$90 and Amazing for Retro Emulation (RGB30 Review)

[Music] hey everybody this is Russ from Metro game core today I have a unique review video we're going to be talking about the pow Kitty RGB 30. now I kind of have a love and hate relationship with this company they often will make devices that have some pretty unique ideas but with some glaring errors every once in a while they do get it right for example the pal Kitty x55 is a device I reviewed a couple months back and honestly I really enjoyed that one in fact I still am calling that one my favorite device under 100 and honestly as soon as they release the x55 I was good with pow Kitty for the rest of the year I figured once a year if they get it all right then that's good I didn't expect them to release another great device but here we are with this RGB 30 and it's kind of unique because the things I like about the x55 the Stacked shoulder buttons the larger screen they're not on the RGB 30. this is a completely different device even though they are at the same price point and have the same chip inside instead what makes the RGB 30 unique is its screen this is a one by one aspect ratio so a square screen which you would think is not going to work very well for certain systems but it turns out that it does because it has a high resolution this is a 720p display this means that when it comes to pixel scaling and things like that it's actually going to work out really well and that's what we're going to dive into in this video here every time I post a picture of this device on social media I've found that people will have a lot of opinions they'll often say that it's going to be great for these systems and terrible for these other ones and it's funny because many times those are incorrect statements and so that's what I want to clarify in this video here is specifically what systems are going to work best on this device and I'll actually break this video up by system so you can see specifically whether or not it's going to be great for Super Nintendo or whether or not it's going to work with Game Boy Advance we'll tackle all that in this video here after spending a week or so testing this device in its screen I came away really impressed in fact I'm not ready to say that it's the best device under 100 because it is kind of Niche but all the same it is really up there as a contender at that price point in fact it's actually replaced certain devices that I use for Niche use cases things like the ambernik rg552 and it's getting very close to replacing the analog pocket we'll talk about that more later anyway we've got a lot of ground to cover in this video I'm going to try to make it as short as possible but you know me it's probably going to be a long one so make sure you grab a drink and a snack and away we go foreign [Music] okay let's go ahead and get started with the specs first off we have the CPU this is a rock chip 3566 this quad-core chip we've seen in a lot of other devices including several from pow Kitty and the ambernik rg353 line and it doesn't have any internal storage but it has two micro SD card slots one will be for the firmware and the other will be for the games now the star of the show here is definitely the display it is four inches in size and a one by ones or Square aspect ratio with a resolution of 720 by 720 and like I mentioned in the intro this is going to work great for Retro Game emulation the battery here is a little over 4 000 milliamp hours and I got an average of about six hours of gameplay depending on the type of games I was playing and it's relatively lightweight as well just over 200 grams we have all the standard connectivity options here so a mini HDMI port 5 gigahertz Wi-Fi as well as Bluetooth this has a Linux based operating system and it comes loaded up with the jealous custom firmware as well finally it has two USB ports as well as a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack the starting price for the RGB 30 is very reasonable it's 90 dollars with free ship shipping and at that price point it's going to come with the firmware card but no extra preloaded games if you like when checking out you can buy something that has a pre-loaded card but it will increase the price and there are three different colors to choose from there is a white color which I'll be reviewing here then also a black one as well as a dark blue now the two ways that you can buy this device are directly from pow Kitty on their website and I'll leave a code down below for five percent off your purchase if you'd like however if you'd rather go through AliExpress you can also do that the prices are going to be the same and they have an official store there I'll leave both of these linked down below to start let's do the unboxing now full disclosure here pal Kitty did send this out to review but of course all opinions are my own I'm not getting paid in any way and they're not going to be seeing this at a time inside the box it's very Bare Bones We have basically a very quick start guide as well as a USBC charging cable let's go ahead and jump right into the device and talk about how it feels now First Impressions this is a tall device that square screen really does give a lot of height and it definitely gives the device a more compact look and feel however one of the big benefits I found from having a taller device like that is that it makes it much roomier for your hands in fact as I hold it on the back here I have plenty of space for all four fingers which is usually not common with a lot of other handhelds in addition it takes away from that cramped feeling you will sometimes get when playing a horizontal handheld because the device is so tall it sits higher up in my Palms which means my thumbs are more extended and as an added bonus it's still very easy to access the analog sticks without having to reach down if anything it feels like it's at the center of the device it's very comfortable feeling and like I mentioned there is plenty of room on the back for all four of your fingers so that makes it really comfortable to hold so when it comes down to it we're looking at a device with a pretty large screen at four inches but then also is very comfortable to hold on top of that it has a fairly compact design which just feels good in the hands so yes First Impressions here I'm very happy with how this is built one slight design update is they've added a grippy texture to the bottom left and right corners and this is a kind of textured feel that sometimes you'll find