I’ve been trying to get my hands on an NES
Classic for the last 6 months, but I’ve refused to pay the hundreds of dollars that
they are selling for on ebay by scalpers. So, I figured I would just wait until Nintendo
got the supply caught up with the demand. But, now I’m being told that they’ve actually
cancelled the NES classic, and that there will be no more production of it. So, I thought
it was time to look into, you know, maybe some of the alternatives. Now, of course,
you could go with the original NES, like this one. They’re not hard to find. There’s
plenty of them out there. But they do tend to actually cost quite a bit these days and
they do have some maintenance issues, plus you have to collect the actual physical hardware
cartridges. Ebay and amazon are just littered with aftermarket consoles, so I decided to
pick up a few of them to look at. The first one I’m going to show you here is called
the 8-Bit Video Game System. This was the cheapest unit I bought, which cost only $18
on Amazon. The box has some very good advice on the back here. it talks about the need
to clean the old games. It actually suggests NOT blowing into them, and instead cleaning
them. It mentions HDTV causing delays, and to set your TV to game mode and 4:3 aspect
ratio. So let’s take a look inside the box and see what it comes with. OK, so here’s
the console itself. It’s quite small. In fact, compare it’s size to the original
Nintendo here. it does have the same color scheme, though. This console is pretty basic.
Just audio and video ports on the back, and controller ports on the front that are compatible
with the original NES controllers. And although you can use you original NES controllers,
it does come with two of its own. And to be honest, while these do feel kind of cheap,
they don’t really feel any cheaper than the original controllers from the 80s. They
shape is a little more comfortable in the hand, but the button layout is the same. Also
the cables are almost as long as the original NES cables. And, I know that has been a sore
point on the new NES classic. So, let’s try a game on it. First I’ll connect it
up to my television. I tried turning it on with no cartridge in it, and it gives this
weird pattern on the screen. So, I’m going to try Super Mario Brothers 2. Wow, look at
that. The cartridge actually looks kind of huge sticking out of this little guy. But,
it does work. To be honest, it feels perfectly natural playing this game, even with these
controllers. And, I think if nobody told me I was playing an aftermarket machine, I would
have never known the difference. However, I decided to hook this up to my video capture
card and have a look at the video output in a little more detail. And again.. even here
it looks perfectly fine to me. However, when I took some still frames and zoomed in, so
the colors seem pretty close, but there’s some difference in the brightness level of
some of the darker colors. Also the real NES seems to have a little bit more background
noise than the clone. But there is another difference that I kept noticing, but it took
me a while to figure out exactly what it is. If you compare these images from this angle,
you’ll see there are black areas on the left and right of the aftermarket. At first
I thought the aspect ratio was just wrong, but when I compared different things on the
screen, they were the same. Eventually I realized the aftermarket consoles were not showing
the screen border correctly. However, as you can see this was not even visible on a real
TV because it is outside of the viewable area anyway. So, you might ask, how could I compare
this to the NES Classic, because you still have to buy, or find, or whatever, all of
the original cartridges and the NES Classic has like 30 built in games and you get the
whole thing for like $60, assuming you could find one without paying the scalpers on ebay.
So, you might say, “how is that a comparable deal?” Well, I can actually match that.
I bought this guy on Amazon and it has 143 games built in. And it only cost me $50. So,
as you can see, when I put this thing in the console, it just comes up with a menu and
tons and tons of games. Now, honestly, I’m not sure if this is legal. I have a suspicion
these are not legitimately licensed games. So, I often have a saying. If a company does
not want to actively make their product available for sale, then I don’t shed too many tears
when people pirate the material. And since Nintendo apparently has no further interest
in selling their own 8-Bit console on the market, then what can I say? Legal or not,
these appear to be scattered all over ebay and amazon. For those that are interested,
I wrote down all of the games that come on this and put them in the description field
because none of the advertisements for this cartridge actually show what games are on
it. I was sort of curious myself until I got it in the mail so I could plug it in. Also,
this cartridge is sort of infuriating as a collector. You see, I keep wanting to expand
my collection of original cartridge titles. But if I have all of them on one cartridge,
where’s the fun in that? Out of curiosity, I wondered if this would work in the original
console with the lockout chip and everything. And sure enough, it works fine. Although I
did notice one difference, which probably has nothing to do with the cartridge. If you
take a listen to the background, you’ll hear a faint humming noise, which is common
for analog signals like this. But if we go back to the aftermarket console, I noticed
it has a much louder hum. I can’t hear this when the games are playing, but because this
cartridge stays quiet on the menu, I noticed. Moving along, heres’s the next console I
want to show you. It’s called the Retro-Bit. It’s a little more expensive, at $59 it
costs over three times what the previous console cost. But it does have some interesting advantages.
The most obvious feature is that it has 3 cartridge ports and you can quite literally
insert an NES cartridge, Super Nintendo, and a Sega Genesis cartridge all at the same time.
