(uptempo dramatic music) - We are looking at the
sub-$100 price range today for emulators. This is a sort of a rough area, because devices around this price point will have just enough power to almost play your retro 3D games, but in most cases you'd probably want to pony up the extra couple of bucks to get a device that can play all the way up through GameCube. (screen stuttering) There it is, oh All right, okay. I've been told that the PowKiddy X55 is among the best value you
can get in gaming right now. It's just 90 bucks, and tops out at N64,
DS, and PSP emulation, which is pretty respectable. I haven't really loved PowKiddy. I think their devices are pretty ugly, and their last device
that I played around with made me lose faith in the whole industry. But these days emulation
gotten a lot better. These days you can get your
hands on a retro handheld that works right out of the box without emulator setting adjusting or custom firmware flashing,
or any of that nonsense. This thing is Linux based, but it comes stock with a great
EmulationStation-like front end. This is yet another contender
for something worth getting if you don't want to mess
around with your retro handheld, but I will definitely have to
compare it to some other stuff in the price point, because I'm not sure I love it either. (uptempo dramatic music) This video is sponsored by Surfshark. Oh boy, we're in trouble now. My Discord's been hacked. - [Dog] What, your Discord? How's that possible, we always use a VPN. - Well, I-
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- Nothing. You asked a dog to help you. Can you let me out, I gotta pee and bark. - All right. First off, it seems like
somebody's opened this box already. I'm not sure if that's part
of the buying experience or if that's just because
I was sent this to review. Thank you, KeepRetro. This front end is EmuELEC,
which we've seen before. It's based off of EmulationStation, which is usually my preferred front end. So, so far this is a great experience except I absolutely hate
when front ends have music. (uptempo electronic music) Shut up. Why are we playing music on a
portable device home screen? I thought we left that
behind in the last decade. Imagine if your phone
just starts playing music every time you unlock it. Fortunately you can turn
that off into settings. You just have to find the toggle for it, because turning down the
volume isn't a permanent fix. Now, it might look aluminum, like some of the Anbernics,
but it's just plastic. It has a nice sheen to it though, which makes it look aluminum. But the form factor is nice. I like the little back bumps. Makes it feel like a tiny Steam Deck. The D-pad is nice and big. I'd love it if it were on top but it feels fine the way that it is. You've got the Joy-Con thumbs
sticks that everyone's using. The volume up is on the left and the volume down is on
the right for some reason. Very, very clicky shoulder buttons, and a large 720P screen. It's a very nice screen, but I'm not sure it needs all this. DS games do greatly benefit
from this long screen though. One day somebody's gotta make a device with a screen like this that's just vertical with the controllers on the side. Something for DS and like tape mode games. I think that dual screen devices or just long vertical devices
might be a next year thing. I think next year we'll see
a couple of these companies make like clamshell dual screen stuff 'cause they're gonna start
running out of ideas. I tooled around with the
stock OS a little bit, hoping to be able to leave it as is without having to put
custom firmware on it, because I do really like that
front end that it ships with. Usually when I do these types of videos, I just jump straight to whatever
the most powerful system is that I'm interested in, and just play whatever is like a really system intensive game. That is no good.
(screen stuttering) The first thing I tried was "Perfect Dark" which stutters on most lower end devices, and it performed very, very bad on here. The audio also has those familiar popping and crackling glitches
that I've heard before. Absolutely not. It's also widescreen by default but I fixed that in the
settings pretty easily. N64 should not be this
difficult to emulate on a $90 device in 2023. Next I tried "Mario 64," which is a little
lighter in terms of load, and it performed better, but it still stuttered
more than it should have. I would not recommend this
for N64 in this state. No.