on the back of controllers now it doesn't extend to the sides of the device but it is there on the back back as well and personally I like this setup it makes it so it feels less slick in the hands and the grippy part fits really well into the meat of your palms kind of wish it was on the sides as well but I'm pretty happy with how it is here the grips here also don't block these front firing speakers which is pretty awesome now let's talk about controls starting with the d-pad now the d-pad is a rubber membrane connection very similar to other pow Kitty devices and so it has a more classic and retro feel to it which is very fitting for this device now just rolling it around and getting a feel for it it does feel a little bit loose in the hands I wouldn't go so far as to call it mushy because it's still very responsive it just feels a little bit loose in that membrane and that will come into play with certain games so we'll start with the Contra test in this example I push down the d-pad and then rock it back and forth ideally the character would only minimally move but as you can see right here he is moving all over the place so this means that we have some pretty loose diagonals and so depending on the game that you're playing you might get a false input here and there now there is a silver lining to this and that comes when you're playing a Capcom style fighting game because the diagonals are so so easy to hit it is very easy to pull off the moves here so this is a d-pad that I would say is 100 hadoukenable and sure you cannibal but when it comes to very precise inputs up down left and right you may get a false diagonal here and there now this can be fixed by opening up the device and putting a little bit of electrical tape on the d-pad and there's a ton of tutorials out there on both Reddit and YouTube so it's definitely not a perfect d-pad but it is fixable next up we'll talk about analog sticks so these are the same generic Nintendo switch style ones that we've seen for many years before they're also fairly recessed which will contribute to its pocketability when it comes to range of motion it feels just like these sticks that you would find on any of these other handhelds and I found that when playing certain games especially arcade games it worked out just fine and in terms of positioning it is actually quite a bit more comfortable than most other handhelds a lot of that has to do with how tall this device is and the fact that they didn't put the sticks at the very bottom instead it feels very centered in your hands now when it comes to functionality I did find that these sticks were not perfect for example when playing analog stick dependent systems like Nintendo 64 and Sega Dreamcast I did find that the input was a little bit too sensitive basically as soon as you press down on that analog stick it's going to go to 100 percent and depending on the type of game you're playing like Mario Kart right here it might feel like a little bit too much and so that's what I mean by it being a little bit overly sensitive I wish that there was more Nuance to this stick now another issue I found is that when playing PSP it didn't seem to register fully it's kind of the opposite problem that we had with Nintendo 64 and Dreamcast and sure enough if we go into the settings you can see that it's not getting a full range of motion thankfully PSP does have the ability to adjust the analog stick so you can increase the sensitivity up to about 1.5 and then also make sure you turn on the circular stick input after that it will get a full range of motion and when going back and playing a game yeah it feels pretty good it still definitely has that feeling where you're basically going from zero to one hundred percent and so when it comes to fine grain analog motion it doesn't seem to work very well with this device however for the systems that I actually enjoy playing on this device it doesn't matter at all for example with arcade games it doesn't have an analog input this is basically just a digital zero or one input when you're playing with an analog stick and so the fact that this will basically go from zero to one is not bad at all in fact it works really well when playing arcade games so all those Nuance issues that you would find with Nintendo 64 and Dreamcast are not going to apply to arcade games and it just so happens these are some of the best games to play on this device same goes when you try to map the analog stick to the d-pad function Link's Awakening is a great example this is a game that was originally meant to be played on a d-pad but I prefer to play it with an analog stick and because it's mimicking that d-pad input which is not analog it's going to work out just fine so yes there are some issues with the analog stick with certain systems but as I'll show later in this video these aren't really the systems that I would recommend buying this device for in the first place for everything else these analog sticks work out just fine now we have front firing stereo speakers here so let's go ahead and do a quick audio test foreign and honestly for a 90 device I have no complaints here the sound is nice and crisp and it gets quite loud the start and select buttons are up on the top and they do have a micro switch connection this means they are going to be quite clicky and a little bit loud these are easily the loudest buttons on the device but they're not super loud altogether also on the front we have an LED light we'll test this out here when we get to the screen next are the face buttons these also have a rubber membrane connection and are also very light to the touch they are very similar to the d-pad just in terms of the amount of force that is required to press them down I think it works really well they're not the best buttons in the world I think they could be a little bit more rounded and just overall the ambernik buttons have better quality but all the same when it comes to a 90 device they are 100 serviceable and I like the fact that the d-pad and the face buttons are aligned up here on the top this is a very retro game-centric device and the controls match that next we'll take a look up top starting with the shoulder and Trigger buttons now in the pow Kitty x55 these were super loud buttons it seems like they've been dampening them down with this model though and so they do still have a little bit of clickiness to them but it's much quieter and softer now in terms of functionality I don't really expect to be using the trigger buttons