Super Console Arcade Stick Setup Guide

[Music] hey everybody this is russ from retro game core a couple weeks ago i did a review of this device here it is called the super console arcade stick and it's made by kinhank and in that video i talked about how much my family really loves playing on this thing not only is it an arcade stick that'll work on other systems but it's a full-blown emulation system as well and the build quality on this is pretty solid i've even replaced the blue buttons as you can see on the side yeah overall i really like this thing in fact my only major complaint about this device is the quality of the software that they pre-load onto it and so in this video i'm going to show you how to set up an emulation station system for the super console arcade stick and i found that once i tweaked it to my own preferences i liked this a lot more than when it came out of the box now i go into detail in the full review about the power performance of this device but just as a quick recap this can play all the old arcade systems no problem and it can play a lot of retro console systems all the way up to nintendo 64 pretty well anyway i had a lot of fun setting this up and i'm looking forward to sharing that process with you too and so without any further delay let's jump into it [Music] okay before we get started i do want to talk about one thing real quick in my review video i mentioned how the device is a lot cheaper if you buy it without games for example here you can see on the amazon listing it's about 35 dollars cheaper if you get the one without games than the one with it and so my recommendation at the time was hey just get the one without the games and we'll load the rest of those ourselves that way instead of having to buy one with a pre-loaded disk we're not going to use anyway we can save a little bit of money well it turns out on one of the listings on aliexpress it shows that the console without the games actually only has a usbc out port and so i reached out to the company and a couple of the other suppliers and they confirmed that yes if you buy the one without the games it's not going to come with the console inside of it and so essentially you're only buying the stick if you get that cheaper model and to me that's a huge bummer because the console itself is one of the main draws of this arcade stick and while i do think this stick is pretty good on its own it's definitely not worth 100 bucks and so unfortunately if you want to do this mod you do have to buy one of the models that does come with an sd card and i would recommend getting the 64 gigabyte model because that's going to be the cheapest one as you can see here on the official kinhank store it's a hundred and forty dollars with a ten dollar off coupon so yeah unfortunately 130 dollars a little bit more than i would like to spend on this and honestly i think the amazon price is way too high 155 dollars plus they're gonna charge you 25 shipping i really don't think that this whole setup is going to be worth 180 and so i would recommend checking out the aliexpress listings i'll have them linked in the video description and yeah i don't think this console is really worth more than 120 maybe 130 altogether just be on the lookout for sales because those will pop up periodically another thing i want to mention is that this chip is supported by badassera in fact if you go to their website into the downloads page you can see near the bottom that yes the amlogic s905 chip is on their list and so i did flash bodicera onto an sd card and i was able to get it up and running however one unfortunate thing here is that i was not able to get the audio to work at all i tried all sorts of audio outputs and profiles and none of those seemed to work and so unfortunately unless somebody else figures it out i'm not sure if we're going to be able to use badassera on this arcade stick but that's fine because we have multiple options including the one we're going to use today which is mu elec now the only other thing you're really going to need is a micro sd card i recommend getting one at 128 gigs altogether they're going to be about 15 and that's going to be able to store the entire catalogs of most of the systems that you're going to want to play on here anyway you're not going to be able to fit every single ps1 and sega cd game onto this system but you will still be able to put quite a few on here i think i put 60 ps1 games on mine now i'll have links to all this in my video description but the first place we want to go to is the emulek website now currently emulek is running on version 4.5 but after version 4.3 they dropped s905 chip support and so unfortunately you're not going to be able to flash 4.4 or 4.5 onto this device instead you'll have to do version 4.3 but honestly for our needs i think 4.3 is a really great upgrade the original super console x firmware comes with 3.9 and 4.3 is way better than that anyway all you have to do is go to the version 4.3 section click on that little assets link here and then this is the file we want here the one that says arch 64 4.3 generic so go ahead and download that file it's going to be about 750 megs altogether and so here it is after i've downloaded it now there's one other file that we need in order to get this to boot it's called a dtb file and i'll also have a link to this specific dtb file in my video description anyway after you've got those two files you're good to go let's go ahead and plug our micro sd card into our computer and we're going to use an app here called belena etcher from there we're going to select the emulec image file that we just downloaded and then in the middle section we'll select our sd card now when you choose to flash it it's going to give you a warning it's going to say hey this is a really big sd card are you sure you want to do it and you're going to click yeah man i want to do it it's probably going to take a couple minutes to flash emilec onto the sd card and when it's done it's actually going to eject the sd card from your computer what you want to do then is pull your sd card reader out of the computer and then plug it back in once you plug it back in you'll get a little emulec drive like this from here all we have to do is take that dtb file i mentioned earlier and drag it over it's going to ask you to replace the file go ahead and click yes from there we can actually go ahead and eject the sd card then remove it from our pc and then we're going to put it in our ken hank arcade stick now what should happen is you'll see the boot screen flash a couple times then you'll get the emulex screen from there it's going to resize the partitions on the sd card it'll