Yes, the AYN Odin is THAT good. (In-Depth Review)

[Music] hey everybody this is russ from metro game core so after a year plus of talking about it and waiting for it it's finally here the ayn oden now i've been waiting for this for quite some time now and i've had it for a few days and while i haven't mastered the device yet i think i'm at a point where i can at least give a fair assessment of what this device is all about now in getting to this point i've spent a lot of time testing to the point where i have something like 15 hours of footage right now and so what i'm going to do for these videos is i'm going to break them up into three distinct parts the first part which is the video you're watching right now is going to be my overall review i'm going to talk about the feel of the device just everything it can and cannot do as well as which scenarios i think the device will be the best and so if you're on the fence about whether or not to purchase this device the goal of this video is to help you make that decision now the second video that i'm going to do is mostly going to be focusing on gameplay footage itself i tested a ton of games got a lot of requests especially for gamecube and ps2 and so that next video which i'll release tomorrow is going to have just a bunch of footage and i'll talk about what i had to do to get those games running smoothly and finally for my third video i'm going to do it dedicated specifically to video out and the ayn odin super dock and this is an available purchase if you want to grab it when you grab the odin itself the thing is i haven't even gotten a chance to open the box yet like i've been doing so much testing with the device in handheld mode then i just don't think i can squeeze it into this video too so we'll do a dedicated video just looking at all the different video out capabilities the device has and whether or not it's going to be a good option for a dockable solution and i plan on doing starter guides later on down the line too that's going to help you in terms of getting the device set up and optimized to your specific use case now you might be wondering why it is that i'm committing to so many videos for one specific device and let me just get down to brass tacks here and now as i've been testing this device over the past few days i've had one specific thought that keeps going through my mind and that is if i had gotten this device when i first started the youtube channel i probably would have quit because like a lot of other people the thing i've always wanted with a retro handheld device is the ability to play my favorite gamecube and maybe a few ps2 games as well and this device does just that in fact it does almost everything i would like it to do and i think mostly because this channel is focused on trying to find that one perfect retro gaming solution that if i had gotten the ayn oden right at the beginning i wouldn't have wanted to go on that journey in the first place and that's how good this device is over the past year and a half that my channel has been around i've heard countless comments of people saying i just want a device that can play gamecube and ps2 and i think this is the first time that i can recommend a handheld at a higher end price that's gonna actually be worth it i mean sure you have those mini pcs like the io neo next which i reviewed a couple weeks ago those can obviously do gamecube and ps2 just fine but you're going to pay upwards of a thousand dollars to hundred dollars to get that solution meanwhile the starting price of the light odin is just around two hundred dollars and even the pro is under three hundred dollars and i think within that spectrum the value here is unmatched now i'm going to be testing the odin pro so i can't really speak authoritatively to the odin bass or the light versions yet and so yes we're looking at the higher end of the spectrum here but as far as i can tell with the odin bass unit the only real difference is going to be the size of the ram 4 gigs versus 8 gigs and that might come into play when it comes to android gaming and potentially if you want to install windows on this machine but as far as i can tell for emulation the base model is probably gonna have the same performance as the pro now the light model hasn't started shipping yet but i did order one right at the beginning of the campaign so i'm hoping to get that one pretty early and of course i'll do thorough testing between that and the pro model as well okay i'm kind of getting into the weeds here so let's actually start the review itself we're gonna do our typical things i'm gonna unbox it give you my impressions of the feel and the buttons and everything else i'm gonna talk about the user experience when it comes to the software and then i'm gonna see what it can do and of course i'll wrap it up with my summary and thoughts at the end so without any further delay let's jump into it okay so let's start with the specs the basin pro models are running a snapdragon 845 cpu it's running an adreno 630 gpu clocked at 787 megahertz and the pro model comes with 8 gigabytes of ram while the base and light models come with 4 gigabytes in terms of storage you have 128 gigs standard on the pro and 64 gigabytes on the base in light but you can upgrade this when you're purchasing the device in terms of connectivity we have five gigahertz wi-fi as well as bluetooth 5.0 which means you could use wireless controllers or wireless headphones while you're playing your games the display is just under 6 inches with a 1920x10 resolution and a 16x9 aspect ratio each model has a 6600 milliamp hour battery which gives you between 6 and 10 hours of gameplay the battery life on this is pretty impressive out of the box the operating system is a version of android 10 but this device is capable of being flashed with arm-based windows and it could potentially run linux distros down the line other features it has hdmi and usb-c video out and a headphone jack so all told besides just the specs what specifically can this device do and personally i think it kind of falls into three different categories you have your piece of cake category which means it can play any of these no problem in any of those 3d based systems dreamcast nintendo 64 sega saturn ps1 psp all of those can be easily upscaled to 1080p and they look gorgeous also thanks to the control setup as well as the 5 gigahertz wi-fi it's pretty