Recently I came across a post about a super
cheap device that had a ton of hype. You mean to tell me that I can get a handheld
that on paper claims that it can emulate NES, Super Nintendo, Genesis, and all of the GameBoy
systems up to the Advanced for less than $20 with free shipping? Take my money. I usually cover a wide range of products on
this channel, but it’s been a very long time since I’ve looked at something that
is this budget. The poor kid inside me desperately wants a
good $20-30 handheld to exist and I’m willing to see if this can fill that role. This is the SF2000 from Datafrog and if that
name doesn’t instill the highest degree of confidence, then I don’t know what would. My expectations going into this are very low. I think like a lot of the people that bought
this just on the render images that went up, I’ve accepted the fact that this can be
a cool paperweight at a minimum. I’m a sucker for anything Super Nintendo
and this thing would at least look cool on my shelf. So I’m going to do a review on this, and
I’m going to tailor my expectations to the $20 price tag. Let’s start with the packaging. This thing comes in a pretty big box for a
device that is this small. For reference, here’s the RG353p that I
gave a favorable review to last year. That device is a little bigger than the SF2000,
but the packaging is actually smaller than our new device. Inside the box, we have a set of AV cables
and a charging cable. AV cables are not common on cheap modern chips,
so this one is probably using something that is a bit older. In terms of the layout, it’s pretty decent. Baring the single analog stick that is almost
pointless on this device, the rest of the design looks good. It’s got a set of big face buttons that
fit the original nostalgia, but they messed up on the buttons themselves. On this X and A are concave or have a recess
middle area, but I believe only Y and X have that on the original controller. Let’s finish up with the front. We have a big DPAD that appears to be modeled
after the SNES controller and we have a Switch joystick that does not have L3 functionality. On the right side, we have a set of rubber
or silicon start and select buttons. That gives this thing two more points over
the 353P in terms of executing the nostalgia correctly. Dead center, this device has a 3” IPS screen,
but this thing does not have OCA applied with a sheet of glass. This uses a plastic front screen with a decent
gap between it and the screen beneath. For some reason, they state that this is a
720p panel, but this should be somewhere around 240p or so. It’s a decent panel for the price, but we
don’t have any brightness controls, and every game that you’ll play on this has
bilinear filtering applied, so it’s difficult to judge the sharpness. But finishing up, the DPAD is decent, as are
ABXY. These don’t stick when pressed and they
feel reminiscent of a SNES controller. The top buttons don’t and they are the only
thing that I don’t really care for on this. These use a hard tac switch that doesn’t
feel great to use. The bottom has our bottom switch, a charging
port, an SD card slot, a headphone jack, and a volume slider. The back holds a single speaker, which is
not ideal, but they did do something interesting on this. You’ll notice that we have this bulge on
the top half of the back. This lets the device display a bit better
on a shelf, but it holds a user-replaceable battery cell. It’s a 1500 mAh cell and it should be easy
to get ahold of a replacement one in your country. I only wish they could have done a better
job of molding this back part a bit more ergonomic. So far, not that bad for $20. The plastic feels a bit cheaper than it does
on the 353p, but they did at least apply the correct texture to the surface. Let’s take a look at the operating system
that’s on this and what comes included. Once you boot the device up, you’ll be greeted
with some elevator music on a loop that is a bit annoying and cannot be disabled. You can completely remove it from the SD card,
but that’s something for a bit later. On the device, we have sections for MAME,
GBA, GBC, GB, Genesis, SNES, and NES. For each of these, they have selected 4 random
titles to act as a kind of favorites, but there does not seem to be any way to change
these out. Pressing start will put us into the system
menu and here we find a ton of games. This thing claims that it includes 6000 ROMs. I don’t know if that is true, but they did
manage to get artwork for all of these titles, which is not common at all. You usually only see the artwork for the first
100 or so titles, but they went ham on this. Let’s launch an NES game to take a look
at some of the other options that we have. So we launch the game with start and then
we are in the game. We can open up a sub menu by pressing start
and select at the same time. This menu is very basic. We can resume the game, quit, load a save
state, or save a save state. We only have a total of 4 states for each
game, but that should be enough for what this can do. We’ll come back to the performance in a
second, let’s head over to the user settings menu. In this menu, we can change the AV signal
type from NTSC to PAL, change the language, search for a game, or browse ROMs that we
manually add to the SD card. Out of all of these, the Search feature is
probably the best because it is a pain to navigate 6000 ROMs and this does a good job
of pulling them all together quickly. Adding ROMs to this device is pretty simple. All you need to do is drag and drop a ROM
file to the ROMs directory on the SD card. Then you will be able to launch it from this
user menu. This is not the only cheap handheld on the
market, and it’s not the only cheap one that I’ve reviewed on the channel. I started this channel when there were very
few options on the market outside of devices like this. There is one thing that almost all cheap devices
seem to have and that’s screen tearing, even in very low-end systems that they can
run well like GB or NES. I went into this kind of accepting that might
be the case in this, but I’ve been surprised before. However, when I launch a game, I am seeing
some of the tell-tale signs. Let me see if I can slow down the footage
