Super Console X King Review: Ultimate Plug-and-Play Gaming TV Box?

[Music] hey everybody this is roster metro gamecore today we're going to look at this device here which is the super console x king now like the others this is an android tv box that has been set up to be a retro gaming solution it comes with controllers and all the games pre-installed you just need to plug it into your tv and away you go now if this device looks familiar it probably is because this is a well-known android box called the b-link gt king and you can find this thing for about a hundred and forty dollars via amazon or as low as 120 dollars through aliexpress now the main differences between the gt king and this super console x king is the fact that this one here is meant to be an all-in-one gaming solution it even comes with a couple crappy controllers but you can swap those out for any bluetooth controller of your own so in today's video we're going to check out the gaming performance of this box and whether or not the upgraded price is worth the convenience of having everything pre-loaded already so without any further delay let's jump into it so let's get started with some of the specs of this box first and foremost this runs the amlogic s922x chipset which is one of the most powerful amlogic cpus out there when it comes to android tv boxes that can run mu elec this is the top tier in addition to having a 1.8 gigahertz clock speed it has four gigs of ram and then 64 gigs of internal storage now this device can triple boot into different operating systems you have an android tv 9.0 system and mulek 4.2 is already installed on the sd card and you can also run corelec which is a fork of kodi for media streaming in terms of connectivity this has wi-fi 6 which is going to give you a very stable wi-fi connection but it also has a gigabit ethernet connection if you want to use that instead in terms of ports it has hdmi 2.1 2 usb 3.0 connectors one usb 2.0 port as well as optical audio and finally this comes with two wireless controllers as well as a remote control for the android side so let's jump into an unboxing here i got mine from aliexpress so as you can see here it came packaged like this and because this is essentially just a rebranded version of the gt king you can see the controllers don't have their own packaging or anything they're just packed in separately here now in terms of controllers everyone likes to complain about these ps2 knockoff controllers but i kind of don't mind them because they're really great for the kids and so i just let them use these controllers and then use the nice ones myself and yeah you could probably say that's cheating you know i'm giving them the crappy controller so i can wail on them and street fighter 2 but that's my privilege as a father these things use usb dongles and aaa batteries to get them running and personally for all of my testing i just use a bluetooth controller instead of these but it's nice to have spares around now the box here is exactly like the gt king there's like no difference at all in terms of branding or anything else the only thing that's different about this is that it comes packaged with an sd card already and honestly this is a pretty nice android box i'm not a big fan of the skull that's here on the front but at least it's subtle on the back you have one of the usb ports hdmi ethernet port and your analog out it also has an av out port on the other side you have your other two usb ports and then you can see here this one came packed with a 256 gig sd card so yeah overall i think this does look pretty nice i like that the box itself is squared off at the sides it doesn't have any bumps or anything to it it has a bit of an austere look to it and i think it would look just fine next to all your other consoles the manual just shows you the different ports that are available let's see what else is inside so this remote control is pretty good i've actually seen this one before it gets the job done now here's the ac plug this actually is a better quality than i was expecting the cable feels really good and the adapter itself feels really solid you got a couple other manuals inside here some instructions on how to use the dual boot system and an hdmi cable yeah overall i'm actually impressed with the quality of this box itself in terms of just pure professionalism it's probably one of the best i've seen one thing to note here is those skull eyes actually light up when you plug it in not a big fan of that either but you know i'm probably not gonna see it in my entertainment center okay so booting it up it's gonna go right into emilek it's gonna start with this intro video here i'm just gonna speed through it for you and then here you are this is the interface here you basically just scroll through your systems and then pick your games now this is just one of many skins that are available for this device if you press start and then go into ui settings you can see there's another skin available under the theme set let's pick this crystal one and check it out and this is what the crystal one looks like and real quick here i'm just gonna shuffle through all the different systems on this device in general this is gonna play all the systems that are supported in emu elect basically it's going to cap out at dreamcast nintendo 64 and sony psp but as you can see it's been loaded with a ton of different systems and games all told there's about 50 000 games on the 256 gigabyte sd card way more than you'd ever be able to play in a lifetime now once you're connected to your wi-fi you can go into the updates section and download new themes and there's something like a dozen or so themes that you can