The $25 Handheld Everyone is Talking About

all right fine let's do a review [Music] hey everybody this is Russ from retro gamecore we're going to review this device right here called the SF 2000 from datafrog and I've gotten a lot of requests to make this review mostly because this device is ridiculously cheap in fact right now on AliExpress it's 24.83 with a two dollar off coupon and free shipping and so you might be thinking to yourself what kind of device can we really get for about the same price as a couple fancy cheeseburgers and so hopefully that's what I'll cover in this review now as I start to do my typical nitpicking you have to bear in mind that I am going to take all this into context and so I will be a little bit more forgiving with its flaws just by virtue of the price either way let's go ahead and dive in to start this one comes with AV cables if you want to plug it into a TV we'll test this later additionally it has a USBC charging cable and then a quick start manual now let's take a look at the device itself first thing that struck me is that it looks like it's been covered with like a grocery bag this is the kind of bag that I would put Tomatoes Inside of not necessarily a retro handheld and taking a look here you can obviously see that it's inspired by the Super Nintendo and it is a relatively small size eyes this is only a three inch screen my first impression here was the big bump here on the back this actually gives it a nice ergonomic Edge but also houses a battery right here and it turns out if you unscrew this section and remove the compartment it is a user replaceable battery in fact this battery right here is relatively standard just a quick Google search found all sorts of Alternatives and so it looks like for about five dollars you could actually replace this battery sometime in the future and for a retro handheld that is essentially E-Waste this is a pretty cool move and in terms of the feel it's surprisingly similar to a Super Nintendo a lot of that has to do with that smaller size on top of that it has a nice plastic texture and also just feels solid in the hand so at least initially this is pretty impressive let's go ahead and test the controls we're going to start with the d-pad this is obviously modeled after the Super Nintendo's d-pad and has a similar mushy feel to it but a little bit higher travel but also less pivot so when pressing up down left and right you have to give it a little bit more force and then as you press down on one side you can see the other sides kind of go down a little bit too and that's because of that lack of pivot so yes at least initially right here I can see there's going to be some issues with the inputs let's do a quick side by side comparison with a Super Nintendo controller and from a size and design standpoint yes they're very similar and while the Super Nintendo controller does have less travel overall it still has a really balanced pivot and so when pressing between the two you can definitely tell the difference right off the bat it just so happens you have to use more Force when pressing down on the sf-2000 now that lack of pivot does have a practical application for example here when using the Contra test you can see that when pressing down on the d-pad even when rocking back and forth you don't get any diagonals at all and personally I like to have a little bit of movement here or there because if the character doesn't move that means you're probably going to have issues and sure enough when just playing the Contra game itself yeah it's pretty hard to actually hit those diagonals so for me I would say this is a less than optimal experience moving over to fighting games it's almost the exact same thing here in fact I had quite a hard time getting those quarter Circle movements I really had to jam down on that d-pad and even then I'm probably only hitting it about half the time and so even though I am primarily a d-pad user when it comes to fighting games I found myself using the joystick more than not and it turns out that using the joystick actually works really well for these games so let's go ahead and move over to actually looking at the joystick itself and really there's not a lot to say here it has a Nintendo switch style joy-con but it does not click down L3 and R3 honestly I don't think that's a big deal because there's no ability to use hotkeys on this device anyway now let's talk about these face buttons number one I love the fact that they're nice and big one thing I found interesting is that some of the buttons were concave and some were convex in fact if you look here the X A and B buttons are concave whereas the Y button for some reason is convex and I've seen other people's units which have a different pattern so honestly I think they're probably just throwing these buttons in willy-nilly either way that setup is a little bit odd but not a deal breaker for me now the buttons themselves also have a rubber membrane very mushy kind of feel to them it's actually pretty similar to a Super Nintendo controller the amount of travel here is actually pretty good too but the big issue I have is that it does tend to bottom out by that I mean when you press fully down on the button it seems to go flush with the case itself and that's not a very pleasant feeling when you're playing a game you always want to have a little bit of distance here on the top here's a comparison with the Super Nintendo controller other than the whole convex