good for streaming things like google stadia run great and you could also stream your media on things like plex or netflix additionally if you have a pc you could stream from that using something like moonlight which will give you access to your steam library or your gog games or you could stream some of those high-end emulators things like switch and wii u directly onto the device seamlessly and additionally you have the ability to stream through modern consoles too for example remote play with playstation and xbox as well as xbox cloud gaming now i put an asterisk here because there are some caveats we'll get into that later in the video and finally that's not all this device can do it can also run some gen 6 content too and the way i'm thinking about this is a lot like how i did with the previous generation of retro handhelds for the most part those older systems could play about half of the dreamcast nintendo 64 and psp catalogs and this is that next evolutionary step the odin can play gamecube wii ps2 and 3ds with moderate success and with some hiccups i would say confidently you can play 75 of the gamecube catalog and about 50 percent of the wii ps2 in 3ds catalogs and if you're willing to put in the work and try to tweak your gameplay you might get better results than that okay so now let's talk about the actual device itself how it feels in the hands first impressions things like that and overall in terms of balance and craftsmanship it feels like a solid device this feels like something very premium it's very close to a first party console something like a switch light or a ps vita it's that good let's talk about individual buttons next for example the d-pad here is almost a direct clone of the ps vita d-pad it has very little travel and a soft clickiness to it it is a little bit reminiscent of a modern xbox controller just in that kind of rounded clickiness to it but it is much softer and quieter and it does feel quite a bit more precise the d-pad itself doesn't have a lot of travel to it but it still feels very good for comparison's sake here is an actual ps vita and as you can see the d-pad is almost identical i would say this one's a little bit looser in the shell than the odin but otherwise in terms of travel and that soft clicky feel it's identical the d-pad itself is a little bit concave which does give you an idea of the cardinal points as you're holding it but i do feel that the cutouts that separate each direction are a little bit shallow the d-pad itself also sits inside of a concave dome which does make it very comfortable too in terms of sizing it's a little bit less than 19 and a half millimeters exactly the same as the ps vita and each of these are about two millimeters smaller than the average ambernick d-pad okay now let's talk about the analog sticks now first impressions with these is they're a little bit small and the range of motion is not as much as i would have liked it actually feels like they're pressing against the sides of the device even though i don't think they are and while they kind of look like a switch analog stick they're much thinner than those and they just give me kind of a flicky quality to them they're just not quite as robust as something i would have liked however they do click in l3 and r3 which i'm always a fan of and i think part of the reason why you don't have that full range of motion is because they are so recessed as you can see here they're almost flush with the d-pad itself but as you can see compared to an actual nintendo switch light they're quite a bit thinner and the range of motion on the switch light just feels monumentally bigger and so when it comes to range of motion hands down i would prefer something like the nintendo switch light but that is going to come at a cost for example with the face buttons the right analog stick is going to get in your way no matter how you position your thumb you're going to be touching that right analog stick and that could get annoying meanwhile on the odin there is absolutely zero chance of that happening in fact you don't even notice that there's a right analog stick at all when you're pushing down on the face buttons so when it comes to a game that focuses primarily on the face buttons this is going to be a welcome addition to your experience it's a shame that the trade-off here is the fact that the analog sticks just don't feel like they have that much range of motion and it's something i've learned to adapt to but all the same i feel like it could be done better for example on the amberneck rg552 theirs are also recessed but they have a bit larger of a space and so because of that there's just a lot greater motion to me this is the best of both worlds and i feel like there was space on the odin to make a bigger hole and to give that extra space there and so in that sense i do think it's a wasted opportunity because it's not a perfect control scheme okay now let's talk about face buttons these have conductive rubber connections and they feel a lot like other retro handhelds on the market today of all the buttons on the device they have a little bit of a hollow feel to them and they just feel very lightweight the labels on the front are not etched in any way they are just painted on and so there's no texture here other than just the matte feel of the whole device itself in terms of size they are 7.38 millimeters in width which is just a hair smaller than ambernick buttons but quite a bit bigger than something like the nintendo switch light ps vita or the rgb 10 max i think overall just in terms of the overall width of the buttons themselves they feel very good if i had to make one complaint about these face buttons it's the sheer amount of travel that is required in order to press down on the button itself i feel like i shouldn't have to make this much effort to push down the button and don't get me wrong it's not a terrible experience but all the same i feel like the amount of travel the button has to take after you press down on it does make it a little bit hard to do rapid button presses for example when i played quicktime events in something like god of war and the psp i had to mash down this thing as fast as i could just to get through a couple of those scenes and that's because the buttons don't bounce up as quickly as i'd like and you also spend more time pushing down on the button in order for it to register in the first place