pick from my favorite is this one here it's called electful now say you come up on a system that you don't actually want to show in the menu what you do is you go into the game collection settings section and then select systems displayed and then just uncheck the systems you don't want to see in the menu super easy then emilek will restart itself and there you go it's no longer there a couple other things i would recommend you do before you get started is go into the mulx settings and then turn off the always show boot video that's going to turn off the video that appears every time you start up the system okay another thing i recommend you do is go into the game setting and then under smooth games turn that one to off this is going to turn off by linear filtering and make your games look a little bit sharper now you may actually see duplicates of games in the menu let's just pick a random game here so i've never heard of this one here it's called super mario brothers 3 but you can see there's two versions of it so let's start up one of them and see what they look like okay so you can clearly see that this one's all messed up they've misspelled everything instead of player one it says jogador what the heck is a jokador anyway obviously they made a huge mistake with this one i'm not sure why it's like this for example when you're actually playing the game instead of saying world one at the bottom left it says mundo one now if we check out the other mario 3 and again i don't know anything about this game i've never even heard of it but when you start it up it does look like it's in the correct english so obviously this is going to be the superior version so once you figure that out what you do is you go back into the menu you hold down the a button and then the options for that game are going to appear and then you can delete that one that's in portuguese and there you go now you only have one of that game now this system is so powerful that one of the things you could consider doing is adjusting the latency options within retroarch so for example if you turn on some of these here and then you start playing a game it does improve the latency of the controller itself but the thing is even though it feels better when you're playing it it actually looks worse as you're running around and i don't know if you can notice it here on screen but it just felt a little bit more jittery than normal and it kind of started giving me a headache when i was running across with mario it just didn't look good to me so this is a bit of a trade-off you could play around with the latency settings because the cpu is so powerful it's going to be able to handle all that but honestly i didn't like it now speaking of the fact that this is a very powerful cpu i'm not going to spend a lot of time on 16-bit systems but i do want to show off that star fox works perfectly on the super nintendo and because this runs so well it's just a given that every other super nintendo game is probably going to play just fine too so in general i'm not going to show really any 8-bit or 16-bit system they're all on here and they play great but let's move on to some of the harder stuff so starting off first with the nintendo 64 you can see it's running at about 60 frames per second using the native 480p resolution but let's go into the quick menu options here and upscale it to 960x720 and just like that you're gonna get about 60 frames per second in this game in particular it does dip down to something around 58 frames per second but honestly if i didn't see the numbers at the top right i wouldn't be able to detect any of that slowdown as far as i could tell every single nintendo 64 game played at 720 resolution and at full speed even the harder ones like mario tennis or cruise in usa they had no problem every once in a while i would hear a little bit of a stutter in the audio but when it came to gameplay everything was just fine and there's a potential here that you could probably upscale it to 1080p as well and still get pretty good gameplay for most of these nintendo 64 games i mean even goldeneye 007 played at 720 resolution and even though some of the frames per second did dip a lot the gameplay itself was smooth the whole time now this game is notorious for having frame rate issues so your mileage may vary but it did look really good to me same thing with conker's bad for a day i actually got further in this game than i ever had before because this is legitimately the first time i've ever been able to play it at full speed now another system i want to show off real quick for the europeans in the audience amiga runs just great you do have to mess with the options a little bit but i would recommend checking out the guides from emu chicken specific to amiga on the super console x and i'll leave a link to it in the video description below okay so moving over to other systems ps1 works just fine you can actually upscale this resolution as well in the retroarch quick menu and in general everything played at a solid 60 frames per second there's no issue at all with any ps1 game even the harder to run games like bloody roar 2 were absolutely flawless and i wasn't totally surprised by this because you know the ps1 is one of the easier systems to emulate from this era but it is still nice to see now nintendo ds also works really well you can also go into the settings and turn on high resolution for this as well and it's not going to affect performance in any way in general you're going to get 100 performance of every nintendo ds game your only limitation is going to be whether or not it requires touch screen inputs okay so moving on to arcade in general all of your classic arcade