and concave thing you can see that the Super Nintendo buttons just rest a little bit higher than the sf2000 but other than that they have a pretty familiar feel to them now I actually decided to go in and try to fix this myself and so what I did is I took some pieces of really thin tape and I placed them at the bottom of each of these buttons and it really doesn't matter what kind of tape you use or a pattern or anything else like that all you're really trying to do is just add a little bit of distance right here where the contact meets the button and so if you have any sort of thin tape like this I would recommend trying this out and after making that change I did feel a little bit of an improvement the buttons definitely stopped bottoming out but all the same I felt like they could be just a little bit higher and so in hindsight instead of putting just two strips of tape I probably should have put something like four either way I think you're probably trying to add about half a millimeter of height altogether to the bottom of the button okay next up are the select and start buttons these actually have a very rubber mushy feel to them very similar to the original Super Nintendo controller and so I think these are actually pretty nice and authentic right here and then finally we have the L and R shoulder buttons now design wise these are very similar to a super Nintendo's controller but they have a very hard micro switch click to them and so they end up feeling and sounding different than all the other buttons on the device and so yes in the end I did find these buttons annoying but also this is a 24 device and I think all told these buttons and controls are above average altogether there are devices out there that cost twice as much that have worse controls and ergonomics than this one now here's a direct comparison here between the Super Nintendo controller and the sf2000 and when you look at them side by side like this yes the Super Nintendo controller looks a lot smaller but if you were just to hold the datafrog device in your hands without looking into Super Nintendo controller it almost feels like a perfect fit so yes big fan of the size and ergonomics overall now let's take a look at the bottom i o on the left here we have an on and off toggle switch next we have a USBC charging port and then an SD card slot and this will come already pre-loaded with a card it's a little bit hard to take out but you kind of have to get in there with your fingernail and as you can see the capacity is 16 gigabytes now this thing feels Ultra cheap like it feels like a generic version of a generic version of a card and so I would say if you're going to be very serious about this device you probably will have to replace this card just for longevity up next we have that AV plug this is not a headphone jack it's a little bit too small and the idea here is you're supposed to use the included RCA cables to plug this into the device and then into a TV however when testing an on my CRT television I was not able to get any signal whatsoever and there could be a bunch of things going wrong here maybe there's something wrong with the port or the cable but either way I did not get this to work and then finally we have a volume wheel I'm a big fan of these as well now looking on the back we have that spot for the battery and then also two different speaker holes and that might lead you to believe that this is going to be stereo sound but of course they cut some Corners so let's go ahead and take this apart and as you can see here we only have a single speaker that is soldered directly onto the board so the device will only give you mono sound but to be honest the speaker is pretty loud and while we're here let's go ahead and do the rest of the teardown so I'm going to pull off the rest of the PCB two things you're going to notice number one is that the screen is not OCA laminated it just comes right off from the shell and the other thing here is you can see that CPU has actually been sanded down so you can't see the name of it they probably did this to prevent anyone from cloning their heart Hardware but all the same it's going to make it super challenging to develop custom firmware if we don't know the chip anyway that's it for the insides and back let's go ahead and take a look at the screen next it does come with a plastic film over it which is actually kind of hard to take off but now that I have it off let's go ahead and take a look and as you can see here there is a gap between the screen covering and the display itself and this was very common that a lot of displays back in the day but not so much anymore okay that's really about it for Hardware let's now start talking about the software experience to start this is running a custom operating system and it boots up pretty quick we're getting less than seven seconds overall and here on the main menu it's going to be playing some music that you cannot turn off let me give you a listen right here [Music] and yes this definitely gets annoying over time but it's easy enough to just turn it down with the volume wheel now as far as the user interface itself it's very simple you just press up and down to go between the different systems and each system has these like top four games right here if you don't want to play any of these you can press the start button to get into the actual game menu from here you can press up and down to go through the games list or left and right if you want