reset itself and then it'll do the rest of the initial configuration now if this doesn't happen and instead it boots you into the internal android image let me show you how to set that up what you want to do is click on this first window and then just click on this colorful icon right here it's going to ask you in chinese do you really want to do this what you want to do then is go and hit right once and then hit yes what that'll do is it'll force it to boot into emulek instead anyway after it's done the initialization you will then see a video here about emilek and it'll boot you right into the main menu now on this first boot the only thing we're going to do is set up the controller just go ahead and hit some buttons it'll bring up this configure input menu from there you can just hold on to any button on the controller and it'll bring up the configuration screen now the first thing you'll notice is that it's going to ask you for the d-pad inputs and of course this thing only has one stick so this is actually a pretty easy fix there's a little cross button here on the top left looks like a little d-pad if you press that once it's gonna light up and now that arcade stick is actually acting like a d-pad and so now you can add your d-pad inputs now if you press the d-pad button again it'll start blinking and acting like the right analog stick but if you press it one more time it'll go back to being the left stick one other thing to note as you're mapping the buttons is the a b and x y i wouldn't recommend correlating them to the letters on the arcade stick itself instead just kind of using some intuition so for example i use the second bottom from the left as my east button and then the bottom most left one as my south button next the second one from the top is my north button and then the top one on the left is my west button so it's kind of like cardinal points but rotate it a little bit from there the rest are pretty intuitive you have your right shoulder and trigger buttons and then l3 and r3 on the top right as well and to do the appropriate analog stick just make sure you press that d-pad button until it's either blinking or off and that's really about it just make sure that select is your hotkey enable button as well so now there's not really much we can do because we don't have any games loaded up on our sd card so that's what we're going to do next just go ahead and press start to bring up the main menu go down to quit and then select shutdown system from there you can remove the sd card and put it back into your pc now this time you're going to get two different partitions showing up on your computer when you add the sd card the emulec one we don't need to look at at all but the other one which is called ee roms that's going to be our games folder and so now the next thing to do is to add your bios files as well as your rom files now bios files as well as rom files are copyrighted so i'm not going to tell you where to get those or anything else like that you're just going to be on your own but i will say in terms of bios files if you already have that super console x card you can grab them from there otherwise you can find your own bios pack on the internet now when it comes to moving over your game files that's going to be up to you to find them and move them over but i will leave a link in the video description which will give you the listing of the correct file types and where to put them since we are mostly going to be using arcade titles i would recommend getting full non-merged rom sets from both final bernio and then maim 2003 plus those two rom sets are going to work the best with this particular hardware when first starting out a lot of people just try to grab an arcade file and throw it into a folder and then hope it works but arcade systems are a little more complicated than that you need to grab the full arcade rom set and then move those files over and like i mentioned i recommend using non-merged rom sets anyway once you're done moving over all of your game files go ahead and eject your sd card and move it over to your arcade stick and now when you start up the arcade stick you should now see all the game systems that you added games for and so next we're gonna do some default configurations just to make sure that you have the best performance and the games look their best to do that go ahead and press the start button and then just go down the line here we'll start with emulex settings for example here we can turn off the bluetooth function because the chip itself doesn't actually have bluetooth and then also if you want to see the frames per second by default as you're playing like i do then you can go ahead and select show retroarch fps and then one other thing here is you can select your retroarch menu personally i like the xmb one so i'm going to change it to that next let's go into the game settings section and there's a few defaults that i like to do for example under game ratio i like to make it core provided and then under smooth games i like to turn this off i don't like bi-linear filtering here you can also set up retroarch bezels we'll get to that here in a minute another thing i like to turn off is the rewind function that takes up a lot of system resources but i do like to turn on auto save and load and that's really about it when it comes to the default settings although i do want to mention that if you do want to get retro achievements you can go to retroachievements.org and then set up a username and password and then add them here next let's do a couple different configurations that are specific to some game systems for example under final burn neo make sure that it's set to the final burn neo emulator and then same thing with the arcade main one just make sure this matches whatever romps that you grab like i mentioned main 2003 plus is the one i prefer you're going to want to do the same thing for neogeo if you added those games usually what you want to choose here is going to be the final burn neo rom set i've also found that in emiyolek 4.3 there is a specific nintendo 64 emulator that works the best and that's the one here that says parallel n64 32-bit also for nintendo 64 i like to add a specific shader so if we go into the shader set i like to add the one that says crt scanline and so this is what games are going to look like using that parallel core on nintendo 64 and then also using that scanline shader by default parallel is going to run at a 240p resolution and so that is going to make the games look quite pixelated and a little bit aged looking and honestly what i like to do is just kind of lean into that idea so i add these scan lines to make it