the L2 and R2 very often but they are easy to reach here on this device because it is still relatively small it might have been better to have stacked shoulder buttons but given the fact that we won't be using the triggers very often I actually think this is the right call in terms of i o we have our volume buttons on the left just a one note here the volume up is on the left side instead of the right and so this might throw you off depending on what you're used to we also have a mini HDMI out Port we'll test that later and then our restart and power buttons there's nothing on the sides here at all but let's take a look at the bottom here we have our two USB ports as well as our two SD card slots and the last slot here will be used for your firmware card and my device here did come with one of those cards and that's really about it on the bottom other than our headphone jack and finally here's a look at the back it's very plain right here with a soft texture to the plastic now to give you an idea of the overall size let's do a quick comparison against other pow Kitty models that have been released this year we'll start with the RK 2023 this one uses the same chipset but with a three and a half inch 4x3 aspect ratio screen and I thought this device was pretty good especially at that around 90 price point but one of the things I didn't like about it was the d-pad it was a little bit sharp on the edges and so I didn't like using it over time so I am happy to see that they're using a different and better d-pad with the RGB 30 but in terms of basically everything else you can see it's very similar the big difference is going to be the height because of that one by one screen and I would say the RGB 30 is actually more ergonomic because it's taller and more comfortable to hold the other device worth comparing with is the x55 again same chipset in price but a completely different experience to start the RGB 30 has the d-pad up top which means it's going to be more centered for Retro Gaming the x55 also has a 720p screen but with a 16x9 aspect ratio this means it'll be better suited for widescreen gaming for example game streaming and because of that wider screen it's just a lot bigger of a device this is one that I wouldn't really consider to be pocketable meanwhile I think that the RGB 30 is at the cusp of being just that you can see when I'm just holding the device like this it is pretty small in the hand the screen itself is still really impressive and I wouldn't call this like a tiny device but all the same it just feels pretty comfortable there's a bit of thickness to it but again I don't think this is too bad it's just a little bit thicker than say a phone all the same I do consider it to be pocketable I'm wearing shorts right here so it's not really a perfect example but all the same I think in most use cases yeah it's going to be a pocketable device okay let's move on to the software experience like I mentioned before it does come loaded with jealous custom firmware it's using an older version mine is dated here from June but all the same yes it is working out of the box and to get set up all you would have to do is just put a second or SD card inside it's going to build all the folders for you when you turn the device on and then you just load up all your games now personally I'm going to take the easy route and I have so many other jealous cards that I'm just going to put one in and so this is my card from the x55 and as you can see it's cross compatible so it works just fine the other nice thing is this device has built-in Wi-Fi so I can just go into these system settings and then update my device here over the air and just like that we now have the most recent version of jealous available on this device and because this firmware updates like every few days this is a really nice thing it's not very often where you get something that's so well formed right out of the box without having to flash anything yourself and so here's the overall experience I've basically updated jealous and then also put in my own game card and that's about it now I've already scraped it with all the box art and all that kind of stuff too so everything's nice and pretty and I've got quite a few setup guides that'll walk you through that process if you've never done it before okay one more thing before we get into software testing I want to show you the screen real quick to start at Max brightness it does get very bright as you can see here so if you're playing in a well-lit environment or even outside in the shade I think this will be fine now in terms of the lowest brightness it is a little bit bright but not terribly bad I would say that you can play this in a low light environment but maybe not in a pitch black one it might be a little bit too bright you can also see that the LED light on the right side of the screen is not too bad either some of the previous devices were like a flashlight so now I want to walk you through each of the systems that I tried on this and what kind of experience you can expect we're going to start with Game Boy because I I think a lot of people assume this is going to work out great with this aspect ratio to start if you go into the game settings section of jealous there's an option called per system Advanced configuration and within here you'll see a listing of all the different systems and if you go into each of these you can then make some curated changes and this is where I recommend going through and making the changes that I'll be talking about throughout the rest of this video for example you can adjust things like aspect ratio in integer scaling but then you can also adjust shaders and filters as well as colorization in particular for Game Boy so for Game Boy I've set up an LCD grid Shader and then also colorization called special one and you've got hundreds of different options you can choose from Within These settings and with that combination this is what it's going to look like as you can see it has a nice green kind of look to it and the LCD grid gives it a more subtle and retro look as well now when playing a game boy game you can see there's a little bit of black borders around the edges but it's not too bad but bear in mind this is not integer scaling this is basically blowing up all the way to a 10 my9 aspect ratio to fill up as much screen as possible now if you'd like you you can change it to integer scaling I'm going to do it really quickly here within retroarch but if you are going to do it then you would