to page through them more quickly from there you can press start to load up a game or select to back out to the main menu and really that's about it when it comes to the user interface now like I mentioned this is going to come with an SD card that already has a bunch of games on it in fact they say it has something like five or six thousand games altogether and it looks like they're using a very comprehensive ROM list in addition to like the typical North American releases you can also see that they have European and Asian ROMs too and so that's why the number count is so high for example with Nintendo we have 868 titles and for Super Nintendo we have over 1100 so if you are looking for a cheap handheld that has all the games loaded up already then yes this could work but bear in mind the Act of actually going through each of these games can get pretty tedious for starters there is no favorites function and so if you want to get to a game that's at the bottom of the list you're going to have to scroll for quite some time however there are some ways that you can curate the ROM list if you'd like for example within the settings menu there's an option here called game list and this is a folder where you can put User submitted ROMs for example if we look here at the SD card there is a folder called ROMs and if you put any of your games inside of here as long as they're compatible with one of these emulators the device will actually pick up on it and you can browse them from there so if you want just a quick and easy way to put your favorite games into one folder that's one way you can do it now there's also a community developed tool that'll give you a solution as well we'll talk about that near the end of the video for now let's go through that settings menu again the next option is a search function this actually works pretty well here you can search for a word and it's going to bring up every title that has that word for example if we search for the word Mario there's 45 different games that show up and so that might be a quick and easy way to get to some of your favorite games if you don't want to load them up your self and then finally you can change the language as well as the external video output from ntsc to Pal okay now let's actually talk about what it's like to play games on the sf2000 to start every single system has a bilinear filter applied to it what this means is it's going to balance out the pixels and it looks pretty good the games themselves will look a little bit softer like it's not a very sharp image and we're not quite sure what the actual resolution of the screen is but if I had to guess I think it's a 240p either way I think the screen itself looks nice but of course it's not perfect there are a couple issues number one you cannot adjust the screen brightness what you see right here is exactly what you'll get that means it'll probably be a pain when trying to play it in the dark and the second issue here which happens with any of the emulators is that we have some pretty bad screen tearing if you look at the trees here in Mega Man 2 when I'm running left and right you can see they kind of have a shimmer or wobble to them and that's because the screen is not refreshing in time and so anytime you try to play a game that has some pretty fast left or right movement you're gonna see this and unfortunately for me I find this almost unplayably bad now to exit out of game all you do is press select and start and it'll bring up this quick menu here here you can quit out of a game or you can save or load a Save State and you have four different saves per game so here with Mega Man 2 I'm going to save the Save State and then go ahead and open it back up and if I go back into the menu and then go into load I can bring up that save so yes this function works really well now when it comes to NES performance I found the best games to play are those that have a somewhat static background so something with a little bit slower of a pace I found that Double Dragon 2 works pretty well same thing with Ninja Gaiden and from a performance standpoint these games seem to be running at basically full speed now there are some issues with the ROMs that are pre-loaded on this card for example with the Mario Brothers games they added the pal ROMs which originally ran at 50 hertz but when they're inside this emulator they're going to run at 60 frames per second foreign and so unfortunately not only are the Mario Brothers games going to have screen tearing but they're also going to have a higher speed and probably the biggest deal breaker of them all among NES is the fact that the A and B buttons are actually swapped so for a Mario game you have to hold on to the a button then press the B button to jump and honestly it just feels kind of weird however there are some fixes to this it's a little bit Advanced and so I'll talk about that later in the video for now let's go ahead and move on to the other systems out of the box next up we have the original game boy there's two issues here number one it does not show colorization and so you're just going to have a black and white image for every game and depending on what kind of nostalgia you're going for you may not like this look and then secondly like with NES the A and B buttons are swapped as well and that can get pretty annoying depending on the game you're playing it's a similar story with Game Boy Color this one at least has the correct colors but all the same the A