Is The R36S STILL The Handheld Retro BUDGET KING In 2024... | Review

[Music] here's a little product that you've probably heard a fair bit about this is the r36 S to be precise and it is described as a uh a game console now it has the four buttons on the back it has the nice 3.5 in screen but it also has a few more unusual things like its history you may have heard of the R35 where they actually completely copied another device and then they decided to completely copy this device as their second outing but you know regardless of that the main standout feature is probably the price now this retails here in the UK at around about 33 if you're buying it from somewhere like AliExpress which is absolute peanuts it doesn't have a Wi-Fi inside of it but you can as you can see add a little Wi-Fi dongle that you can find for £5 on Amazon and that makes things like scraping the artwork for your ROMs much easier now this runs on the AR Coos system which by default was on a very old version but you can easily update that but I did find the for whatever reason the update failed a few times now I would suggest if you can doing it the oldfashioned way to a computer and updating it using the inbuilt SD cards now the micro SD cards here you've got one for the operating system and you've got one for your actual ROMs you can put both onto a single card and as you know by now with these devices you should always change out the card that's in there because they really are that bad now this device is actually quite impressive it can run all the way up to PSP uh although I have a few things to say about that if you're looking for a system to run 2D games like Game Boy games Game Boy Color then this is absolutely fantastic not only is a 3.5 in screen remarkably clear and bright it has this curved glass look to it I think they call it um 2.5d don't quote me on that but it doesn't come with a glass screen protector like many of the other models so on here at the moment I have a piece of plastic which does irk me a little now on the one hand the emulation is is of a good quality on the other hand there are a few things with the hardware which you might need to think about now the screen is absolutely fine the speaker it's not the best in the world as you'll hear in a second but it's functional enough the d-pad is just okay now as you'll know maybe that it is actually has a couple of joints inside one of them is disconnected and one of them isn't you should cut that joint and it makes things a little bit nicer uh the same goes for the buttons they are okay not the best not the worst and you can improve those with a little modifi modification by just unscrewing one of the screws on the back of the device it's very simple there's another Channel I'll pop a link in the description you can go check out how to do that now aside from that the front buttons the analog sticks are very much like a Nintendo switch they do have click they feel okay but their low profile means that if you're used to something like a steamed de or a console controller they will feel a little restrictive and the same can be said for the back of the device now on the back of the device we have four buttons L and L2 R and R2 but they are quite possibly the clickiest buttons of all time they have slightly thought about the design here you'll notice that the internal buttons are ever so slightly raised they're actually a little bit higher than the exterior so your fingers can sit a little more comfortable there's also a ridge on the back of the device that you can rest another finger underneath there's some thought here not a huge amount now there are six screws in total if you want to take this apart it is very easy indeed and there's also a removable cover so that you can actually replace the battery which I think should be on every device it's really simple to do there's a simple plug that you pull out and that's job done now the quality of the batteries themselves doesn't seem to be tip toop I've noticed on my other model the battery does seem to have slightly swollen which is something that can happen on all lithium batteries but it's also something that can lead to fire so just the quality control perhaps not the best now with these emulators you can set the screen to reflect your chosen game boy style you can have it as a much more high contrast white image or you can use the more retro green I just can't bring myself to use anything but the Retro you know what I mean I just think I prefer [Music] [Music] it now on the subject of the Ros if you want to get back to the main menu you just press start and select together you have to do that twice sometimes but that will take you right back if you want to get into the menu within your ROMs while the Game Boy Game Boy Advance Game Boy Color you'll have to press start and X together there is a full list on the Wiki of Ros that will give you all of those so again I'll pop a link to that in the description so you can go check that out now the scraper that I mentioned that scrapes the artwork will also scrape a little bit of information about each of your games that'll just scroll over on the screen and depending on the theme that you've got that will appear in a different place if you want to favorite a particular game you will need to go into it over to the game and then favorite that now your engines are also listed in this