look like an old tv as well and so yes this isn't going to be like a high resolution version of nintendo 64. we're not upscaling the image at all this chip really isn't powerful enough to do that but i think with that scanline shader on here it looks pretty cool and a little bit nostalgic as well now this core is not perfect for example with mortal kombat 4 you can see there's no life bar at the top here for the characters and so something to bear in mind here is not every nintendo 64 game is going to play perfectly but a lot will and this is kind of the upper limit of the system now another per system advanced configuration that i recommend is going into ps1 and then making sure it's the pcsx re-armed 32-bit core again on emio like 4.3 this one seems to run the best now for ps1 you could also run a scanline shader like we did with intensive 64 and it's gonna give it that old kind of nostalgic look but i think ps1 also looks pretty good with it off as well this is what it looks like here with default settings without that scanline shader either way totally going to be up to you okay so that's really the majority of the system configurations that we need to do but there are a couple other things we could do for example if we go into the game collection settings under systems displayed we can choose what we want to see and what we don't want to see here so for example you can turn off the setup menu as well as the ports menu if you're not going to use them that's really just going to clean up your overall interface also within here you can set up some automatic game collections by default it's going to have all games as well as your favorites showing but if you wanted you could unselect those or select something else for example if you wanted to have a collection of two player games that would show up here or if you wanted to have like vertical arcade games or beat em ups or things like that now under the network settings you can turn on the wi-fi and then connect to your local network personally i have this hardwired into an ethernet cable but that's where you would do it once you are connected to the internet you can go into the updates and download section here you can browse through and download new themes if you'd like i'm going to go ahead and start downloading a couple of those while we talk but that's basically all you have to do now if you want to have some nice bezels on the side of your systems you can also go through and download each of these and the way this works you'll individually download each of these bezel packs and if you're using roms that are set up to use the no intro naming convention what it'll do is give you individualized bezels depending on the game you're running the last tweak i'd recommend doing is going into the system settings and then navigate down to developer and then down under the ui section you'll have the ability to swap the a and b buttons personally i like to swap them but again that'll be all up to you either way that's where you would find that setting okay our downloads are now finished so i'm going to go into ui settings and i'm going to change up the theme set to one of the other ones that we downloaded and i've only downloaded a couple but i just wanted to show you some of the options you have for example if you want to have like a vertical wheel like this one that's pretty cool but personally my favorite to use on this system is the one called elec full and that's this one here now since we also downloaded some bezels let's go ahead and set those up i'm going to go back into the game settings section and then i'm going to enable the retro arc bezels now let's go into the nintendo section here and start up the first game which for me is batman and yeah as you can see now i have these batman specific bezels for the nes game and the reason why i found that specific batman bezel is because i'm using the no intro naming convention for that rom and so with any luck any time that you open up one of these games you'll find this specific bezel for the game and i think it's pretty cool now if you happen to have a game that doesn't perfectly match that no intro convention you're gonna get like a standardized bezel instead and these don't look that bad either they're basically gonna be like these generic system bezels and so it's totally gonna be up to you how much effort you want to put into this do you want to use the no intro naming convention to be able to get these personalized bezels or do you just want to use these system bezels i think both look pretty good of course you don't have to use the bezels at all if you would prefer just to have the black bars on the sides you can have it set up like that or you could also go into the game settings and change the aspect ratio to be sixteen by nine and then it's going to fill up the whole screen but it is going to stretch it out personally with this specific arcade stick setup i actually do like to have these bezels on the sides i think that it gives a really nice curated feel to your game collection either way it's all going to be totally up to you and what you're comfortable working on so a couple more recommendations to really get this set up properly next we're going to go into the quit section and we're going to select start retroarch this is going to boot us directly into the retroarch interface so next we're going to set up some of the controls to make sure everything works properly within retroarch first we'll go into settings then input and then under menu controls you have the option to swap your ok and cancel button so that they match with emulack next you want to go down to the hotkeys section and here i like to turn off the confirm quit which means i only have to press select and start once to quit out of a game and then within here i like to set up all of my favorite hotkeys instead of walking you through each of these individually what i'm going to do instead is just show you this diagram and so in a nutshell make sure that you have your hotkey enable as your select button and then for example everything else you can set up however you'd like for me i have the start button set up as the reset retroarch button even though it says it resets retroarch what it'll actually do is quit out of it and from there you can see all the other hotkeys that i have set up for example the rewind and fast four buttons are on the very top right and then i have all of my other face buttons set up to specific controls anyway it really doesn't matter what hotkeys you set up but these are the ones that i found work best for me now once you've made the changes you want to the hotkeys we need to do two things in order to save them