ton of games on there that had high to not recommend I'm talking about things I've seen from the worst-ever series things you wouldn't want to play even if they were given to you for free but now thankfully you can use your own rom files that you have in your collection or perhaps ones that are homebrew creations and stuff like that you're gonna be able to play NES games Game Boy games and Game Boy Color games but what I love about this is that it has a micro SD card slot at the top that actually works because if you remember the original bit boy that one had an open slot that went nowhere there's no need to download or configure any of the emulators whatsoever all you need to do is drop the roms directly on a micro SD card and you're good to go which is a pretty easy thing considering that some of these devices can be a lot more difficult the new bit boy just like the old one feels relatively solid but the buttons and d-pad feel just a little bit squishy and believe me that will affect you when you're playing games but one thing that is improved over the original is that the sound is a lot better for example on the original bit boy if you were to get to the second stage a double dragon it would sound like this but with the new bit boy it sounds the way it's supposed to like this [Music] general sound quality is pretty good across the board but we did notice a couple of instances where games just weren't being emulated properly with the right kind of sound effects it didn't happen a lot but when it was there it was pretty noticeable regardless though there is something that the original bit boy does way better than the new one and that's when it comes to controlling your volume you see on the old bit boy you had a volume dial which you know works really well on the new one they got rid of it you can even see the little plastic space where it would have been they just kind of covered it up or something on the mold so how do you adjust the volume on the new bit boy well you have to hold the select button down and push a or V this is a very bad idea because the select button is still activated in any of the games that you're playing so what happens is that you'll push select in game if you're playing a game or use a select as a function you'll activate whatever that is and that's not the way volume control should work on a device like that they got a better on the original pip-boy and they failed tremendously on this one but not everything is amiss because the new bit boy has a much better screen on it not only is it just slightly bigger but you also have the ability to adjust the aspect ratio from kind of a four by three to a bit of a wider option regardless of which one you choose they both look great and the color representation on this is fantastic personally I can completely look past the mistake of volume adjustment on here because of how much better the screen is but then when you want to adjust the screen brightness you have to hold down the select button and push the two turbo buttons at the top so you run into the exact same problems while adjusting the volume and unfortunately the only way to adjust the volume and the screen brightness is while you're playing a game so it will always affect you and just like the original bit boy this one has composite video out but it kind of sucks because the image on the screen on the device itself looks so much better than the image it outputs from these composite cables the operating system on this thing is incredibly sparse you're gonna have access to an NES menu a gameboy menu and a gameboy color menu but there's very few options or settings that you can change for any of the emulation whatsoever now you might know the main menu here is stretched and pulled past the boundaries of the screen now this seems to only happen when you use the video output on the device itself on the built-in screen this looks fine and so do the games as well this only really seems to affect the menu and nothing else but you really won't be spending that much time in these menus because they're really only there to select a game and once you've selected one you have a couple of features that are accessed by pushing the R button now on the original fit boy that our button would just reset the system on the new bit boy you have the ability to adjust the aspect ratio you also have the ability to turn the video output on and off from the composite video cable and you have save state support which is a nice addition because that definitely wasn't on the original model unfortunately though using the save system at any point is kind of a roll of the dice more often than not I found it would lock up the bit boy forcing me to hard restart the system losing all of my progress and to make it just a little bit more frustrating any game that you would have played in the past that would have had safe support built-in like let's say Zelda or Pokemon will not really work on this system because you're unable to use the built-in battery safe because these are roms and they don't actually have a built-in battery and this system does not modify the roms at all the moment you turn off a game it forgets all of your progress completely but now let's get to the main event how well does this system play games we first started off by playing a bunch of nes games and the difference between the old system - this one is a night and day the screen looks so much better but unfortunately the same problems we had with a video output also affect the games here sometimes it look a little bit stretched and even if you adjust the aspect ratio there's still wider than they typically would have been on the original screens that you would have played them on back in the day composite video out just has a lot of visual problems and you better not expect something as close to the NES classic in terms of visual fidelity because you're simply not going to get that without HDMI that doesn't mean that you won't have fun playing games on here pac-man played very well and although it is kind of a sparse looking game I didn't notice any big visual problems but when I played Micro Machines I noticed a little bit of a slowdown and some visual shakiness here and there other games like mighty final fight play ok and they still have that authentic NES bright flickering that some people like and a lot of other people don't if you're dealing with a game with fast movement like super mario brothers u will see screen tearing every so often and that's something that you really wouldn't have seen from the original hardware there's also other video artifacts that you'll see from this video output method that you will not see from the original hardware when you're using the screen itself for instance this rainbow effect you see on the bottom of the floor of Ninja Gaiden only shows up when you have the video output used if you just play this game on the screen it's not there at all and you might also run into problems when it comes to rom compatibility now many of the roms that we use we tested on other devices just to make sure that they worked and while they did run on other devices that we had sometimes they wouldn't run properly on here we eventually found a version of Kirby's Adventure that ran fine but we came across one that had these visual glitches here and aside from switching out the game ROM entirely there was just no way to fix this overall though the new bit boy is a marked improvement over the original when it comes to playing NES games you're getting better visuals you're getting way better gameplay performance and the sound quality is a lot better as well with all that in mind though the original bit boy couldn't play Game Boy and Game Boy Color games so how do they run well it's a bit of a mixed bag when you play Game Boy games the performance seems to be alright and by performance I mean the speed and the way you actually control the games it's the visual representation though that is way off because the game boys original screen was a lot lower resolution and this one is a lot higher it's trying to rescale the games in a way that doesn't work properly pixels are just not resized properly when they move across the screen so you'll get this weird shimmering effect that just looks bad but it gets even worse when you take a look at how the characters are represented just take a look at your main character here on Pokemon he looks like somebody smacked him in the face with a tire iron and he seems lost and confused but unfortunately it does get worse when you go to play Game Boy Color games they have all the same visual problems that Game Boy games have plus performance issues certain games like The Smurfs nightmare would run fine at points but then other areas would run completely slow seemingly at random then we were playing shantae the game just overall ran really badly but we also had points where shantae would just completely disappear on the screen we also tried some fan-made hacks and unfortunately with those we can't really guarantee if they're running a hundred percent accurately but with this color version of Super Mario Land we noticed that the game ran really too fast at points and the music was just totally out of control so as you can see Game Boy Color games and Game Boy games probably shouldn't be played on the system even if the games tend to run ok which some of them do visually they just look off what I believe this system is really best at is playing NES games which is funny considering what it looks like and although it's got a couple of rough edges I think a couple people out there might really enjoy this device specifically if you're looking to play NES games on the go in this small form-factor and because they removed all that pirated and bootleg software I think a lot more people out there will have a better experience getting one of these things and not feeling so worried about playing bad versions of good games the new bit boy plays NES games better than the old one but when it comes to Game Boy and Game Boy Color games it just doesn't do it that well and for anyone out there that's looking to get that kind of portable gaming I really wouldn't recommend it but if you want NES games on the go this is something that I can easily recommend because there's no pirated software on here which is a big plus in my books

Channel: Rerez

Views: 254,905

Keywords: Rerez, Video, Games, Shane, Luis, Gaming, Gamers, Reviews, Review, Bittboy, The New Bittboy, New Bittboy, Bitboy, bit boy, bitt boy, NES, GB, GBC, Game Boy, GameBoy, Emulation, Portable Console, Mini Emulator, Bittboy Review

Id: AvsCu7OiSk8

Length: 10min 11sec (611 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 28 2019