and B buttons are swapped however from a performance standpoint both Gameboy and Game Boy Color are running at full speed the only other issue to bring up is that they are stretched to a 4x3 aspect ratio instead of the original 10x9 and so some of your characters may look a little bit squished sticking with handheld systems let's go over to Game Boy Advance these ones also are stretched out to a 4x3 instead of three by two so everything's going to look a little bit taller and then also performance here is going to be an issue there are a couple games that I tried that were at least at a playable speed like Pokemon Emerald but also bear in mind there is no fast forward option with this device and trying to play these old-school Game Boy advanced Pokemon games at their normal speed is kind of excruciating nowadays and so as much as I want to say hey this is going to be a great Pokemon machine you might get a little bit bored at this regular speed now on top of that I would say about three quarters of the Game Boy Advance games I tested weren't even playable in the first place games like Mario Kart as well as Lego Star Wars had a bunch of frame skipping and then also audio stuttering and slow down too and so all together I found these to be a very frustrating gameplay experience I would say if you're looking forward to playing Game Boy Advance games on this device do not have high expectations especially when it comes to action or driving games these are just going to feel terrible which led me to think that okay maybe we can try some role-playing games maybe that'll be better but these games have their own issues for example with Mario and Luigi when I actually went into a battle the game would freeze and so unfortunately this game is broken and same thing with Final Fantasy 1 and 2 this one actually can't scroll properly at all and so when you try to go into a village or move around everything just kind of gets screwy so overall I would say that Game Boy Advance is on here but it's not really playable now one nice thing about Game Boy Advance is that at least the A and B buttons are mapped correctly but the shoulder buttons are not mapped to the actual shoulder buttons they're mapped to X and Y instead so that is a little bit weird but you might get used to it now for Sega Genesis the button mapping is really strange the way they've mapped it is a is a and b is B but then the right shoulder button is C and if you're used to the original Sega Genesis layout this is going to feel very strange for example with Aladdin you're gonna use the shoulder button to jump and in the far right or the a button to actually throw your Apple and for a guy like me who grew up playing this game it just feel feels really weird to my brain thankfully in terms of performance Sega Genesis is actually pretty good so if you can get over the screen tearing and the button mapping this might be a pretty good time okay moving over to Arcade I'm pretty sure they're running the final burn Alpha 2012 core right here what this means is you're going to be limited to mostly fighting games and beat-em-ups for the most part the 200 ROMs that they've added are mostly going to be Capcom games as well as Neo Geo games and so if you are looking to play like classic arcade games from like Sega or Namco they're not even on this SD card and like with some of the other systems the performance here is going to be mixed I did find that lightweight Neo Geo games and Capcom games played pretty well but as you start moving up things get pretty bad for example King of Fighters 98 has quite a bit of slowdown and even the original Street Fighter 2 games like Championship Edition does have issues as well so if you're looking for an arcade experience that's going to play at full speed you're not going to find it here and what's surprising is that the performance is not very predictable for example X-Men Children of the atom actually runs better than Street Fighter 2. and the Dungeons and Dragons games which are kind of hard to emulate within the Capcom catalog are actually pretty easy too so I would say that arcade gameplay here is going to be hit or miss but it is pretty good when it actually works and then finally let's talk about Super Nintendo this is probably the most important system for this device considering the fact that it looks like a Super Nintendo controller and so I think a lot of people are probably going to buy this device thinking that they can get a handheld Super Nintendo but unfortunately when it comes down to it only some games are actually going to play at full speed so if you're a big fan of Alfred chicken yeah this one plays pretty well however unfortunately most of the classics will not run at full speed initially when I started up Donkey Kong Country I thought to myself wow this actually is playing Super Nintendo games but then as I started to play the game more I realized I was not enjoying the experience number one the screen tearing is just terrible here on Super Nintendo but then also the game speed and the audio are really bad too and so really this is a far cry from being a good Super Nintendo experience let me give you an example with Final Fantasy 3. this is a game that usually will have some audio stuttering here and there unless you have some powerful Hardware but this one literally sounds worse than any other Super Nintendo emulator I've ever tried in fact it kind of sounds like a bunch of cats dying to the Final Fantasy theme