want to do it within those jealous game settings either way I'm just going to do it here on screen to make it faster and this is what Android scaling looks like the black borders will be a little bit larger but not by much and this will give you a perfect 4X integer scale now when figuring out whether or not a system is going to look good on the screen then I recommend using this tool right here I'll have it linked down below this is made by a developer named Sean Inman so you can go through here and choose whatever console you want to emulate and then choose the screen and RGB 30 is an option and depending on the system you'll see how large these bezels are going to be and you can also toggle between the integer scaling on or off so I'm going to show this tool quite a few times as we go through the rest of this video and that's really just to help you kind of get an idea of the scale of what it's going to look like on the screen and I do think that game boy and Game Boy Color are one of those systems that works really well with the RGB 30. now most people will probably agree that the Ultimate Game Boy or Game Boy Color device is the analog pocket I've done a few videos on this device and I really like it and in many ways this really is the Ultimate machine not only can It play cartridges here on the back but it also has Full Game Boy link compatibility on the bottom additionally recent updates to the firmware now allow you to load games directly from the card so you could play a bunch of Game Boy Game Boy Color games and other systems directly from this micro SD card slot and there are a lot of reasons why people will prefer to play on an analog pocket over an emulated system number one this is an fpga which means it recreates the hardware environment of the original Game Boy and Game Boy Color so in terms of accuracy when it comes to audio video as well as input lag it's going to be very very similar and almost identical to the original experience additionally this is a device that was 100 made with the Game Boy in mind it has a huge resolution of 1440p and a perfect 10x9 aspect ratio which matches the device so no black borders at all in addition this three and a half inch screen is a 10x integer scale so it is 10 times the original resolution of the Game Boy and Game Boy Color now the RGB 30 specs are still still very impressive it's a 720p screen with that one by one aspect ratio and when playing 10x9 content you'll get 3.4 inches at a 4X integer scale so while that may not be quite as impressive as the analog pocket it's still very very impressive compared to other retro handhelds on the market now for all the great things the analog pocket is there are some detractors number one is going to be the price and availability the device costs 220 dollars and it's completely out of stock anyway due to demand so your only option is to sign up for a mailing list for the opportunity to pre-order at some point on top of that if you want to hook this device up to a television you're going to need a dock and that's an additional 100 and after you've paid taxes and shipping which is extraordinarily high from this company you're looking at about 400 to get a device that can also play on a television so there's quite a huge price difference here between the 400-ish dollars that you'll pay for a fully specked out analog pocket versus the 90 with free shipping that you can get for the RGB 30. another limitation of the analog pocket are they can configuration options when loading games from an SD card there's not a lot of options if you go into the settings in some of the fpga cores you can change things like colorization or screen aspect ratio but again those options are going to be very limited and with some of these systems you can do safe States or what they call memories but really when it comes to configuration that is the extent of what you can do meanwhile the RGB 30 is software emulation which means it's not going to be a perfect representation of the original experience but fairly close and the added benefit here is you have a ton of different options you can choose from for example you have hundreds of different choices when it comes to shaders and colorization but then also you have functions like fast forward and Rewind which can be very helpful when playing these older games Additionally you have some other added perks like the ability to integrate cheats or use retro achievements and for many of these systems you can also do wireless multiplayer I just made a video about this last week I'll leave a link down below to walk you through that whole experience and I also think that four inch display on the RGB 30 is just perfect for Game Boy games for example if you're a okay with not using integer scaling you will get a larger screen you'll actually get about 3.8 inches if you blow it all the way up so you've got a lot of choices when it comes to customization and screen options here on the RGB 30. there's no denying that the analog pocket is the Ultimate Game Boy and Game Boy Color machine but at a fraction of the price I think that the RGB 30 is Ultimate enough for me I also really enjoy playing these games at a horizontal form factor it's more comfortable for me than a vertical device so in that sense yes I've really been enjoying Game Boy games on the RGB 30. you've got a lot of options here to work with and it's a very similar experience here with the Game Boy Color even compared to the analog pocket in fact I found that the color on the RGB 30 is a little bit more pleasing to my eye than even on the analog pocket and there are options within the jealous firmware to adjust the screen as well so if you want to increase or decrease the saturation or you want to make some tweaks to the Gamma or tint you can do all that within the firmware so if you do prefer a certain color balance you can actually tweak that to your preference within the software which is something unfortunately you cannot do with the analog clock it so in a nutshell if you're a big fan of Game Boy and Game Boy Color or maybe you've been wanting an analog pocket but it hasn't been available or maybe it's a little bit too expensive I think the RGB 30 is a great consolation prize okay next we're going to talk about standard 4x3 systems both at 8 and 16 bit we're going to use Sega Genesis as an example but this will also work with other systems like turbo Graphics 16. if we pull up that tool again you can see that a 4x3 aspect ratio screen will still give you three and