for you on Link’s Awakening so you can see what I mean. Unfortunately, this appears to have screen
tearing. We can confirm with a screen tearing test
and we see the same thing. If this did not have screen tearing, you would
not be able to see these jagged lines. So what is screen tearing? Essentially, the system is trying to display
a frame before it has a full one generated. On other devices, we can use vsync to fix
this, but on small devices like these, it’s a bit more complicated. The emulator and the screen need to be able
to communicate with each other, and on stuff like this, that doesn’t happen. Sometimes this can be fixed through code,
but sometimes it needs code and special hardware, like a screen that can generate something
called a tearing effect signal. Obviously, we know that this thing can’t
be perfect for $20, so let’s at least see if it can emulate the systems that it claims
at full speed. If it can do that with tearing, it’s not
the end of the world. Starting with GB, the game appears to be running
at full speed, but I think the tearing ruins games that side-scroll fast like this one. I’m noticing one thing that might be an
issue for some of you while playing this. They have used A and B for A and B on a Game
Boy. On its face, that kind of makes sense, but
when you consider how you have to position your hand to make this work in games that
need B held down for running, you are either holding the device like this, which isn’t
comfortable, or you are trying to awkwardly position your thumb between them. I think the more common way to map 2-button
systems like this would be to use Y and B, because that would give you a closer feeling
of how you’d play on the original hardware. The problem is there is no way for the user
to configure or remap buttons on this device, so we are stuck with how this shipped. Back to testing, GBC also appears to run full
speed, but it suffers from the same issue if you are playing a fast sidescrolling game. If we switch to something that has fewer full-screen
transitions like Link’s Awakening DX, it’s much better. The tearing only comes into play when you
transition the entire screen, but that isn’t that bad. When it comes to GBA, this appears to be a
crapshoot. Even stuff that appears to be running well
actually runs a bit slower than normal. Not only does it run a little slow, but it
also has audio glitching that’s kind of distracting. There are 762 GBA ROMs on this device, so
there are probably a few that will run well, but I don’t think this is a system I’d
play on this device. After this, we have MAME. This is another system that is going to come
down to the games that you are playing. Something like Metal Slug will run very well
on this. It slows down in some areas, but it’s a
lot better than something like GBA. Normal beat-em-up games also run well on this. This is also the only system that I could
see myself using the small analog. NES runs very well on this device, with the
same sidescrolling notice that I gave for the other systems. Games like Adventure Island are a bit too
annoying for me to play on this, but The Legend of Zelda is much better. Super Nintendo is crap on this, but it was
less crap before I applied the latest software update. At that time, games ran very slow with heavy
frameskip applied. Now they run at less than half speed for all
titles. Here, take a listen to this Capcom intro for
a second. It’s best to just ignore this entire system. Megadrive is our last system, and thankfully,
it performs much better than SNES. The same rules apply here, I would not play
a game that is fast like Sonic on this even though it can run with some audio issues,
but I would play something like Comix Zone or Streets of Rage. That’s it for the systems that are supported
in this menu, but I discovered that this can also play Master System ROMs. I tried other simple things that should run
on this board like PC-Engine, Lynx, and Wonderswan and all of those seem to be out of the question. I’m left with the thought that this could
at least be a better product than it is if the software were better. There are simple things that do not have access
to like remapping buttons, or adding other light emulation systems. The company claims that this is an SL4350
SoC, but that doesn’t exist. Let’s do a teardown to try and get some
answers. With the back shell off, we can get a clear
look at the processor, or we would if they hadn’t gone to the extreme length of sanding
down the identification markings. You really only see stuff like this with the
ultra-budget handhelds where companies are so worried that someone will come around and
just do a complete hardware clone of their product. I don’t know for sure what this processor
is, but I can take a wild guess. It’s either a very low-end Allwinner chip,
a low-end MIPS chip, or it’s a repurposed mirrorcast processor like the Russian lads
over at 4pda found in other datafrog gaming hardware. Let’s wrap up this video with my pros and
cons. On the pros side, this thing is dirt cheap. Even without the coupon applied, $24 with
free shipping is a steal of a deal even if you only want this as a paperweight. It’s got a decent screen, good buttons,
and it has a user-replaceable battery. The speaker is also not that bad for a mono
speaker, although I wish they would have included a second one. For cons, we just have a few. The top of the list would be the screen tearing
issue, but this can be mitigated if you only use this to play certain games that don’t
have a lot of movement. I think the stock firmware is kind of crap
and not being able to remap buttons sucks in systems that only use two buttons. I also do not like that bilinear filtering
is enabled for every system without the ability to turn it off. That’s basically it. Even if the screen tearing issue cannot be
fixed, this product could be a lot better with custom firmware, but I don’t think
the company will allow that to happen if they went to the lengths of sanding off their processor. Oh well. If you enjoyed this video, take a look at
my review of the Trim UI Smart. That’s a good product with a bit more power
than this. Happy gaming everyone, Taki out.