number one we need to go in and turn on advanced settings and that'll give us the ability to save the configuration file from there we'll go into the main menu configuration file save current configuration and that's it from now on your hotkeys will be saved now another thing you may want to set up are the capcom based fighting game controls so here what you want to do is start up one of the street fighter games and then press select and y to bring up the menu now within this quick menu you want to go into the control section and then navigate down to port 1 controls here scroll down to where the shoulder and trigger buttons are and then set them up like they are displayed here on the screen we're going to set up the strong punch to be the right bumper and then the strong kick to be the right trigger now once that's done go ahead and back up to that main controls menu and then select this option here save game remap file now that means anytime you start up this game it's going to have the proper capcom controls we'll go back and resume the game and test it out and yeah it's working fine and luckily you only have to do this remapping one time so for example if we start up a different capcom game like marvel vs capcom here what we can do is go back into the quick menu then select controls and then select load remap file from here you should see that same street fighter file next you can select save game remap file and it's going to make a new one specific to that game that you're playing now and so now with marvel vs capcom i have that same remap and i didn't have to actually do any remapping all i had to do was just save and then load that same remap file and you only have to do this once per capcom game and then you're good to go okay so the last trick i want to show is how to get some fancy box art so that you have a better navigation experience as you can see here with the sega cd collection i don't have any sort of media at all what you want to do if you're set up like this is go ahead and press the start button and go into scrape here you've got a couple options you can use screen scraper or the games database screen scraper is going to give you both images and videos but you will need to set up your own account first and then have it linked within the settings if you don't want to do any of that stuff you can just go and change it to the gamesdb this is only going to give you an image and not a video but it usually works really well here i'm going to change the image source to box 2d so i see that instead of a screenshot and then i'm just going to select scrape now because i'm in the sega cd menu it knows it's only going to scrape for a sega cd games and then after that set up it's going to scrape through all these images make sure you're connected to the internet for this part anyway once that's done go ahead and go into game settings then update games list and now with any luck as you scroll through you should see the box art and if you use the screen scraper app you'll see some video as well but it may be that it won't catch every single game for example with adventures of batman and robin it didn't figure it out here what you can do is hold down on the a button and a quick menu will pop up from the right from here you can select the scrape button it's going to search for that game specifically and as you can see here under screen scraper it did find it so i'm just going to go ahead and select the screen scraper option and it's going to download all those assets and like i mentioned because it's screen scraper it's going to show the video as well but yeah that's basically it that's how you would set up to have a nice navigation system it's going to take some time to you know obviously get everything tweaked you need to download your roms you need to add them to the card then you need to scrape them but i would say it's going to take maybe a couple hours altogether to get this all set up and then once it's done it's going to be a lot of fun for you and your family now one question a lot of people asked me after i made my initial review is whether or not you could use an 8-bit doe arcade stick as a second controller when playing this system and so i tested that out and yeah absolutely it does work just great here i'm using the 2.4 gigahertz usb dongle connected to the super console x arcade stick and i'm using the x input function but from there it was completely plug and play as you can see right here my youngest son and i we were playing some turtles arcade game and we were having a blast and so yes long story short you can use the 8-bit doe arcade stick as a second controller with the super console arcade stick in fact if you wanted to get that other arcade stick the one that doesn't have any games inside of it you could use that as a second controller as well and like i demonstrated in my initial review video you can also just use an 8-bit doe controller if you wanted as well and so yeah that's really about it for this video i just wanted to show you how to set this up if you wanted to do it yourself and like i mentioned before you know tailoring this to my own game library and having everything configured the way i want it to be was a little bit of effort but totally worth it in my opinion like i showed in the review video they just put way too many games on the other one and you would spend more time deleting games than you would just loading up your own like this when it comes down to it i was surprised to find how much i really enjoyed this system once i had it set up i initially bought this thing i think for about 130 maybe 140 dollars and i was expecting just to maybe do one quick review video and be done with it but it turns out our family liked this so much that it ended up getting a permanent spot in our living room tv setup and so i'm hoping that some other families out there might find this useful as well admittedly i was pretty bummed to find out that the one that doesn't come with a game card doesn't even have the game system inside and so it's a little bit more expensive than it would be if we just got the very cheapest model but still i think if you can find this for about 120 or 130 dollars altogether when it's on sale it's totally gonna be worth it anyway let me know if you have any questions in the comments below and as always thank you for watching be sure to like and subscribe if you found this helpful and we will see you next time happy gaming [Music] you

Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 20,148

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Id: AVYwb9Sd3Q4

Length: 21min 36sec (1296 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 06 2022