a half inches of screen real estate on this four inch one by one display so in essence this will be the exact same size screen as a 4x3 device with a three and a half inch screen and if we compare a three and a half inch device like The RK 2023 you can see that yes the screen here is exactly the same size now 4x3 content is a little bit wider than say for example the Game Boy or Game Boy Color and as a result you will get black bars on the top and bottom and I know a lot of people are probably apprehensive about that idea but I found that I didn't mind it at all I don't like having black bars on the left and right because I think it makes the device unnecessarily large but when it comes to a horizontal device having black bars on the top and bottom really doesn't bother me at all now when it comes to a vertical handheld like the analog pocket then yes this does start to bother me again it's very similar to how it is with a horizontal device because it makes it device feel too tall or taller than it needs to be and so personally I'm not a huge fan of playing 4x3 content on the analog pocket because it is so tall but on a horizontal handheld like the RGB 30 it's neither here nor there for me because the device is still going to feel nice and compact you just have a little bit more height on the top and bottom which again I don't really mind because it makes it more comfortable so when it comes to playing 4x3 content specifically I think it is just fine now along those same lines another wider system is Game Boy Advance this has a 3x2 aspect ratio and this means that the black bars will be even larger on Game Boy Advance games however one thing to note here in the tool is that Game Boy Advance is a perfect 3x integer scale with this screen this means the pixel balance is going to be 100 perfect it's going to look super sharp and clear now with that 3x2 aspect ratio on this four inch screen it's going to give you about 3.4 inches altogether and admittedly that is smaller than 3.5 but if you look at the original screen size of the Game Boy Advance it was 2.9 inches so it's still a half inch larger than it used to be and I think that is still a pretty significant upgrade from the original console so much like with 4x3 systems I again didn't really mind having those black bars at the top and bottom especially considering the fact that this is a perfect 3x integer scale the games here look a lot sharper than I was expecting them to be this is actually a very good experience now when it comes to the overall size yes it is 3.4 inches which is going to be quite a bit smaller than a four inch device like the rg405m this one will give you about 3.9 inches when you fill the screen all the way up however this device only has a 480p resolution which means it cannot integer scale very high in fact when you turn on Integer scaling you can see it only gets to 3 inches altogether so when it comes to having very sharp and clear pixels I would prefer to play Game Boy Advance on the RGB 30 and it's a very similar story with your standard three and a half inch 4x3 display like with the rk2023 when you blow it all the way up to fill the screen it's going to be 3.3 inches but then if you use integer scaling it's only going to be 2.4 so all around when it comes to to playing Game Boy Advance I think that the RGB 30 is going to be great now with the top and bottom borders do bother you just having that wasted space then I can totally see why you may not want to play Game Boy Advance on this device but like I demonstrated it doesn't really bother me because it's still nice and compact feeling and I don't really feel like that screen real estate is being wasted next up we're going to do a special section just specifically for Nintendo Entertainment System now there's a lot of discussion about the proper aspect ratio for NES because things varied a lot depending on the game and television you were using back in the day but the general idea is that it's somewhere between 4x3 and 16 by 15 and so it's kind of all over the place I usually prefer to play my games in 4x3 but with this screen in particular I've been playing with a different aspect ratio and this one here is eight by seven that's a little bit closer to a squarish aspect ratio and for me this is narrow enough where I don't feel like it's distorting the image and in addition to changing the aspect ratio to 8x7 I also like going into the core options the emulator and adjusting the over scan what I do here is I crop off 8 pixels both on the left and the right and for most games this was basically additional noise that was added to the sides of the screen so you're not really going to be losing a lot when it comes to the gameplay if anything it gives it a smoother and more integrated experience and so that's how I've been playing these games for the most part playing it in non-integer scaling but at an 8x7 aspect ratio with that over scan on the left and right and for me this looks great it may not be perfect like I would prefer to play at a 4x3 but all the same this is perfectly acceptable for me now there is quite a difference between this and integer scaling if we turn that on you can see the image will get quite small and when you turn off integer scaling like I do you will see some pixel imbalance for example in Mega Man 2 you can see that the life bar is not perfectly balanced and so what I prefer to do in this scenario is to actually apply a Shader which will give it an interpolation feel and there are a ton of different options but I'm using the sharp bilinear 2x pre-scale Shader this will balance things out and kind of make the pixels a little bit rounded around the sides which just gives it a little bit older of a look and so this is how I prefer to play my NES games on this device I think by using that aspect ratio and over scanning you can get a really impressive display that almost fills up the entire thing another system that really benefits from this 8x7 aspect ratio is Super Nintendo and there's a couple special tricks I like to do with this system too so let me walk you through that process to start we are going to use that 8x7 aspect ratio but in addition we're going to try out integer scaling and as you can see Yes again here the screen is a little bit small and this here is a 2X integer scale but it's actually very close to a 3X one when we blow it up so instead we can use a different tool we can go in and turn on Integer scaling and then right below that there's an option called integer scale