(Mario cheering) Then I jumped over to DS simulation, because it came with DS games, and to my surprise that ran great. It looks and plays pretty good. My only complaint here is
that there is no touch screen so you have to use the right analog stick to move the cursor around, and for some reason, right stick click does
not click in the cursor, left stick click does. That's dumb. Also, another gripe with the stock OS, holding down the power button
does not turn the device off. Clicking it in once puts it to sleep but the only way to turn it off completely is to go into the system settings, go to quit and then shut down. That's the only way to do it. That's a little dumb. If we're gonna be rating this
on the stock firmware alone, I'd probably rate it pretty poorly. I wanna give it some points for having a good experience
right out of the box, and it does play most stuff pretty good, and it plays DSS pretty good, so you can get it for
DS if you really want, but it plays N64 so poorly that I would probably recommend
just getting something else. I crap on Retroid a lot, and I did not get their
brand new Retroid Pocket 2S, because I think it's just
too similar to the 2+ that I have already, but at a $100, either one of those
would probably be great if you just wanted to do N64
emulation, that's hard to beat. Now I wouldn't do DS emulation on that, because the screen is a little tiny, and the screen is a little better for that on this pow PowKiddy X55, but I would think the best DS emulator is just a DS Lite and an R4. There's no beating that, because
it's not really emulating, and it's super easy to set up. (slow relaxing music) But we're not gonna stop there. We're gonna put some custom
firmware on this thing to see how much value we can really get out of this $90 device. The custom firmware of
choice seems to be JELOS and I used Retro Game
course guide, of course, to put that on here but really it's just as simple as taking the JELOS X55 fork
that they have available on their GitHub, and flashing it to your microSD card, the first slot, using balenaEtcher, and I left the second microSD
card completely untouched. That's the one that has all
of the games and ROMs on it that came preloaded, so I was able to keep all
of my preloaded games too. It was very simple So far in terms of ease of
use, and ease of upgrading, this was a great experience. I want to give it points
for that if nothing else. After a lengthy boot while the new OS got everything situated I jumped right back into "Perfect Dark," it definitely runs significantly better. There's still some stutters, and it's not perfect,
but it's playable now. I allow a certain amount of frame skips when I'm testing N64, because even the actual
N64 dips frames constantly. What the hell? I'd say the emulation
quality here is fine. "Super Mario 64" ran way
better this time too, or so I thought I'm coming
in here in the edit, because I was shooting some B-roll and two days after I installed JELOS. - Yippee!
- Why do these run so bad all of a sudden. It was running worse again, I don't know, I had a good day with
it, and then a bad day, and N64 started running bad again. I don't understand. I do think there's some
weird stuff going on with the scaling. Its window-boxed, so it looks like they're
trying to scale it correctly but you still see a lot of sharp lines. DS ran good before, and
we're still looking good now. I don't know why I decided to test PSP only after I installed
the custom firmware. I guess I had no faith
that it would run good after that poor N64 performance. I jumped right into "Metal
Gear: Peace Walker," because that's really the only
PSP game that I care about, and that had no audio, glitched menus, and it ran at an unplayable frame rate and I also tried "Gran Turismo," and that was pretty bad too. One minor change in the OS
is that the power button, if you hold it, now it turns
the whole system off I think. Come on. There you go. Isn't that a novel concept? Some other things that might
sweeten the deal for you on the PowKiddy X55 is that it has wifi, which means that if you
add any extra ROMs on here, you can very easily scrape those ROMs for extra box art and stuff. So everything will look
all nice and pretty. This also means you can stream
Steam games with Moonlight if you want to try to figure
out how to get that set up. I can't be bothered to do that. It also has a mini HDMI out. That's something that I never
use on these types of devices, because there's always
a weird little problem and it's always just
easier to use something, like a Nintendo Switch, a Steam Deck, or even just a Windows
PC to do your HDMI out if you need it. And on this it just drops
the frame rate to a crawl. No thank you. The PowKiddy X55 is being compared to last year's Anbernic RG552, which I gave a pretty bad review to. That did get better with some custom firmware
updates in the past year, but that device is currently over $180. If for some reason you're trying to choose between the PowKiddy X55 and the RG552, I mean this seems like a no brainer, because this is only $90. The other one's $100 more. If you're looking for something
that can do N64 emulation, I still think the Retroid Pocket 2+ or the S2 is your best bet. All these things are dead. If you want DS on top of that, get a DS light or 3Ds. It's so easy to hack. If you want PSP specifically for a game that you know is super light on the system then maybe this is a
good deal maybe, maybe. Oh man. But probably not. Otherwise it's almost always
gonna end up being worth it to either spend a couple
bucks extra on something, like an RG 405 M that
I just made a video on, or one of the more powerful Retroids, or it might be worth
it to save some money, and get something like the
RG35XX, or the Miyoo Mini Plus if you can live without N64, DS and PSP. In my opinion, this $100 price point just ain't
it for emulation right now. The sweet spots seem to be around $60, or 150 to $200. Anything in between that is gonna come with some compromises. So you guys think about PowKiddy X55. Is there a use case for
this that I'm missing? Is there something I should
try on this that I didn't that might change my opinion? Is there an idea that you have for it that might make it work good for you? Leave it in the comments
below, at me on Twitter, and any and all of this
other social media garbage. Thank you Surfshark for coming
back, sponsoring the video. Welcome back, check them
out at the link below. If you're interested in this, or any of the other devices
that I talked about, I have links below to keepretro.com. They're the ones who send it to me, and those are affiliate
links, thank you very much. Don't forget about my Twitch streams over on twitch.tv/wulffden. But the most important thing you can do to help support us here is just subscribe. Thank you very much and share
this video with a friend, a friend who is looking
at getting a device like one of these in this price point. Thank you very much, have
yourself a good week.