This selector switch here will determine which one you are playing. It has multiple connectors
for all 3 styles of the original controllers, but It also comes with its own controllers
as well, that appear to use the super Nintendo style ports. On the back it does have the
standard audio video ports, but also an S-Video port as well. And it comes with it’s own
S-Video cable bundled with the regular ones. As for playing the console, I couldn’t see
any noticeable difference from it over the last console I showed you. However, the controller
proved to be irritating. You see on the original NES controllers, your A & B buttons are here,
but on this controller, they are here and they are even backwards from how you would
expect. So, now I’m sure you can adapt to this, but I did find it initially irritating.
So, as for video comparison, thing I was most interested in was how it looked between composite
and S-Video. Now, to the naked eye it is hard to sell a huge difference. But take a look
at this closeup. So the S-Video has a color rendition more similar to the original Nintendo.
But the image does seem to be a little soft, for some reason compared to the composite.
I would have normally expected it to be the other way around. So, next I tried playing
a Super Nintnedo game, Super Mario Kart. What’s interesting is that when looking at the difference
between composite and S-Video, you can see a fairly significant clarity difference here.
I also tried a Gensis game in it, and it seemed to work about the same. I also tried flicking
this NTSC switch over to PAL but it doesn’t seem to do anything at all. In fact, my capture
card insisted that it was outputting NTSC video the whole time. When I forced my capture
card to PAL mode, the video image looked like this. So I think it is correct. I have no
idea what the switch is for unless it is simply to tell the games themselves what format they
are supposed to be on. All right, so the next console I want to show you is the Generation
Nex. Now, unfortunately, they don’t actually make this console anymore, but you can still
find them on places like ebay and Amazon. I picked this one up recently for$50. Notice
it has a front-loading cartridge slot, much like the original NES, but also has a top
loading slot for the Japanese Famicom games. Notice it does have stereo audio outputs.
I’m told that it does support stereo, but only for newer games that take advantage of
it. I haven’t been able to find any examples of games that do. The power button and reset
are on the top and a little hard to see. If you compare it to an NES, you’ll see it
is much smaller and because it has front loading games, it is a much lower profile than the
8-Bit console, once a cartridge is installed, which is good if you are sticking this in
an entertainment center or something. Now the controllers are interesting because it
has these turbo and slow buttons and I’m quite curious how they work. I’m also curious
what these rear buttons do. So I decided it was time to open this adorable owners manual
that looks like a game cartridge. It says the buttons work just like a touch screen.
And slow motion will slow a game down to a snail’s pace. I don’t really get how that’s
possible, but I guess I’ll just have to plug it in and try it out. So when playing
Super Mario Brothers 2, I tried repeatedly touching the slow and turbo buttons and nothing
seemed to ever happen. I did discover that the buttons on the rear work identical to
the A & B buttons, so that mystery is solved. I thought maybe I should try the turbo and
slow on a different game, maybe a shooter style game. Well, at first they still didn’t
seem to do anything, but then I realized the manual was wrong, you don’t treat them like
a touch screen, rather you have to really press them moderately hard like a real button.
So yeah, so the slow motion just acts like it is pushing pause a million times. And while
this is rather annoying, I can see how it might still give you an advantage on some
games where quick decision making is the key to winning. I also got the turbo fire button
to work, and you can see even on this game it makes a difference.. See, this is the regular
firing speed, and this is with turbo on. So let’s take a look at some closeup screenshots
as compared to the original NES. This has about the same appearance as the other aftermarket
consoles I’ve shown. The last console I want to show you is not an NES clone, however,
I thought it went really well with this video. It’s actually a Gameboy Color clone. It’s
called the GB Boy. It’s called the GB Boy Color. It’s too bad they couldn’t have
picked a more creative name. You can see it comes in 3 different colors, mine is blue
of course. And on the back they have some questionable English. The thing that stood
out the most is that it claims to have a front light, but I’m pretty sure this is actually
a backlight. Anyway, lets open the box and have a look. It was literally packaged just
like this. There appears to be a manual of some sort crammed down here… For all the
good it does, all of the instructions are in Chinese. Ahh, I love that feeling of peeling
off factory screen protection. So, let’s compare it with the original GameBoy Color
from 1998. Looks pretty similar. Volume and data cable on the left. Headphone and power
port on the bottom. Yep same. Power switch on the right. Yep! Same again. And at last,
cartridge port and infrared on the rear. Yep, all exactly the same. So, I’m going to start
by showing you the most important difference. Looking at the original gameboy, I’m going
to insert a game and power it on. As you can see, the screen is not backlit. It’s really
hard to find an angle that gives you the best lighting of the screen, but also doesn’t
cause a glare. And if you turn the light off, it’s darned near impossible to play. But
not the GB Boy Color! It’s backlit screen makes a HUGE difference and can be played
equally well in both a well lit room, or in total darkness. This is a feature I would
have certainly paid extra for back in the 90s and is baffling to me why Nintendo didn’t
offer it at the time. It isn’t like other systems weren’t already using backlights
during that time. Here’s another interesting thing. If you power it on with no game in
the slot, it comes up to this screen claiming to have 188 built in games. So, I’ll pick
one, like Super Mario Land. Yep, it’s the original game, and I question the legality
of this as well. However, I can assure you that there aren’t 188 games on here. I noticed
a lot of duplicates scattered throughout the list. So, I wrote them all down and determined
that there were really only 66 unique games, with most of the games being on the list two
or three times. I couldn’t see any difference between the multiple copies. However, a lot
of the games on here are just garbage games. And some of them aren’t even in English.
