It's a BIG and CHUNKY GameBoy! (RG405v Review)

do you like retro games yeah do you like to play the mod retro handhelds yeah do but do you find most retro head helds to be a little too small yeah well then what do you think about this wow well you can't have it it's mine a but you can each have one of your own awesome hey there I'm Tech wee welcome thanks for clicking on the video today there is a trend in the handheld space to make Sleek small thin lightweight devices it seems that everything's going towards a minimalist approach with tight control layouts that leave no wasted space sure they're not as comfortable as they would be if they were bigger and bulkier but at least they could fit in your pocket right well not all of them obviously yeah that sort of thing however there are probably some people who aren't into that Trend some people who find these things a little too cramped too awkward and just uncomfortable if only there were more handhelds that did away with all this Sleek efficiency and I just made something big I like them big I like them chunky I like my RG 405 V because it's big it's it's a big it's a big hand ritual handheld is what up this ladies and gentlemen is the RG 405 V it is the kind of vertical sequel to The RG 405m which I loved it has the same screen size and the same internal components but apart from that the 405m couldn't be more different than the 405 V this is a big boy headheld when I unbox a new device and get it into my hands for the first time I could usually instantly tell if I'm going to like it or not based purely on how it feels in my hands but the RG 405 V was the first that threw me for a loop I didn't know how I felt about it and I've been using it for over a week now and it's taken me a while to decide I don't think there will be many people that are will be neutral about this thing I I think most people are either going to love it to bits and it'll be their new favorite device for all time and they'll leave it in their will to their grandkids or they're going to hate it to bits and literally run outside and throw it into traffic the moment that they touch it for the first time however we have to give credit where credit is due in a world of devices that are all the same basic size the same basic shape in a world of copycats amernick is doing something different with the rg405 V there are no other handhelds out there like it so thanks amernick for spicing things up a bit I'm all for it before we get uh too far along let's go over the specs this thing is powered by the uniso tiger t618 chip which is called that because the man who invented it had 618 pet tigers we also get four gigabytes of lpddr4x Reb 128 gigabytes of emmc internal storage with micro SD card expansion 5G Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0 one USBC port for charging but we have no video capabilities unfortunately the system is running a custom build of Android 12 and we get a whopping 550 mAh battery in this big old booty which will give you around 9 hours of game time it's 282 G or 7.5 Twinkies for my American audience and it smells like plastic this thing is a big it's a it's a really big hand up it's bigger than an original game boy and that's saying a lot because the original gay boy is a freaking brick if you found that lots of these retro head helds can be a bit on the small side a bit cramped then the RG 405 V might be the headheld that you've been waiting for I know lots of people complained about the way it looks but I love it I love the original Game Boy Vibe of my model 2 that that's the flavor of the head helds that I choose the most often as you've probably noticed one thing I'm happy about here is the color of the gray on the 353 V and the RG 35xx they went with a stark colorless gray but then on the RG 353 PS abler dick mixed it up and went with a warmer beige color which looks way better and I was very happy to see that they went with the same color here but and that's a big butt we can't talk about the look of this thing without taking a peek around back and oh baby look at that booty this thing has some seriously big grips which do look silly but they're not there to look cool they're there to be comfortable and I I get what they're going for and it more or less works but here's the thing whether you find the the shape of this comfortable will highly depend on the the your hand size and shape I find the bouquet but they're a little bit awkward I find my long skinny fingers can't quite find the perfect spot to rest here and overall I think they're a bit too angular that's how it feels in my hands I they probably should have had a more rounded shape to this stuff in my my opinion not that it's uncomfortable far from it it's one of the most comfortable devices that I have definitely the most comfortable retro handheld it's just a shame that it's going to fall short of its potential for lots of people because of how specific it is the screen on this thing is Big this is a 4in screen which feels way bigger than the 3.5 in screen if you don't have the best eyesight or if you just like a nice big visual experience then this screen will probably feel great for you the actual quality of this screen is fine it it has a decent pixel density and it's a touchscreen which is important for Android not the best viewing angles and it's not super bright but it's it's pretty good it's fine however one thing that amerck did he that they did on the 405m and I hated it there is that they have a sharpening filter applied globally to the whole device from the operating system to the games everything looks like it has a Cheesy Photoshop sharpening filter applied to it there is a fix for that and I'll explain it in a bit but it's just freaking annoying that amernick is