(mysterious music) - One of the best deals in gaming for the past year has
been the ANBERNIC RG35XX. It took all of the best
parts of the Miyoo Mini, made them bigger and most
importantly, made them available. The RG35XX plays anything
from Game Boy all the way up to PS1 with fantastic emulation quality and great firmware options, and you get all that for
around 50 bucks plus shipping, so more like 65 bucks. Now, almost a year later, Anbernic iterated on their bestseller with the RG35XX Plus. It's more or less the same. It's ever so slightly smaller. It has angled shoulder buttons that are easier to differentiate
by feel when playing. These shoulder buttons
were inspired by mods for the original RG35XX. They also moved the
start and select buttons for some reason. If we're talking about cosmetic changes, everything else is more or less the same. It's an unremarkable upgrade. The rest of the upgrades are internal. A more powerful CPU GPU combo and quadruple the RAM
allows this new RG35XX Plus to play all the way up to
N64 DS and even PSP games and just for $14 more than the original, a substantial improvement. But there are a few questions
you probably already have. How are DS games gonna work on this thing if there's just one square screen? How are N64 and PSP Games gonna work without an analog stick, and to that, I say it's a $14 upgrade. Come on guys. Seriously, there's gonna
be some compromises. It's a substantial improvement, but it's certainly not for everybody. (lively music) This video is sponsored by Trade coffee. Oh, I hope that guy's not here. Oh man, I wanted to try
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with your first subscription or a gift for somebody. Hey man, can I get the wifi? - Yeah, of course. You go. Take it. Here. - This was sent to me by keepretro.com. They have free shipping and Anbernic's official website does not. So altogether it is slightly
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link to their store in the description below. Should you be interested in this, but I would say watch this whole video and decide for yourself. One of the best things
about the original RG35XX is the community around it. Custom firmware improved things so much and became so popular that
Anbernic decided to ship units with that custom firmware
installed already. And that leads us right off the bat to one of the biggest
issues with the RG35XX Plus. There is currently no custom
firmware out right now. It's too new. The stock experience of the
RG35XX Plus is very similar to the stock experience
of the original RG35XX when it first launched,
which is not the best. A lot of my criticisms here are gonna be on the firmware level and
these can be easily fixed with custom firmware over time. It's just that at the time of writing, there is no custom firmware
that addresses these issues. For example, you can't
suspend your gameplay at all. If you leave the app or
turn your console off, you'll lose your progress
unless you saved, of course. All right, it does let you suspend. It only kind of lets you suspend. If I wait too long, this will
die and I'll lose my progress. That alone is reason enough to consider the original RG35XX over this new revamped RG35XX Plus. That is of course, until
custom firmware gets developed. Keep an eye out for
updates from Black-Seraph. I'm sure he is working on
some custom firmware for this. I'll also be sure to update
the description of this video and also a pin comment or something with any updates that I see. I wanna give the original stock experience of the original RG35XX,
a little more credit because even before the custom firmware, it had a pretty great
emulation experience. The emulation quality was pretty great. It came with a bunch of
games that all ran very well. It was a good candidate for a
stocking stuffer for someone who just wants to play retro stuff but doesn't wanna mess around too much. And this new RG35XX Plus
does everything that one did just as well as NES emulation passes, the Yoshi's Island test, GBA emulation is spectacular. You'll probably get some
better emulation quality outta some more modern
demanding PS1 games as well, which was the peak of the
original's performance. It just now also includes
more powerful systems, N64, Dreamcast, PSP, and even
Nintendo DS emulation. That's huge for such a
small device like this, but the emulation quality just isn't all there for those systems. I was excited for the boosted performance, so I immediately jumped
right into DS emulation. As you can imagine, the
dual screens are not ideal for the single screen
experience, but that's fine. I've had a fine time running DS and 3DS on four by three screens before. Pressing R2 just full
screens, the top screen. Lots of DS games only use the
top screens, so that's fine. It's cool that the option's here, even if it isn't ideal for every game. My issue is with the
scaling on the screen, it looks mostly fine, but it would be nicer
if there was an option to make the resolution a two time scale because right now it's a
two and a half times scale and we're already gonna get jagged edges. It's a DS game, but now
they're gonna be a little more jagged in places we don't want and maybe even some blurriness. Mario has seen better days here. I'd rather have a slightly
smaller image than a jagged one. At least gimme the option. This is something that could be fixed with custom firmware eventually, but all that being said, the emulation quality
seems to be pretty decent. There was no noticeable audio glitches or a slowdown that I experienced in any of the games that I played. The biggest issue with DS is that there's no touchscreen on here and there's really no extra buttons to map touchscreen controls to. Drastic that DS emulator this comes with does not seem to have an
option to toggle the D-Pad to act like a cursor. You can map the D-Pad
to just move the cursor, but then you won't have a D-Pad. This is gonna break some
games that require you to touch a menu option at the start. Again, this could be fixed
with custom firmware. Some PSP games like Mega Man perform surprisingly well on this device. Some audio pops here and there, but overall, I was surprised by it. However, PSP suffers from