I don’t know if this is Chinese or Japanese because I can’t read either one. But, I
know I certainly can’t play these games like this. So, there are really only about
maybe 10 actually good, playable games on here. And these aren’t even Gameboy Color
games. I mean, sure the games have color, but even the original black and white gameboy
games usually had very basic colors programmed into them for future use, such as the Super
Gameboy and the Gameboy color. But none of the games that are built in are actually real
Gameboy Color games that make use of larger color palettes. Of course, if you insert your
own gameboy color games, it seems to play them all perfectly in full color. Another
thing I should probably mention, is that I think they just used an off-the-shelf LCD
screen on this thing, probably something from a digital camera. And it the sub-pixel rendering
organization is not really optimum for gameboy games. If you take a look at this closeup
of the screen, you can see that the mountains look at little broken in places. So, what’s
going on here is that the original gameboy had a grayscale screen with more or less square
pixels. When the gameboy color came out, they moved to a color screen that still kept the
same basic shape of the pixels, but now had red. green, and blue subpixels. And so, the
games translated really well. This screen, however, uses a totally different sub-pixel
technique that is fine for photographs and things, but not great for games. Still, I
can’t complain too much about this because, honestly, I was playing it for 30 minutes
before I even noticed. Plus, when things are in motion, it’s impossible to even tell.
So, if you do enjoy playing the old gameboy games and you actually like having tactile
controls, you know, things you can actually feel with your fingers when you play them,
then I actually recommend this unit. And despite some of the shortcomings that it has, I think
it’s a superior experience to playing the original Gameboy Color. And it has really
nothing to do with the pirated games that it has built into it, because, like I said,
there’s only like maybe 10 of them in there worth playing. The main thing is just the
backlit screen. That really makes all the difference in the world. I am also putting
the list of 66 games included in the ROM down in the description field, because much like
the other cartridge I showed, there’s actually not a listing anywhere on the box or in the
advertisement for this product. Probably because they’re not legal copies so they probably
don’t want to throw the names out of all the different things they’re pirating, but
anyway for those that are interested you can take a look. You know, this is really what
the Gameboy Color should have been from the very beginning when it was produced back in
1998. And it’s not like there weren’t other portable consoles using a backlit color
screen, so I don’t really know why it wasn’t included. But, the only thing they could do
to really make this better, in my opinion, is to put a larger screen on it. I mean, I
know it’s roughly the same size as the original gameboy screen, so I can’t complain too
much about that, but there is actually space here. You know, they could make that screen
another inch or two bigger. And that would actually be really cool. I’d pay extra for
that! OK, so I should mention one more thing about all of the Nintendo clones. That, they
were all basically on the same “Nintendo on a Chip” architecture. Which means they
all suffer from the same problems and incompatibilities. In fact, there’s a short list out there
of a very small number of games that will not work, most likely on any of the aftermarket
consoles. I don’t actually own any of those games, so it doesn’t really affect me. But,
I will point out one thing, and this affects all of these systems, even the original Nintendo
in comparison with the NES classic. The Classic does have one thing going for it in that it
does have HDMI video output. Now, none of the games are going to be high definition
even when running on HDMI, because they just simply weren’t designed for it. But, the
image will be sharper and clearer as a result of being on HDMI. Not only that, it probably
makes it somewhat easier to connect to some of the more modern televisions. I should point
out that there is at least one other console out there, called the RetroUSB AVS which actually
uses its own custom chips and thus is in a different league than these clones, it also
has HDMI output. But it costs $185 and it was out of stock at the time I was trying
to make this video, so I wasn’t able to show it. It also has 4 controller ports, but
I’m not sure which games would use that. So, out of all of these consoles, which one
is my favorite? Well, I’m probably still going to go with the original NES as my favorite,
but admittedly, like I said, these sometimes can have reliability and maintenance issues
because they’re getting very old. So, my next favorite console probably is the Generation
Nex. Even though these are a few years old now, they do seem to hold up pretty well and
I like the front loading on it. Not only that, but after I finally noticed the buzzing sound
on this guy, it actually kind of started to drive me nuts! And this has actually a very
quiet audio on it. So, I also like that about it. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this episode
and leave me some comments and tell me what you think.