way and I do like this lowkey blue clean look there are several different ones that you can access from the options menu but I think we should look at some of the emulation on the other devices as it's not nearly as good as we've just seen now a good example of this is with the N64 if you want to play this well you're going to have to do a few things firstly from the main menu you're going to go in and change the actual ROM settings you're going to want to change the emulator settings on this one because the default emulator core just doesn't work very well with the r 36s now this is with the updated core as you can see it's playable the frame rate's not terrible when you're looking in certain areas like not at the enemy or not anywhere where there's large Open Spaces it's okay the frame rate does dip down quite considerably every time you look well anywhere else as you know the control scheme of this game was an interesting one and by default on the r 36s the controls are shocking you've got both the aim and the shoot on the left hand side of the device so make sure you change that before you go trying to demo it for a new channel as you can see if I can line up the head shot I won't actually be able to pull the trigger because I need to get my finger around and press the other button but we'll try there we go now as far as N64 goes that's potentially one of the worst performing games some of the others are actually much much more playable now in the N64 emulator settings Standalone rice is the best one really you can try a few others but for me it's been the one that has worked the best it is worth playing around though especially if you get a game that performs as badly as the last one to see if things improve at all yeah so it's not perfect uh and that's put it nicely but it's not the worst it could certainly be worse than that it really depends on the game as to the performance that you're going to get it's definitely a different story on the 2D systems everything is absolutely flawless I've been working my way through classic Cannon fod and uh yeah it's just so perfect even even using not having a mouse and keyboard obviously you would never had a mouse and keyboard but I was always an Amiga player for this title it really does run and play like I remember although I managed to glitch this stage out and I can't blow the door off this building so I'm going to have to restart in a [Music] second you can probably hear just how loud this device can get as well and bear in mind that I don't actually have this set to the full brightness this is actually 50% brightness just because it's more than bright enough if I head into the options I can turn that all the way up now I wouldn't say that was 50% more bright but it's certainly brighter than it was and it's a very nice screen every other platform works brilliantly now the PlayStation is particularly good on this device if that's a system that you loved and let's be honest it had some of best RPGs if you're an RPG fan and it also has some amazing action adventure games and pretty much everything in between then this is a great device for PlayStation emulation Bido blade was one of my all-time favorites back in the day I'm probably not quite as good as I remember being but it's worth giving a go and seeing how it performs on this device if you've not played Bido blade this isn't Tekken it is um life or death with a single hit so yeah it runs well on this platform the same experience carries over to all the RPGs this device is almost perfect for the PlayStation setup can feel a little restrictive if you have larger hands but even so the pocket ability makes up for that in my opinion now we do still have a couple of speaker grills on the bottom of the device as well as the DC input for power and the OTG Port which we just used for our Wi-Fi connection as well as the headphones now as for the chipset well you can see all the information on the screen the overall power and performance and as I say for the price they're asking it really isn't a lot and I do think this is a worthy device the issue here really is if you want to support the copying of other devices on the market they are literally taken even down to the board repackaging it and selling it for cheaper than the person who originally came up with that design I will leave you to decide that but for me if you're after an initial retro handheld then this is really a solid choice if you're looking for a premium fing device then you really do have to pay for that but if you just want a handheld that's very cheap has a nice 2.5d screen comes with 15,000 games as this one does if you go for the 64 GB card option battery life is so so there are definitely devices that will last longer than this but if like me you just want to play some of your favorite games from your childhood no matter how um bad they were well this really is a Fant fantastic way to do just that if you've enjoyed the content in any way on this new channel then please do stick around let me know in the comments and I'll be sure to reply to you as well and yeah don't forget to hit [Music] continue

Channel: MarkiTech

Views: 32,480

Keywords: retro handhelds, handheld gaming, handheld game console, new tech, new gaming, handhelds, portable, mobile

Id: vH38edoTnC8

Length: 10min 22sec (622 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 02 2024