even worse scaling issues. This full screen letter boxing
makes it extremely jagged. I mean, it's a PSP game, so
Mega Man's gonna be jagged. There's gonna be some pixel mismatch and there's room to
scale it a little better, if we had a more powerful GPU. You can double the render resolution, but this doesn't seem to help much. It just weighs down the GPU even more. I'm not thrilled about
how PSP looks on here, and if you're gonna play
any more demanding games like Gran Turismo, you're
gonna have a bad time. Oh, oh. Given the aspect ratio and
resolution of this thing, and of course the performance, I'd say don't get the 35XX Plus for PSP. Consider it an added bonus. Dreamcast has the worst scaling of all. It should look fine on here, but with this stock firmware, it has to run at half
resolution, which causes the text and some other textures to look terrible. Running the game at full
resolution will cause what can only be described
as screen ripping. So if you're gonna be playing Dreamcast, expect half resolution. It's playable but not ideal, which seems to be a running theme here. Also, I had to manually map the D-Pad to act like an analog stick. I don't know why it wasn't
that way by default. What Dreamcast games would benefit by using this as a D-Pad by default, that doesn't make much sense. The RG35XX Plus is capable of N64 games, but it didn't come with any. In fact, you'll see a bunch
of games throughout this video that I might have added myself. The library that this thing came with is a little bit lacking. To add your own games, it's as simple as taking the micro SD card out of the device, popping
it in your computer and transferring your ROMs. The micro SD cards that
come with these devices are usually pretty terrible. I had to transfer my
larger files one at a time, or else the card would get
mad at me and disconnect. If you're wondering
where I get my ROMs from, all you have to do is
go to a little website that rhymes with choogoo and type in the name of
the game you want ROM and then navigate all of the
weird looking download links and good luck. If you wanna get games legitimately, I do have a video on how to get games that you own physically
and turn them into ROMs. (suspenseful music) N64 has some pretty bad audio crackling. The first game I always
try is Perfect Dark because I like that game and it tests the limits of N64 emulation. There was some audio crackling and it was slow in a lot of places, but ran okay during actual gameplay. I do like how the R2 button by default toggles the face
buttons to act like C-buttons. This sounds complicated, but it's actually surprisingly intuitive to wrap your head around. If you know how to play Perfect
Dark or Goldeneye already, because those controls are
already pretty confusing. Mario 64 also suffers some bad audio and weird slowdown sometimes, but again, actual
gameplay seemed just fine. Mario 64 is just not a great
game to play with a D-Pad. (dog barks) This isn't the best device for N64 games, but again, it's a nice added bonus that it's even capable of these games. I've been spending a lot of time crapping on the improvements that this thing has, but it's just because a lot of people see that it's capable of PSP games and they go, ooh, I want that. But if you're gonna be getting this thing for its PSP capabilities,
you're gonna be disappointed. All in all, it's a $14 price difference that does open you up to a whole bunch of
different game libraries, and that might be worth something to you. But if you do want pretty good N64 Dreamcast and even DS
emulation, it might be worth it to spend the extra couple
of bucks on something like the the PowKiddy X55, but you're gonna wanna install
the custom JELOS firmware on it to get some better emulation. If you want good PSP or even some light GameCube emulation, splurge for the RG405M or 405V, but don't get me wrong, the RG35XX is $100 cheaper than those two that I just mentioned. It's still a phenomenal handheld. The original RG35XX is still a contender for best retro handheld of all time, especially if all you
wanna do is play GBA games. It's just $50, has great emulation quality and comes with the best
firmware right out of the box. For $14 more, you can get the
new and improved 35XX Plus with some N64 Dreamcast
DS and PSP emulation. It's not the best, but
the option is there, and that's worth something. It's worth $14, is what it's worth, but losing that custom firmware does make it a hard thing to recommend. I would hold off on getting
yourself the RG35XX Plus if A, you don't wanna install
custom firmware yourself, or B, you don't wanna wait for that custom firmware to be developed. I find it hard to recommend anything that has future promises of
eventually becoming good. Even though the original
cannot play N64 games, at least you can suspend your gameplay, playing Game Boy Advance, SNES, PS1 and all that is more than enough to justify the price of the original. Although there is custom form where you can install in the original, that does let you play N64 games. Just again, not the
best emulation quality. Again, I'll leave an
update in the description or a pin comment if custom
form becomes available for the Plus, because that will change the whole story. Anyway, what do you guys
think about the RG35XX Plus? Is it an upgrade that gives
you a little bit of FOMO, some buyer's remorse makes
you wanna buy the new guy? Does it make you wanna finally
pull the trigger to get one of these guys, or do you think it's just not worth it at all? Even the comments below at me on Twitter, any and all this other
social media garbage. Thank you Trade for
helping sponsor this video. Don't forget to check them out at the link in the description as well. I got streams over on Twitch.tv/wulffden. We got a podcast called
the WULFF DEN Podcast. You know what the most
important thing that you can do to help support this channel
is just subscribe right here and share this video with a
friend, a friend who maybe wants to get into this handheld
emulation nonsense. Thank you guys very much. Have yourself a very good week.