games are going to play just perfectly really anything that can play through meme for the most part is going to play well that includes any of the shooters and fighters you can think of the only one that i really had any issues with is killer instinct which is notoriously hard to emulate as you can see here it got about 45 frames per second so it's running at about three quarters speed to me this is too slow to really enjoy but the options there if you really want and this game actually didn't come bundled with this system i had to add it myself i'll show you how to do that later in this video but other than killer instinct and a couple others like nfl blitz and tekken everything else played really well cps3 games like street fighter 3 were perfect and there's a big library of neo geo cd games on here and then all the regular neo geo games played well also i did experience some slow down with the metal slug games and i don't think it really had to do with frame rate i think these games just bog down when there's lots of things on the screen okay let's move over to sega saturn now i found that there was a bunch of games bundled onto this system and so i had an opportunity to play a lot of games that i really hadn't played before now sega saturn actually plays so well that you can mess around with the scaling options in this part of the video looks a little bit blurry it has to do with my video capture card it's not the actual gameplay itself it looked really good when i was playing it on my monitor either way these games played so well i wanted to mess with the scaling options available in retroarch so going into the quick menu options i changed the rendering to 2x rendering as you can see here and it does look better but it also has some weird like wobbling with some of the 3d sprites so i'm not really sure if i like that like i don't like how the trunk of the car is kind of wobbling a little bit but honestly you can scale it all the way up to 720p and it does take a little bit of a hit in terms of speed but if you really wanted to have nice looking saturn it is possible on this here's one more example with panzer dragoon here it is with native rendering and i think it looks just fine i think this is kind of what i expect when i look at a saturn game it's supposed to be chunky and blocky it's a very early 3d system but you can turn on 2x rendering and it does look a lot nicer i do think that 2x rendering is probably the best for sega saturn on this system and like i mentioned there are a ton of saturn games on this one at least on the 256 gigabyte card and it's a lot of fun to go through this catalog this is one of those systems i never got to try when i was growing up okay so moving on to other systems the thomas wave every game that i had on here played perfectly i'm going to show off dolphin blue because that's one of the hardest to emulate as you can see here a solid frame rate throughout the whole thing same thing with sega naomi games they also had very good performance even if you upscaled it to 720p so let's move over to sega dreamcast and see how that works and just like with the other sega systems this one runs beautifully too in fact you can upscale this to 720p and in general it's gonna play perfectly and this also comes bundled with games i'd never tried before for example metropolis street racer which i was very disappointed to find out does not have superman in it at all why would they do that they're a metropolis where superman but all the other usual suspects played just fine crazy taxi 2 would have frame rate dips every once in a while but it felt like the performance was smooth throughout the whole thing other games like ikaruga are just fine and probably one of the ultimate tests is virtua fighter 3 tv and as you can see here it's also playing really well even upscaled at 720p okay so last note on dreamcast is sonic adventure 2. this one also plays just fine upscaled to 720p but you know in retroarch you can actually go into the options and turn on widescreen hacks as well and sonic adventure 2 is one of those games that looks really good in widescreen now while this works really well for probably 90 percent of the gameplay you will find that there are moments where it bottlenecks into much slower speeds so as you can see here when you're going down the stairs it slows down to a crawl there's a moment where it runs at maybe half speed and then it bounces right back to normal speed and so it's one of those things where you kind of have to play it by ear whether or not the white screen is going to be worth this trade-off either way the options are there now back in the main menu if you go into game settings and then per system advanced configuration you can specify which emulator you want to run for every system on this device and this is mostly important for the sony psp because by default they have the retroarch core selected but the standalone port of ppsspp runs much better so you need to change that over before you start playing psp now in order to get to the settings in the standalone emulator you actually need a usb keyboard the first time around and what you need to do is you need to press the escape key and that'll bring up the menu settings and then you can go in and change the controls and then map a key to the pause function here this is going to allow you to get back to the settings without having to use a usb keyboard every time okay let's check out gameplay now in general what i tend to do is i turn on 2x rendering and then an auto frame skip of one for every psp game and what that's going to do is it's going to run it at full speed if possible but it will initiate an auto frame skip if it's