over scale this will force the next integer scale which is going to be a 3X in this case and then it's going to crop off the necessary pixels on the left and right and because this is so close to a 3X integer scale it really only cuts off a couple pixels on each end and so this basically turns into the Best of Both Worlds not only can we use integer scaling but we can also blow it up to fill the entire higher screen and an 8x7 aspect ratio it's going to be very close to square and many people actually prefer to use 8x7 aspect ratio when playing Super Nintendo there's a big debate between 4x3 and 8x7 and I'm personally in the 4x3 camp but all the same I don't really mind it on this device so if you are a Super Nintendo connoisseur like me you'll probably really enjoyed this experience on the RGB 30 as well now previously my favorite device to play Super Nintendo on was the ambernik rg552 and I've made a bunch of videos about this device previously and why I preferred specifically to play retro games on this one and this one will give you a 5x integer scale with Super Nintendo and still give you a nice big screen here I'm using a 4x3 aspect ratio and you can see we're getting about 4.4 inches and so that will be 0.6 inches better than the RGB 30. however there are quite a few issues with the rg552 for example it is twice the price of the RGB 30 and it also has terrible battery life you can get maybe three to four hours depending on what you're playing not only that the device will drain the battery when you're you're not actually using it and so it becomes really impractical to actually use this device as your primary handheld so I can see the RGB 30 actually replacing the rg552 is my preferred way to play many of these retro systems not only do I have that high resolution display which allows me to mess around with the settings to get that perfectly tweaked experience but I also have some really great battery life I get an average about six hours with this device but when playing something like Super Nintendo it's closer to eight to ten so all around when it comes to Super Nintendo and all the other devices below it yeah I think this is going to be a really excellent solution now another device everyone wants to know about is playing Nintendo DS on this larger screen because it's so tall a lot of people assume that you can put both screens on top of each other and yes for the most part it actually does work out pretty well I would say it's still not perfect because this isn't quite tall enough to give you that full screen experience in fact the screens themselves are a little bit small another thing that's not great is this does not have a touch screen and so many of those games that require a touch input aren't going to be playable on this device however if you're playing a certain game that does require dual screens but not touch screen input this might be a nice fit and of course there are hotkeys that you can use to swap between the different screen orientations and so for many games that don't require you to see both screens at once you can use those hotkeys to just show one screen at a time and that might end up being a really great experience much like how it is on other retro handhelds it is nice to be able to have two screens on it once without getting too small but I still don't think this is going to be a perfect device when it comes to Nintendo DS I think the perfect one would be a little bit taller and you can also use a touch screen input so if anything I would say that Nintendo DS is close but not quite there okay next up we're going to talk about Arcade this is another one that Everyone likes to bring up number one we were talking about just regular arcade games you know those that are in a 4x3 aspect ratio yeah these are going to look great it's very similar to playing those systems like Sega Genesis but on this screen and with this four inch display you will get about three and a half inches of content so it is going to look nice however where the screen really shines is in vertical content there were many many games that came out for arcade that were in a more vertical orientation and this is kind of a middle ground this is not quite as tall as two Nintendo DS screens but it is still a little bit taller than the screen can manage however the black bars on the sides are nothing compared to those like on a 4x3 aspect ratio device so you are still getting a lot of screen real estate here in fact the image here is nice and big as well so when it comes down to it I do think this is an ideal device when playing vertically oriented games especially if you're a fan of vertical shoot em ups this might be one of the best options you have outside of using Tate mode with a horizontal device personally I think it's much more comfortable to use a device like this where it already has these horizontal controls set up as opposed to using settings to rotate the screen and then rotate the device and try to make that work ergonomically so yes I found that I was playing a lot more vertical games on this device than I do on other devices it's not quite perfect yet I think that we still don't have the one true vertical Shoot Em Up device just yet but this is getting very close Okay and the last emulator related section here are all those other systems Sega Saturn Dreamcast PlayStation Nintendo 64 and PSP and the experience here will be a little bit mixed so let me walk you through it to start PlayStation 1 we'll play just fine this chip is more than capable of playing every single PS1 game it's a 4x3 system so you will get black bars in the top and bottom but again I don't think it's very bad not to mention the fact that the natural bezels on this device are nice and thin and so because of that it's a very nice experience moving up to Nintendo 64 not every game is going to play at full speed I would say about 75 percent of the catalog will run very well but you also have to bear in mind that there's a lot of hacks and things happening in the back end to get these games to work and so in terms of just graphical accuracy you may not have the best experience and like I mentioned those really heavyweight games you know something like GoldenEye or Conker is bad for day are just not really worth playing on this chip now surprisingly Sega Saturn actually fares a little bit better than Nintendo 64. this one has its own Standalone emulator that works really well there are many games that will run at full speed but there are quite a few that will require