and that combination does make it hard to do rapid button presses now this is a non-issue on devices like the rg552 which is just much easier to press down on quickly and honestly if i didn't have a device to compare it to i probably wouldn't have noticed it in the first place and for games that do not require any sort of quick button presses it's not going to be an issue either in fact as you're playing most games you may not notice it at all it's really going to come down to those quick time events or things where you have to press a button very rapidly and so that's a minor use case and also a minor complaint but something i wanted to bring up okay moving over to start and select buttons these are also rubber conductive connections here and they're nice and quiet in fact all the buttons on this device are very quiet other than the volume and power button even the home button here on the top right is nice and quiet in fact this is one of the many reasons why this device is really great for playing in bed and i'll show more examples here later on it also has a mic input in case there is a game that does require that up top we have some standard i o and i'll talk about each of these in a little bit more depth here in a second but for now i want to focus on the shoulder and trigger buttons on this device primarily these triggers which do in fact have an analog input now it feels like the company decided to go with low travel analog triggers here potentially to give the device a low profile scheme and i love the fact that they have analog triggers at all and they do feel pretty decent but in my experience i've found that these analog triggers have a little bit more resistance than i would have liked much like with the face buttons i feel like i have to give a little bit more effort than i would have liked in order to fully push down on the button and my guess here is they made it this way so that way it would spring back quickly which is definitely something it does but all the same the amount of tension on the button itself just feels like 10 percent more than i would have liked now these shoulder buttons are a little bit small but they're actually a really nice fit they have a very soft clickiness to them much like the d-pad and they're nice and quiet as well i've heard people have had issues with the inputs on their shoulder buttons but luckily i didn't have any with my unit overall i'm a big fan of the shoulder buttons but i do think the trigger buttons need a little bit more work here's a good example of a low travel analog trigger that works well this is the backbone one controller and as you can see it doesn't have a lot of travel either but the thing is these triggers just feel much easier to press down on all the way in fact i feel like i could press down on them very quickly and personally that's an ideal situation when it comes to triggers i like to be able to press them very quickly and unfortunately the odin just has a little bit too much resistance that being said they do snap back quickly which is a nice feature i'm not in any way saying these are bad controls at the very least they are decent and what i'm hoping is that the company can improve upon them with their next iteration of this model okay moving over to the rest of the top here on the left we have a compartment which holds the micro hdmi input as well as a micro sd card slot i personally put a 256 gig card in my device there's also an exhaust vent here at the top some clicky volume buttons as well as a power button my major complaint about these two is that they are so close together that i often will press the power button on accident when trying to change the volume there's also a little led indicator that comes on when it's charging on the bottom there are two stereo speakers at the very edge of the device which i love that helps with stereo differentiation and the sound on this device was quite good for the price range it also has a headphone jack and a usb-c port there's also a little divot here i think that has to do with the dock i'm not quite sure yet on the back we have two more exhaust vents here on the bottom as well as a diamond shaped air intake vent there are also two programmable function buttons and unfortunately these do not register in most software applications i've only really found them to work in the key mapping software app also the device has two ergonomic grips on the back and these feel very nice too they're definitely not as comfortable as something like a full on xbox controller but all the same they do improve the ergonomics compared to something like the switch light not only that one of my favorite things is there are plenty of space for your fingers on the back of the device on many handhelds they're too shallow to be able to place your pinkies properly and luckily with this one every finger fits perfectly on the back and so this plus these grips on the back here make it one of the most comfortable devices that i own right now in general the overall feel in your hand is nice and balanced the face buttons d-pad analog sticks are all well placed and the triggers and shoulders are nice too when it comes to a whole device experience they've kind of knocked it out of the park in the fact that everything is very good on the device nothing is perfect but all the same many of them are close next the size comparison i'm just going to kind of run through some of the more popular handhelds right now just to give you an idea of how this is going to feel in your hands or pocket compared to something you may already own i found that it dwarfs any of the 3.5 inch display devices and those with a 5 inch display like a ps vita or rgb10 max it is significantly bigger something like maybe 25 percent larger than those but with that extra size does come a comparable amount of comfort too going to some of the largest systems you know the amber neck rg552 is a little bit smaller and also the nintendo switch light is maybe five percent smaller as well of course this isn't the biggest device on the block the gpd xp is a little bit wider than the odin and if you take a modern cell phone and put something like the game sir x2 around it it's going to be even bigger even though the odin is basically just an android phone with a controller shell wrapped around it it doesn't feel like it it feels more like a compact handheld compared to a setup like the gamesrx2 