having any sort of slow down issues what that means is you're going to have relatively smooth gameplay throughout but you may get a little bit of jerkiness depending on the game but for the most part even with 2x rendering it rarely would dip into any sort of frame skill what that says to me is you could probably get away with 3x rendering on certain games but in general i do think that a 2x rendering looks really good on a tv or a monitor in many games that i figured we're going to have a lot of slowdown we're still playing perfectly with 2x rendering for example lego star wars 2 is really hard to emulate this specific part and it played it perfectly same thing with jack and daxter the lost frontier this one plays really well too now there are some graphical glitches for example with this atv game you can see that the character sprite is all weird looking but otherwise it plays great and of course the only games that don't play well are the god of war games with a 2x rendering and auto frame skip a 1 they just don't work really well you can tell there's a lot of slowdown but if you bump that down to 1x rendering it does play fairly well the auto frame skip is really coming into play here but if you really wanted to play this game despite having this low resolution you could definitely do it now a bunch of psp games are actually not bundled with this system for example the god of war games as well as ridge racer aren't on there and that's a shame because ridge racer in particular runs really well on this so let me show you how to remove and add games from the sd card and honestly it's super easy because with emulek 4.0 and above it actually has its own sd card partition so all you have to do is plug the sd card in and you can find all of the games now for example i noticed that the nintendo ds has a ton of duplicates if you just search for the word japan within the ds folder you're going to find thousands of files that are japanese localized games there's nearly 14 gigs of japanese language games on this sd card and personally i don't ever plan on playing a japanese ds game on this device so i just deleted all 14 gigs right then and there that gives me more space to add new games and with that additional storage space now you can add in your own game you can see here i'm dragging over a bunch of psp games and that's basically it super easy now as i mentioned before these are actually android tv boxes and the android operating system still works on this device there's two ways to access it either you can just pull the sd card out when it's off and then turn it back on or you can go into the mulx settings and then select reboot from nand let's do that now and here we are this is android tv 9.0 and in here you can use it just like any other android tv box you can sign in to your google profile you can either browse or search for android apps and then install them onto the device and then it's basically going to run like any other android device you can pick your games your emulators things like that so let me show you some of the possibilities here for example let's go into the standalone psp emulator and from here we can actually access the sd card in that same games partition that we were playing with earlier within here you can go into the psp folder and bam all of a sudden you have access to all of your psp games without ever having to take the sd card out or install it anywhere else and just like that you can run all those same games using the standalone android emulator and again even though it looks all fuzzy right here that's because of my video capture card it looks beautiful when i was playing it on the tv and for the most part psp games run really well the performance is about the same as it is on emulek but nintendo 64 i found was actually a better experience i really like being able to browse through all the cover art here and when upscaling to 720p everything played really well but you can even upscale to 1080p and get the same performance too so in general all the nintendo 64 games that capped out at 720p on emulek can run at 1080p on the android side so that's pretty handy and it's pretty cool that you can just use the same files for either system on the dreamcast side you're going to be able to use the redream emulator and this one i found runs a little bit better than the retroarch one and if you pay a little bit extra for the pro version of the redream emulator it's going to allow you to upscale all these games so as you can see here i'm playing these games at 1280 by 960 and they still run really well but you know given the fact that they run at 720p on the retroarch side just fine it's really going to be up to you if you want to get into the weeds like this on the android side now one of the cool options on the android side is you can actually stream your pc onto this device and you can use things like moonlight or steam link i'm going to use parsec which is one of my favorite streaming apps so now that i'm accessing my computer i'm going to start up some emulators on this side and just like that i'm now streaming wii u games from my pc onto this box which is kind of a neat concept if you're going to have this box over say your living room and then you have the pc in the other side of the house this allows you to play all your pc games from the comfort of your couch and finally the other thing that you can do on the android side is play android games so if there's a certain game you really like to play and you want to play it on your tv for example asphalt 8 or maybe beach buggy racing which i guess people like i'm not really sure or even some first person shooters like dead trigger for the most part they're