some Auto frame skip thankfully this is turned on by default so it's kind of a seamless experience for example when playing Knights into dreams the game will play at full speed even though in the top left you can see there is some frame skip happening within the numbers now other games are just a little bit too much to play this is like the top 10 or 20 percent of games something like Sega Rally Championship will use all the frame skip it can and still not quite reach 60 frames per second so this is definitely not a perfect Sega Saturn experience but it is pretty good if you're desperate enough to just try out some of these games moving over to Dreamcast it's very similar to Sega Saturn in the fact that it uses an auto frame scale so when you look at the FPS on the top right of the screen you can see that it is not quite getting 60 frames per second but all the same you can see the gameplay itself is smooth and running at basically full speed and the vast majority of Dreamcast games will work just fine I would say at least 75 maybe 80 percent of games will be playable and then finally we have Sony PlayStation Portable this system really kind of struggles on this chipset so I would expect about 50 of games to play okay but you will probably have to turn on some frame skip the way I see it the RGB 30 is really not made for all the systems in this section and other than PlayStation 1 there are none of these that will play the full catalog at full speed instead I would just kind of think of these as bonus systems to play on this device if you really want to speaking of which you can also play PC ports on this device using a tool called portmaster I have a bunch of guides about this on my website and channel but basically you can play some ported games over here on Linux just bear in mind that the aspect ratio on most of these ports will be 16x9 and as a result it will be a little bit squinty so it's very similar to the PlayStation Portable in that regard okay and finally the last system I want to talk about is called Pico 8. if you're not familiar with this this is a fantasy console that has thousands of games within it and this can run on all sorts of devices Windows Mac and even Raspberry Pi now this app is not free it's 15 as a one-time purchase and after you have the license you can download it to any platform that you own and the great thing here is that the Raspberry Pi version of this app will work natively on the RGB B30 now you could always just emulate these carts instead of using the actual console but I'm going to show you here why it's going to be worth it so really all I've done is I've taken my Raspberry Pi files and then put them in my Pico weight folder on my SD card from there when I go into jealous there's an option that says start Pico weight if I open that up it brings up a menu called splore and this is essentially an online browsing window for the entire console so as long as you're connected to the internet you can browse through the entire library and then download those games and play immediately on your device so imagine that you can browse and play games directly onto this device just by using the d-pad for all the other systems on this device you have to go through and find the ROM put it on your SD card and load it up but here you actually can do it directly on the console and it is a wonderful experience if you imagine it's kind of like shopping for all these free games and you can play them right then and there and there's tons of options within here you can set up your favorites you can search for specific games you can do all that stuff within here as well and I love the idea of just kind of finding a name looking at the tie title and then just starting it right up and seeing if it's worth it and because these games are so lightweight they're just very easy to pick up and play and as an added bonus they run at a one by one aspect ratio it's going to be a perfect square which is a perfect fit for this device now one of the more famous games that was made for pico8 is the original Celeste the developers made this game first and then they made the other console one that you're probably familiar with another thing that pico8 is famous for is what they call D makes where they make a lower end version of a very popular game one of the most famous dmix is this game here called poom as you can imagine this is a copy of Doom with a little bit different levels but a very similar experience so when it comes to pico8 you kind of have two different options number one is emulating you'd have to go to the pico8 website find the different games and then download them they're freely available so there's no big deal there but then you'll have to load it into the SD card and kind of boot it like any other emulated system on top of that the pico8 emulator is not quite as good as the original one anyway however if you have the actual console installed like I do then you can browse through the games Direct directly on the device which is a wonderful experience so I would very much so recommend that now one thing to note here is that I'm blowing everything up to full screen but this is not integer scale however as of just a few minutes ago me starting to record this video they have included integer scaling within the jealous options and here's a preview of what it's going to look like when you are using integer scaling as you can see the black bars are a little bit larger but not by much so if you want to have really crisp pixels you can definitely do that on this device as well now the other thing that's wonderful about pico8 is that you can develop your own games and it's not really that hard for example a few years ago I challenged my son over a holiday weekend to develop a game and we both were going to make our own platformer and after three days of going through some tutorials and kind of figuring out how it all works we both had something worth presenting this is my game here it's called bear me it's about a bear named Jeremy in the Army and the idea here is it was going to be a contra style shooting game now everything kind of fell apart when I had to figure out how to actually shoot bullets and have enemies so I never really got that far but it is still supremely cool to be able to open up this game of my own directly on this device now my son also made a game and his is called The Challenge game and he did a pretty great job considering the fact that he was I think like 10 or 11 at the time he even had a neat little