here in that sense it feels much more like a proper handheld device i would say it's about 10 smaller than the og nintendo switch that my kids have just beat up to all heck and about 20 percent smaller than the io retro power this is a device i just got and haven't had a chance to review yet but be on the lookout for this review coming soon finally it's also quite a bit smaller than the io neo next which i reviewed a couple weeks ago and it definitely gets dwarfed by something like the steam deck in terms of weight this is 12.8 ounces or 362 grams and that puts it basically in between the switch light at 274 and the full size switch which is at 411 grams in terms of size i would say this is definitely portable but i wouldn't call it pocketable yes it'll probably fit in your shorts pocket and it definitely wouldn't fit in something like your jeans unless you have jenkos or some cargo pants either way i would say this is something you could throw in a backpack but i wouldn't expect to throw this in your pocket and run out into town in general if you have a nintendo switch light you can probably expect the same amount of portability between that and this one okay now let's turn it on and get into the software experience itself i'm going to time it real quick and also speed this up in general because it's an android device i don't have high hopes it's able to boot in under 26 seconds which is pretty dang good when you first boot it up it's going to give you a few options for example setting up your wi-fi or choosing whatever launcher you want personally i recommend going with the one that looks more like an android interface because that's going to be more helpful when you're first setting the device up and i'll also show you that other launcher here in a minute you can also choose between your navigation style for example if you want to swipe up to see your buttons or you just want to have the buttons there all the time personally i don't like swiping all the time because it makes so many fingerprints on the device so i chose to use the ones with the buttons and you can always change this configuration in the settings later on this isn't a one and done deal now before we get started there are a couple configurations that i do recommend you consider when first starting out and to find these what i would do is go into the settings app and then find the odin settings section and within here you have several odin specific options for example you can turn on these led lights on these sides and around the joysticks and there's a couple other ways to turn these on and off i'll show you those later too you can also choose an audio profile which will favor trouble over bass personally i think the bass effect has more rich and vibrant sound and finally let's talk about your controller settings the most important one here is the a b and x y mode you can choose between an xbox or a nintendo style which they're calling an odin style here and that'll essentially allow you to decide between using the b button to confirm or the a button to confirm out of the box it's going to use the a button but honestly i recommend using the b button instead and that's because a lot of android apps as well as the android emulators are going to favor that b button out of the gate and so by using the xbox style setup you're not going to have to do a lot of button remapping personally i'm considering doing a project where i actually just go in and swap out these buttons so that the a button is on the bottom and the b button is on the right and same thing with the x and y it's obviously going to mess with the color scheme and not really match any controller at that point but given the fact that i like to have the a button on the bottom for this device in particular i'm hoping that by swapping out the a and b buttons it's just going to make it more of an intuitive experience either way i'll be sure to report back when i do try it out and then finally the last setting is the l2 and r2 mode by default it's going to be set to analog but i found that some emulators are not going to register if you have it on analog so if you put it on both it's usually going to work with everything also within here you can go and re-enter the setup wizard in case you want to do that again now let's talk about that top menu bar which you can get from swiping down from the top at the very top is the brightness setting honestly this device is so bright that i never put it to 100 i rarely get it past about 50 or 60 percent now in addition to having your typical cell phone options up here like wi-fi and airplane mode you can also adjust the performance mode this is going to do things like overclock the gpu and also turn on the fan on the back in performance mode the fan will kick on but just barely you can basically not hear it at all but the high performance mode is pretty loud let's take a listen so yeah when you have it on high performance mode you and the person sitting next to you are definitely going to notice it now in addition to the performance mode affecting your fan speed you can also just turn on the fan speed manually up here in the top menu too and you have four different options here you have off quiet sport and smart in general i never really turn on the fan without turning on performance mode so i usually just let the performance mode figure the fan speed out itself also up here you can turn off your leds around the joystick in the sides of the device and the only other odin specific option is the floating icon which is a menu that can pop out on the right when you swipe to the left on the second page of the top menu bar you have the ability to turn on things like a dark theme or invert the colors these are all typical cell phone functions so i'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about these so i'm not going to bore you with the setup of the device i'll leave that for my starter guide when i work on that later but really in a nutshell all i did is go onto the google play store and then downloaded all my favorite emulators and games and set them all up and this is no different than using a phone for emulation or a tablet or anything else like that i did try out a couple different front ends just to see how the experience is the first one i tried is digg this one's pretty plug and play because it'll automatically scan your entire card and find all your games inside of