doing this like does anyone actually think this looks good the speakers are okay not terrible but not amazing they're they're loud enough but not very clear when they're at higher volumes and there's a slight Buzz to them when you turn them all the way up a pretty standard cheap Retro handheld speaker quality I guess so this is an Amer dick device which means something that's not a joke by the way Amer dick is really consistent with their controls unlike some companies that said there are a few changes from the amernick format that we have here my current main device is the RG 353 V so I'll use that to compare one thing is that the d-pad is sort of rounded it's got like soft edges and I love that change it feels very good under my finger and it's also a bit higher up from the shell same thing with the buttons and I I like the feel of this stuff in general oh and the d-pad does not give false diagonals by the way it passes the Contra test however the joysticks are kind of crappy actually they say they're Hall sticks but if that's the case then maybe Hall sticks aren't all there cracked up to be they they don't feel smooth they're imprecise and they snap to the cardal direction so it'll be hard to do any sort of accurate movement and they're in a weird position too like like my thumbs touch when I'm using both at once so they feel kind of cramped even though the device itself is Big it's not the end of the world I can live with them but I do wish they were better and one more gripe that I have here is with the shoulder buttons it's very easy to accidentally let your finger put a little bit too much pressure and push them by mistake I think if these were a bit more firm like they are on the RG 353 V that would probably help a lot before we get into the games let's talk about the system itself we are running amerck custom version of Android 12 here and the the emulators are all pre-installed and ready to rock and if you bought this device from amernick or a reseller there's a good chance that it came with an SD card full of games amernick has its own custom game launcher application as well and you can switch back and forth between that and the Android Launcher with this little button on the left side which is kind of neat and it works the the games launch and you can play them and the controls and hot Keys work but in typical Amer Nick Fashion the the games Library totally sucks they have a ton of duplicate games and foreign language games and missing games and there's only art for a few of the games and the art is weird plus they did that thing that Amer Nick loves to do and put nonsensical numbers in front of the game names so these aren't in alphabetical order on on some of the systems but they are on others and I found that there are games on the SD card that aren't in the right folders so they're not being detected in the front end like 30 gigabytes of games on the card are not showing up in the front end because they're in the wrong place on the on the card this is it's super amateur stuff Ambler dick just sucks at making ROM sets which is baffling because this should be so easy outside of the Amer dick launcher it's a pretty standard Android experience you could use the Play Store to download Android games and other emulators or other frends you can launch Standalone emulators and load your games yourself there's a pretty basic built-in screen mapper to map your physical controls to touchscreen functions and you can also set the CPU profile to Auto for battery saving or high for Max performance and you can change the fan speed oh did I mention there's a fan it only makes a difference for the very high-end games and even then it's barely any difference at all and the fan is kind of loud so I usually don't bother with it so I don't like the aeric game launcher and I hate the sharpening that they have applied however there is an early build of gamma OS which is a custom firmware that you can install that fixes the sharpening issue and it has some other quality of life improvements I will make a video when I do install it showing how to install it and how I set up the emulation front end and how I organize my games and you'll want to get subscribed so you don't miss that on to the performance I'm not going to go super in depth here because this t618 chipset has been benchmarked to death you're going to get pretty much the exact same performance that we got on the rp3 plus and the retroid pocket flip and the RG 405m and the pal K x28 there's nothing new here but I'll give you the big picture so for the older stuff the screen on this thing has a 640x480 resolution which means that we can use uh integer scaling on the NES to get a nice big Pixel Perfect Image we won't get full screen Pixel Perfect scaling on Game Boy or Game Boy Color but we have enough pixels to work with here that they still look great uh at full screen without integer scaling and we get nearly full screen integer scaling on Super Nintendo and we get Pixel Perfect integer scaling on turbor graphic 16 and Sega Genesis not only that but we have the horsepower to use shaders so even more intensive CRT shaders like my favorite CRT Gom will run perfectly fine without any slow down or stuttering playing these 8 bit and 16 bit at 32-bit games like this really completes the Retro feeling on this thing I've also enjoyed arcade games on here too because those games tend to be a bit more bright and colorful a bit more of a feast For The Senses so overall these old systems are so fun to play on here and they look freaking awesome on this big screen early 3D stuff is going to be no problem either that PS1 Nintendo 64 Saga Saturn there won't be any games from those systems that won't run at full speed even the trickier stuff like the harder