going to play great there are some games that do have hiccups for example you can see with horizon chase there's something wrong with the road here so this one's not playable unfortunately but far and away most of the other games played fine so to get back to the emulex side you just go over to the power menu app and then select reboot and when it reboots it's going to go into the mulex side and here we are back on the old system so yeah this is the beauty of the super console x king you're able to dual boot into the android side or the emulex side and the emulx side is already customized for the most part with all the games that you would want to be able to play now one thing to note is this system is pretty expensive it's almost 200 dollars if you get the biggest sd card and once you get into that 200 range now it's time to start thinking about the nvidia shield tv now i picked one of these up about a month or two ago and i've been really enjoying it but i haven't done a review on it yet in a nutshell this is an android tv box on steroids now with this one you're not able to dual boot into any other system like emilek so you're stuck with the android tv operating system so let's compare the nvidia shield against the super console x king and what better way to compare them than with a venn diagram okay so first things first let's separate the fact that there's the b league gt king and then the super console x king even though they're the same system and they run the same chip set and everything else there are some differences between them number one the super console x king is a plug and play experience it comes with two controllers and it already comes with an sd card that's been loaded with thousands of games and emu elect the fact that they do this is a little bit shady but this is a no judgment zone here additionally the super console x king does maintain all the android tv functions that you can find in the b league gt king anyway and the thing is the gt king actually can run emulek but you're gonna have to manually load it and i have a video where i show you how to do that and i'll leave that in the video description as well and that's something to consider is that you can just get this box without emilek for about 120 to 140 dollars and if you want to take the time and put emulec on it yourself and then load up all of your games that's going to be the cheapest option when it comes down to it the super console x king is really about convenience you're essentially going to pay between 180 and 200 depending on the sd card you buy to have the convenience of being able to just plug it in and play all of your games right then and there and it's up to you to decide whether or not that's worth that upgraded cost but since we're talking about a system that costs up to 200 let's talk about the nvidia shield tv for a second now this one does retail for 200 and you can get it on amazon the nvidia shield tv is quite a bit more powerful than these other systems it runs the same chipset that's on the nintendo switch now it only has 16 gigabytes of internal storage and no sd card slot but you can plug in a usb flash drive and access all of your games from there and unlike the other two systems the nvidia shield tv does have vulcan support and it also has the drm permissions to run 4k content like on netflix and youtube the super console x king even though it can play netflix and youtube maxes out at 1080p now the nvidia shield tv is so powerful that it actually can emulate some gamecube games as well but you have to bear in mind that it only runs android tv operating system which means you're not going to have a pretty menu like emulac or anything else like that you're gonna have to find and install standalone apps and then point them to your roms and do all that kind of setup and i'll get into more detail about that when i do a review of this device but it's in no way as convenient as something like the super console x king alright so there you have it this is my review of the super console x king and personally i've had a lot of fun with this device for starters i really love how powerful this chipset is and i think when you pair it with one of your own controllers something that's a little bit more high quality it's a really great gaming experience and if you're someone who is interested in the original super console x but you really didn't think it was powerful enough this system is going to be just about as powerful as you're going to be able to find and still run emulek of course it does have a higher price point but i don't know it's kind of worth it right it's like 200 bucks to play every single game in existence all the way up through dreamcast and not only play them but upscale them to 720p or even higher and it looks pretty nice other than this ugly skull thing and you know i think it's just a really good mixture of value and performance you can definitely get some tv boxes for cheaper but none of them other than the nvidia shield are going to perform as well as this one and the convenience factor of having this operating system already pre-loaded with everything is going to be pretty tempting if you're not really interested in figuring out how emulation works and all that other stuff if you just want to play the games and in particular you want to play saturn and dreamcast and nintendo 64 at full speed this is going to be the device that'll be the most convenient for you alright everyone that's it for this video it was a long one but i hope you enjoyed it let me know if you have any questions in the comments below and be sure to like and subscribe if you found this helpful and we will see you next time happy [Music] gaming

Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 214,877

Keywords:

Id: WzXyLdEP3Ec

Length: 24min 14sec (1454 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 27 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Atlas3030]

It's my privelege as a father to woop they're ass in street fighter 2

[u/kakka_rot]

Man, I had a super console x, then the SCX Pro, now there is ANOTHER one. These damn things come out like every 3 months I swear. I was on aliexpress earlier, someone was selling one that looks exactly the same as a SCX, but blue with a different name.

[u/Austin_Terrible]

Would a Gamecube Controller Adapter, and subsequently a or several gamecube controllers, work with this device? I would be very interested in this if so!

[u/vodkaffee]

oh, i bought a standard android tv box with very similar specs, it doesnt run the most demanding psp games but besides that is great, thinking if ishould install emuelec on it

[u/Steveyg777]

Hi guys. I need some quick advice. I saw the super console x and it looks good but i saw reviews that it stuttered when playing 'gen 5' games like the Saturn games etc. So i also saw the nvidia shield Pro 4k. With this it seems I'd need to install retroarch and download roms for ages then mess about trying to get it all to work BUT it would play the games more smoothly. Is this a good understanding of the situation and are these my only options? - ideally I'd like a system that is pre setup with all roms for all retro systems setup and working BUT it plays all games and systems smoothly. What are the options that would meet these requirements? Is it better to just go for the super console x and be fairly happy as well as glad i haven't wasted lots of time on other 'diy' options? And if so is the super console x Pro the best choice? Or the king? Max? Etc?

[u/solider67]

Does anyone know how to work the ds emulator? It reads my left joystick as the touch screen but that’s it, I can’t get into the menu or anything

[u/Neodeastra777]

I have a few questions regarding this game box. When I use retroarch ingame it freezes the whole system. Does anyone have a work around for that? Like, how do you shut off the system when it freezes?

How do you transfer everything provided on the SD card to a better card? I hear the SD card that comes with the system isn't very reliable. Do you have to flash Emuelec on a new SD card and add everything manually to the new card?

And how do you scrape. I'm connected via wifi but when I try to scrape a game it says "no game found".

If anyone can provide any help on the matter I would greatly appreciate it.

[u/Daley_Corvid]

Super Console X King is amazing, the Kinhank S922X version (hopefully revision A like my one). It emulates up to DC/N64 perfectly, and personally I am yet to have a single problem with it.

​

I also bought a stock GT-King and tied to make one myself that was as good but failed. My one just lacks the same amount of finishing polish, so I just use the Kinhank now.

This issues you are reporting have been fixed in the latest update, you should try downloading and updating your software.

I run all the games with several filters and shaders plus overlay graphics and it runs sweet as a nut on the new update. Highly recommend!

[u/-Heathenlust]

I recently bought one. Not bad, enjoying it so far. Noticed that some of the computer based systems are harder to work, several even have games that seem to crash.

I am curious though, how do i setup a bigger sd card to run instead of my current? I have a 64 but want to use a 128g.