it and it'll download the box art and everything else the problem is that development on dig has kind of stalled over the past couple years and so because of that some of the more modern emulators actually don't work things like gamecube and ps2 need to be manually configured now another front-end that's in active development is the launch box front end now this one does cost some money i think it's 25 when it's not on sale but this one has more support for some of the more modern systems like gamecube and ps2 the only one i couldn't get working on it was sega saturn and that has to do more with the emulator itself and not necessarily launch box but in general when it comes to navigating through your games using the d-pad and not having to swipe all over the place this has been my preferred way of navigating the system now odin has their own launcher they're just calling it the odin launcher and when you boot this one up it's going to ask you to identify applications that you want to add to that home screen and really at the end of the day this is just a more simple skin that allows you to kind of make everything look a little bit prettier and so after you've gone through and decided which apps you want to add to your home screen when you close out of it you can see that they're all going to appear here and these are fairly customizable for example you can change the background color or you can reposition them and so in that sense you do have a little bit of control over what you want to see and where and so in particular if you're a person who uses a lot of standalone games or apps on this device this actually might work out pretty well personally i prefer something like launchbox which is a front end that allows me to see my individual game systems but honestly they didn't do a terrible job with this launcher either and so in that sense the use case of the odin launcher is not quite a good fit for me now this has two different slide out menus you can see here on the left you have the ability to make different sections to add your apps into and you can also do things like change your performance mode and it's also a third way of turning on your led indicators for your joysticks and your sidelights now over on the right side you have some other functions for example wi-fi and bluetooth you can also adjust your brightness on the fly and also take a look at your current storage setup and then you can also adjust your video out settings and so overall i think there's a good amount of functions within the odin launcher but it still feels very much like an android phone when i'm using this one so that's a really quick look at some of the navigation options you have let's talk about the screen quality and size for a second now when it comes to retro gaming i prefer to use integer scaling i like to have those perfectly square pixels but as you can see with the odin here there's quite a bit of a border in fact you're losing a lot of screen real estate so personally my solution to that is to go into the video settings in retroarch and then under scaling i prefer to turn off the integer scale and then i like to use a filter called normal 4x this is basically gonna blow up the screen to four times the size and then shrink it back down to the size of your screen and somehow during that magical process it'll also give you square pixels now this is a very cpu intensive filter but all the same the odin can handle it no problem and so if you want to have nice pixels with your retroarch setup this is what i recommend doing and with it blown up to full size like this you're going to get nearly 5 inches of diagonal screen real estate with 4x3 content and that's a lot of gaming space for a 6 inch screen like this it's actually very impressive for comparison let's take the rgb 10 max 2 which has a 5 inch screen and the same aspect ratio as you can see here this one only gets about 4 inches of content with a 4x3 display and so i think when it comes down to it a 5-inch representation of 4x3 content on a device that is of this size is actually a very nice prospect the only device that gives you a better ratio is going to be the ambernik rg552 and that's because the aspect ratio on this device is 5x3 and so despite having a much smaller screen than the odin you still get about four and a half inches of screen real estate and let's do a quick comparison of the quality between these two screens because the 552 screen is one of my favorites on any handheld after adjusting the brightness to make sure they have about the same amount of brightness here you can see that the 552 has a little bit warmer of a display and the colors are a little bit more richer and the blacks seem to be a bit deeper as well now the odin display is just fine i have no problems with it all together but i think in a comparison between the two here i prefer the 552 screen now the odin is so powerful that the normal 4x filter is not the only one you could use for example all of the blog filters work really well on this device now these basically recreate an original tv input and my favorite among these is the s-video input what this does is it slightly blurs the image while still keeping a nice balance and it gives you a very nostalgic crt effect personally i think that this filter looks a lot better than any shader that's available within retroarch and it does have quite a large cpu cost but all the same it works just fine with super nintendo and below games even if you want to turn on things like run ahead and rewind it's still going to run at full speed even with this bsnes core and that's just a testament to how powerful this device is now let's talk about using this device in the dark here i am just using a black image at full brightness and as you can see there's some blooming around the edges of my screen here and this might not happen to everybody and it's not a huge distraction to me but it is definitely something i noticed when playing in the dark now on the other end of the spectrum when i turn the brightness all the way down it gets very dark to the point where if i play this in bed in the dark it's actually not going to bother my wife at all i would say in terms of the brightness range of this device from the most brightest to the least brightest this has the largest range of any device i've ever used before now the lcd lights look super cool when you're playing it at night but all