mechanic where in order to get past the bad guy you had to jump over the clouds to get over the other side so really the design of his is a lot more clever than mine so kudos to him and I think he definitely won that challenge over that holiday weekend and that's the great thing about Pico 8 is that it has a very low barrier to entry a friend of mine named Christian has a YouTube channel called lazy devs Academy and within there he has a ton of different tutorials including how to make a vertical Shoot Em Up like this one right here another friend of mine victory yemeni has a YouTube channel based on retro handhelds but in the Portuguese language and he's also been working on a game for a while he showed me a preview of it here recently and this is it right here this is based off an old Cartoon Network game and it's pretty cool that he's been remaking it directly here within Pico 8. and I think that's really the final kicker about this fantasy console is that if you plug a keyboard into your device you can actually program directly onto the device here so here I am going into the console command line and actually downloading a demo and then starting it up and not only that I can toggle between the game itself and the code so if I want to make adjustments to the code I can do that directly here so this is going to be great for any budding developer somebody who maybe is already working on pico8 or wants to learn how to code a game not only could you code directly on the device but you can test it on the controls at the same time so I think that's also a really handy mechanic right there okay and before we start wrapping up I also wanted to show that you can consolides the RGB 30 very easily not only does it have HDMI out but the Bluetooth seems to work just fine when using controllers in X input mode so here I've paired an 8-bit doe sn30 controller to the device and plugged it into my Monitor and the great thing here is that this scaling is working correctly so on my 16x9 display the menu is showing in 16x9 but then when I start up a Super Nintendo game it's running in an 8x7 aspect ratio which is how I have it set in the settings so if you are looking to consolize the RGB 30 played on a TV with a wireless controller you can absolutely do that here so I think this is a really great experience all around and it's kind of amazing that we're getting this in a 90 machine alright this video is super long I can't believe that we're still going but let's start wrapping up we're going to talk about what I like and what I don't like about the RGB 30. we'll start with what I like and number one is the screen this thing is amazing it's four inches 720p resolution and a one by one aspect ratio which gives you a ton of room to work with not only that the screen is nice and bright and vibrant and you can adjust all the screen settings within jealous as well I also think in terms of performance and everything else we're getting a really excellent price for ninety dollars with free shipping you can play just about anything you could think of when it comes to Retro systems not only that it's very comfortable thanks to that added height of the one by one aspect ratio screen so I've been taking this device with me everywhere because it's very portable but then also comfortable I think the audio quality here is very good I love the fact that we have front firing speakers the quality itself is good and you don't cover it with your palms when you're holding onto the device I'm also happy with the fact that we have custom firmware on day one this ships with jealous and you can update it directly on the device and I've heard that other developers are interested in making their own firmwares for this one too and overall my favorite thing is the fact that we have so many options when it comes to Retro emulation everything just kind of comes together the screen those scaling options and those nice d-pad sensor controls make this a very good retro emulation machine but of course this device is not perfect so let's talk about some of the few things that I don't like about it number one there are some ambient heat issues that I've noticed especially when playing those harder to run systems so if you do want to push it with a bunch of Dreamcast or Nintendo 64 emulation it does get a little bit warm on the back a lot of that has to do with the fact that they stack the battery on top of the CPU I don't think they're actually touching but all the same there's a lot of Heat going on inside again if you're just playing the Retro systems that I think this thing is meant for it's not going to be an issue at all along those same lines I found that the analog stick gameplay is not ideal so when playing something like dreamcaster and Nintendo 64. it just feels a little bit too sensitive however like I mentioned earlier when playing arcade games or d-pad games with an analog stick it's absolutely fine however one thing that can become an issue are the diagonals on the d-pad depending on what the game you're playing you might get some accidental diagonals because it's a little bit too loose again this is probably a very minor thing and it's easily correctable if you want to open it up but all the same I did find it to be a negative and finally while I do think that this device overall is very comfortable it does have a bit of a blocky design and part of me thinks that if they had made it a little bit more rounded it would have been even more comfortable than it is regardless I think that all four of these points are not deal breakers at all especially in a device that comes in at this price point and I think specifically if you're into Retro Gaming like me this is basically a dream come true we got a device that comes in at under 100 that has Wi-Fi and a wonderful screen and decent controls and so as it stands when it comes to Retro Game emulation in particular this is becoming my new favorite so I think if your gameplay Style aligns to mine then yes I can wholeheartedly recommend the RGB 30. so let me know what you think in the comments down below is this exactly the device you're looking for or are you looking for something else as always thank you for watching and be sure to like And subscribe if you found this helpful and we will see you next time happy gaming [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 280,659

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Id: KTb6ik1Eb40

Length: 42min 26sec (2546 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 10 2023