to run Nintendo 60 four games I complained about the analog sticks earlier but honestly if you're not playing something that requires extreme precisions then these will work totally fine I love my RG 353 V but it can't handle every Nintendo 64 game without slowdown but this thing absolutely can there's lots you can play on here but I think Nintendo 64 is my favorite system because it runs so well and the controls feel great and the big screen lends itself well to these early 3D systems and they don't even push the hardware that hard you can get a ton of battery life playing these games PSP and Nintendo DS and 3DS are doable you you can absolutely play any PSP game or DS game at lots of 3DS games but it's not ideal because of the screen PSP is a widescreen system so on a 4x3 screen like this they'll be pretty small with substantial letter box bars on the screen and DS and 3DS are dual screen systems obviously so some games will be all right if it's mostly one screen but some won't I like Nintendo DS emulation and I guess it's cool that you can use the touchcreen here but honestly I think you'd have many better ways to use this thing other than doing DS or 3DS emulation for example what about Dreamcast Dreamcast is amazing there won't be any Dreamcast games that you can't run even the higher end stuff will run fine without any slow down or stud rig or anything and they actually do look amazing on this screen as well these games ran at 640 by 480 resolution which is exactly what we have here so just as a portable Dreamcast machine this thing is freaking perfect GameCube is going to be pretty good although you'll have to expect to make some uh settings changes and maybe install some different versions of dolphin to get lots of the games to run also having the European version of the ROMs helps because those run at 50 FPS instead of 60 FPS which is a much easier Target to be able to get full speed about 50% of the GameCube Library will run at full speed completely Problem free and 25 will run but you'll need to make some tweaks and 25% will not be playable I have a GameCube emulation guide that I made for the rp3 plus and everything in there applies to the 405 V since it's the same system in the same chip I'll include a link to that in the description below if you want to know how to get the best GameCube performance on this thing and PS2 is going to be okay I'd estimate maybe 50 to 60% of PS2 games are going to run well enough to be able to be playable but even though the most demanding games won't run there are a ton of amazing PS2 games that will run my two favorite PS2 games Red Dead Revolver and Evil Dead regeneration that they both run completely Problem free so keep your expectations in check and you'll probably be pleasantly surprised at the quality of things you'll be able to get rot here okay so whether or not that this is going to be right for you is going to come down to what you need need what you expect and what shape your hands are just be aware of the rest of the shortcomings that I mentioned in this video and if you're okay with them then you'll probably be pretty happy with with this thing overall the biggest thing that's going to make or break this device for most people is going to be the handfield and unfortunately you won't know for yourself until you get this in your hands but if you've been looking for a bigger vertical handheld if you've found these things just a little too small and cramped then this will probably be the the one you want to get there are lots of other options like the rp3 plus and the retroid pocket flip and the 405m and the pow KD x28 or the retroid pocket 2s the review of that one coming soon by the way but if like me you really like vertical forbat devices this is currently the best that you could get and the icing on the cake the the thing that I didn't know how good it was until I actually started using it is the battery life holy crap this thing lasts for ever this thing would be great to bring with you on a long flight like if you were flying to Wisconsin to to visit the root beer Museum then you could play Nintendo 64 games on the 405 V the whole way there and back and still have enough juice left over to play Burger time while drinking the root beer that you stole from the root beer Museum you monster so I'm going to give the RG 405 V 13 antique root beers out of 17 and I'll throw in a copy of the 1988 film big on VHS because it's big if you want to pick one of these up I'll include a link in the description below and that brings us to the end thanks for watching that stuff thanks as always to my generous patrons who help make what I do possible if you'd like to support your favorite tech weeb there's a link to my patreon page in the description below when you're done here maybe check out my review of the RG 405m that's another great device and a good choice if you're interested in this thing there's a link on the screen right now and at the top of the description below for your convenience and you can go check that out now because we're done here un Tech wee thanks for watching bye-bye

Channel: TechDweeb

Views: 89,044

Keywords: techdweeb, tech, dweeb, retro, emulation, dreamcast, ps2, psp, ps1, psx, playstation, n64, nintendo, nes, gameboy, gba, advance, colour, snes, super, saturn, sega, genesis, mega drive, gamegear, amiga, spectrum, commodore, pc, atari, 2600, turbografx, pc engine, gamecube, wii, ds, 3ds, switch, ps3, xbox, emulator, games, retroarch, core, mame, arcade, fba, neo geo, handheld, anbernic, 405m, retroid pocket 3+, rp3+, rg505, rg35xx, miyoo mini, performance, android, retro handheld, rg405v, vetical, big, thicc, chunky

Id: 2tqXodEjB8g

Length: 17min 47sec (1067 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 19 2023