the same they're pretty bright and you can't dim them in any way and so for me they end up being a little bit too bright to play in bed but they are still fun to use nonetheless now on the other side of the spectrum this device gets very bright as you can see here i'm playing outdoors this is about 4 p.m in the afternoon and i'm not in shade at all and as you can see it looks very good and i have to say in real life it was even brighter so this is definitely a device you could play outdoors okay now let's talk about key mapping i'm going to use an android game here that has no controller support at all now while in game if you swipe from the right it's going to bring up a menu here and one of the options is to map the keys and the menu bar here is typical of any other key mapping software if you've ever used it before you basically move the button icon into where you want it to push and then you push the button you want to correspond to that section and that's basically it you just kind of rinse and repeat they have analog inputs and everything else and then i'll save it and i'm ready to go and as you can see it works just fine all the buttons register really well and so if there are any touch control games that you want to use key mapping with this is going to be a great option now that being said i did find the analog controls on this device are not quite as precise as i would like them to be even after going into the settings and trying to dial in the sensitivity i never really found a perfect solution and the biggest culprit is the right analog stick it just doesn't seem to be as intuitive as using your thumb and so like with many other android games when i use a key mapping function like this on other devices i end up using my right thumb for my look controls and then i map all the other buttons honestly for me this isn't ideal but it is better than using 100 touch control one neat feature about the odin that isn't advertised is that it does have gyroscopic controls so for example a game like asphalt 9 like this which does support gyro controls you can just tilt the device itself to steer your car now of course if you were playing this on your phone you could do the exact same thing but it is kind of neat to have this ability which you could use in like gyroscopic game boy advanced games or some 3ds games too i'm not going to focus too much on android gaming but every game that i've tested does work really well in this device okay so now let's get to the good stuff let's do some retro game emulation we're going to start with nes here i'm using that same blog s video filter here and as you can see it looks just great and plays really well and that blog filter does scale everything perfectly too as you can see here with the mega man 2 the life bar looks great of course if you want a sharper image just use that normal 4x filter and you're gonna get a really great result too when it comes to game boy and game boy color you get a good amount of screen real estate with these devices too in fact you get just about four and a half inches of real estate so that's a full inch larger than something like the analog pocket with the ability to use your own roms do retro achievements have your own save states and do colorization for the original gameplay so all in all this is a great device when it comes to gameplay and it's even better for game boy advance thanks to the wider 3x2 aspect ratio of the original gba and so in that sense i would say this is a really excellent device when it comes to game boy advance as well and of course you can use things like fast forward when you're playing pokemon games so that you can kind of speed through some of those slower parts moving along i'm just going to kind of breeze through the 16-bit systems you know sega genesis works perfectly same thing with super nintendo personally i've been using the more accurate bsnes core and of course that blog filter which i really enjoy overall when it comes to retro gaming on this device i'm very happy moving over to nintendo ds this also works really well i have it currently set up with one screen much bigger than the other and then i can toggle between them using the shoulder buttons and i'm using the drastic emulator which has full touch screen support it's actually really nice and this emulator runs at full speed no problem with the high resolution rendering and of course you could use key mapping software on this app as well if you wanted to use it on something like metroid prime hunters but unfortunately this suffers the same issues as the android side does in that the analog sticks just don't seem to register very cleanly with the device and so i found myself much like with any other android type device that i have to use my finger for the aiming which kind of defeats the whole purpose of the screen mapping tool so not a perfect fit moving over to playstation 1 i had no problems with this one either i used both the duck station standalone emulator as well as the duck station core within retroarch both of them played at 5x resolution which is 1080p with geometry correction enabled and they played full speed with every single game i tested so when it comes to ps1 gameplay this is an excellent machine same thing with nintendo 64. i'm using the standalone movement 64 plus emulator also upscaled to 1080p and every game i tried worked flawlessly even if i did a royal rumble with four rocks in the same cage i had zero slowdown this is a great nintendo 64 emulation device too and of course it doesn't stop there sega saturn plays at full speed you can turn the frame skip off it's gonna play perfectly and it can be upscaled to 1080p with zero hints of slowdown and again this happened across the board with every game i tested i'll show off more games in my video tomorrow but for now i just want to give you an impression of what to expect when it comes to performance and moving up here yes dreamcast runs at full speed too now personally i prefer to use the retroarch flycast core with this one in particular because it's very easy to go into the quick menu options of this core and then turn on the widescreen hacks and cheats and then any game that's capable of playing widescreen is going to play and they all look very nice all right we're about 40 minutes into it i think you deserve a cat break at this point so here's chicken my cat if you haven't seen her before she loves to sit