and unfortunately I am going to give you a listen here right now foreign [Music] ly not only does it sound terrible but the gameplay is atrocious as well I'd say when it comes down to it only about 10 percent of Super Nintendo games are even going to be playable and let's face it those are not going to be the 10 of the best games now there is one bright spot and that is that the button mapping is correct but in addition to the performance issues there are some compatibility issues as well for example when trying to play Super Metroid it actually told me that it cannot be played on this device and I'm assuming it's because they use some sort of hacked version of this game and it's just not playing well with the emulator either way I would say your best bet is probably just to skip Super Nintendo games altogether okay with our testing out of the way let's talk about what I like and what I don't like about the datafrog sf2000 to start I'm a big fan of this price at 25 shipped you really can't expect much I also found this handheld was surprisingly comfortable and the overall build quality is definitely punching above its weight class I like the fact that it has larger buttons this is something that isn't very common on retro handhelds and it feels very good and I do like that navigating the menu is a very simple experience it's going to make it very easy for all ages to get through now as you can expect there's quite a few things I don't like about this device so let's dive into those number one the screen tearing is apparent in all of the emulators and it is pretty distracting next up the default button mapping can be frustrating especially if you have muscle memory for certain games and overall I walked away with the feeling there are just too many ROMs on this device and that's not really a complaint about the actual number of ROMs but just how hard it is to actually get to all of them because they don't have a favorites function you're going to spend a lot of time scrolling to find a specific game and that process can get a little bit frustrating another thing I didn't like was the fact that I couldn't adjust the screen brightness and I'm not sure if we're going to get custom firmware on this device but if we do I hope this is something that they can fix and finally it's pretty disappointing That Game Boy Advance Super Nintendo and arcade are not playing at full speed and among all of them I think that Super Nintendo is probably the most disappointing because it really looks like this device was designed for those games and really when it comes down to it out of the box none of these systems actually run well on the sf2000 they're either going to have issues with the button configuration or the performance or both however due to the price the sf-2000 has become a little bit of a viral hit so a bunch of people have been buying it and other people have been working on it as well in fact there are a couple websites already built that are dedicated to this handheld and I'll leave these linked below but essentially this one here has a collection of all the information we have about this device and it has some pretty handy links for example a tool that will allow you to change the button mapping Additionally you have the ability to change your boot logo and there's some other information within here as well and then also there's an app called frog tool and this will allow you to add your own games if you'd like now the process here is a little bit Advanced because of the way that this device reads the ROMs but all the same this tool does a pretty good job of walking you through that whole process and so if you do pick this up and you want to Tinker around you do have some options already and who knows even though this is closed Source we might get some custom firmware working as well when it comes down to it the big question is going to be whether or not you find this device worthy 25 to you and honestly I'm a little bit torn about the entire experience I really love the idea of the sf2000 for a very reasonable price you can play a lot of classic games and it has a nostalgic form factor and the controls aren't half bad but in practice basically every system has some sort of fatal flaw to it and unless you want to spend your time tinkering around with it to try to fix some of those flaws this may not be a good fit in a perfect world this would be a device that would already be loaded up with games and it would work relatively well and you could hand it out as like gifts to your relatives but honestly I think the gameplay experience here is bad enough that I think they're probably not going to enjoy themselves that much so in the end I have a hard time recommending this device even if it is super cheap you're definitely getting a lot of value for your money but all the same the actual gameplay experience is not really fun and so at this point I really just kind of leave it up to the Retro handheld Community if somebody is able to get custom firmware working and get a better gameplay experience we might have a gem on our hands but as it stands right now even paying 25 for this device is a bit of a risk anyway let me know what you think think in the comments below does this device show a lot of promise or is it basically E-Waste 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: 316,736

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Id: _VxK63sT2hk

Length: 22min 8sec (1328 seconds)

Published: Tue May 09 2023