on my lap while i'm doing testings and so every once in a while i give everyone what they want which is more chicken and less of me and so yeah here's your cat break let's move on to some more game testing sticking with dreamcast i just want to give a couple more examples here dead other live 2 runs at full speed no problem with that widescreen hack on now one other point to make up into this moment i have not used any of the performance modes at all so no fan has been kicking in i'm just using the regular cpu speed and the only game that gave me some hiccups is nba 2k2 this one stutter every once in a while and so i think of all the dreamcast games that might do well with the performance mode turned on this might be the only game you need to use that now psp emulation also was very nice this is at a 4x resolution which is 1080p and as you can see here even the harder to run games like outrun 2006 do run at full speed same thing with god of war 4x resolution 1080p but i did turn on performance mode just to make sure that i got some really smooth gameplay either way psp is something you could definitely play through at 1080p resolution with just about every single game okay so those are all the systems that basically run flawlessly now let's start moving things up to some of the harder to run emulation systems we're gonna start with nintendo gamecube one of my personal favorite systems of all time and i'll show a lot more footage in my gameplay testing video tomorrow but in general i will say that the best results that i had were by using the mmjr emulator and then running everything at a 2x resolution which is 720p for the most part i didn't have to do any tweaks to get a majority of these games to play well and some of these games do support widescreen hacks which do give you a much more immersive experience and like i mentioned at the beginning of this video i would comfortably say that 75 of gamecube games are going to run at full speed now that being said there are gonna be some that have just occasional hiccups you'll get a pause every once in a while when going into a new room or maybe a little bit of slow down when you're in like a world map in a role playing game and so it really comes down to how picky you are when it comes to smooth gameplay if you're willing to live with a couple hiccups here and there just to have that thrill of being able to play a gamecube in a portable solution like this then i think you're gonna have a great time and sure you might have a more powerful phone in your pocket which could give a little bit more smooth gameplay but i bet putting a controller on it is not going to be as seamless as an experience as the odin is on top of that chances are you paid more than two or three hundred dollars for your phone compared to this thing which runs two to three hundred dollars and includes a controller and so while this does not play 100 of gamecube games perfectly and you are gonna get worse performance if you use the mainline dolphin emulator all the same the performance is very impressive for the price that you pay and if you're willing to mess around with the settings you might get better performance too okay now let's move on to wii emulation now this one is more complicated than using gamecube emulation just by virtue of the fact that the wiimote controls are a little bit hard to configure in the dolphin emulators but it is possible for a good amount of game now that being said almost every single wii game did require me to go into the settings and enable some hacks in order to get it to work at full speed and so compared to gamecube i would say that wii doesn't work out of the box but i was pleasantly surprised that just by going into the settings and toggling on things here and there to find one that actually worked i was mostly successful and like with gamecube i kept the resolution to 720p because that seemed to give me the best overall performance and of course you're always going to have to deal with slowdown in some games for example mario galaxy 2 whenever you have this huge bowser on the screen it's almost always gonna slow down no matter how nice of a system you may have but all in all i was surprised at how many wii games played pretty well okay two more emulation systems to show off let's do a little bit of ps2 now the thing about ps2 is the odin was never designed to play ps2 in the first place it just so happened that the ether sx2 app came out during the production lifecycle of the odin itself and so despite the fact that this device was never meant to play ps2 i kind of consider every game that can play on this to be bonus content and many games play really well so for the most part i turned everything to a 2x resolution so 720p but some games like kingdom hearts and final fantasy 10 actually played at 1080p with very little problems i'll go into more detail with setting tweaks in my next video but in general what i did is i turned everything to the fast preset and then i would adjust the cycle rate and cycle skip as needed in order to get full speed and given the fact that i treated ps2 as a bonus system on the odin i just had a great time the ps2 was a system that i owned but rarely played during its life cycle to be honest i mostly used it as a dvd player back in the day but it was pretty cool to see some of my favorite ps2 games from back in the day on this device for example jack and daxter played really well and i would definitely say that metal gear solid 2 was playable as well it would get a little bit of slow down when you're in larger open areas but given the fact that most of the game actually takes place in enclosed spaces like this it plays just great so yeah i got a lot more content to show when it comes to ps2 in tomorrow's video but for now just rest assured that at least fifty percent of your favorite games are going to play really well and with enough tweaks you might get some of those harder to run games to at least be playable too but yeah i'm gonna show off a lot more ps2 footage in tomorrow's video but long story short ps2 is pretty good on this thing okay final emulated system here is going to be nintendo 3ds and i would say this one plays a little bit worse than the ps2 it's going to be a little bit hit and miss in general if you stick to the 2d games things like metroid samus returns or new super mario bros 2 you're going to get some pretty good gameplay but i did find that others like paper mario sticker star definitely did struggle under pressure and so i would recommend do not buy this device if you're looking to specifically play 3ds games but i would say try out a game or two and you might be pleasantly surprised just don't have any high expectations now like with other devices that have come out in the past couple months there's already a community compatibility spreadsheet available and i'll leave this linked in the video description but you can go here and kind of check out what games people have tested and what settings they have found to work the best and they're always looking for new contributors so if you're interested in testing and showing off your results then jump into this spreadsheet and help out okay we're done with emulation let's buckle up and do game streaming and then we're done we're gonna start with xbox we have three different apps we can choose from the regular xbox app game pass and cloud gaming the xbox app is gonna allow you to remote play into your own xbox and if you have a game pass account you can do cloud gaming with that app and i've also made a chrome web app that just goes directly to xbox.com play that'll actually sometimes give you a better experience okay so let's test out each of these i'm going to start with the xbox app here i'm going to remote play into my actual xbox and so in this way i can play any of the games that are installed onto my device and so here is forza horizon 5. and the first thing i wanted to test yes it does support analog input with the triggers so that means if you're interested in playing any sort of game that uses an analog input on the xbox you're going to have a really great experience overall i found the gameplay on my home network to be very nice and smooth the resolution is not the highest i think it's outputting to 720p and when playing first person shooters like halo infinite i definitely felt the smallness of the analog joysticks i did adapt to that over time but all the same it's not the same as using an xbox controller okay next we're going to use the gamepass app itself this is going to allow us to cloud stream any of our games without having to worry about having an xbox in the first place now my issue with the game pass app is that the a and b are swapped on this and there's no way to change it it doesn't matter if you change the input in the odin settings and there's no settings on the xbox side to change the button layout and so unless you're playing a game that has the option to remap the controls one by one you're going to be stuck with a swapped out abxy and that can be very disorienting depending on the game you're playing so unfortunately i would say that's a pretty big drawback when you want to do cloud gaming on this device now like i mentioned i also made a web app which you see here which just dials in directly into xbox.com now the great thing about this is that the a and b are correct on this one and the gameplay is relatively smooth i would say this and the game pass app are a little bit more laggy than using remote play but it's still pretty good the problem with this web app is that the l2 and r2 are not registered at all and so unfortunately that renders games like halo infinite to be completely unplayable and so long story short neither the game pass options are perfect remote play is great but when it comes to xbox cloud gaming there are gonna be some concessions and some of those are gonna break the gameplay experience okay now let's talk about playstation the official remote play app isn't gonna work with these controls so you're gonna have to use ps play or chiaki ps play is easier to set up but costs five dollars chiaki is open source but is a little bit harder to set up initially we'll start with ps play first now i'm connecting to my ps5 here and the great thing about both of these apps it allows you to set your own bit rate and resolution so i'm running this at 1080p with a nice solid bitrate but unfortunately the analog triggers do present some challenges with the ps play app when i push all the way down on the l2 and r2 buttons it's only registering as half button presses on the actual ps5 as you can see here ratchet is shooting a little bit slowly now if we switch over to chiaki same thing here great bitrate great resolution but when i push down on that analog trigger it only registers a full press and so unfortunately neither of these apps work perfectly with the odin you can either choose between having a half button press when it comes to the triggers or you're gonna have a full digital press when you're using chiaki and that's a shame i'm not sure if that's a problem on the app side or if it's on the device i'm holding out hope that maybe the apps themselves will get updated to support this option but as it stands right now when you're trying to play a ps5 game you may have a limited experience as well that being said if you try to play a ps3 or ps4 game through your ps5 you might have a great time for example here's god of war 3 remastered running on my ps5 and it looks and plays just great so not the end of the world when it comes to streaming on the ps5 but it could be a limited experience depending on the game you're playing okay and another streaming option we have at least for now is google stadia and i will say that this one works just great all the buttons work as expected and it does give you a proper analog input and so i would say when it comes to streaming the two big wins are xbox remote play and google stadia now when it comes to local streaming you can also use something like moonlight to play off of your pc so right here i'm playing the steam version of celeste and it's working out just great and in general i found the moonlight connection to be super solid and so i would say once you're connected moonlight your only limitation is going to be what your pc can handle and i've got a pretty beefy pc so as you can see here in addition to playing pc games i can emulate some of the higher end systems here's breath of the wild running at 1080p 60 frames per second with a shader applied and the gameplay is super smooth in fact if i handed this to somebody else they would not be able to notice that you're streaming instead of actually just playing on your device and so i had the same results running all the way through nintendo's switch and so i would say in that sense when it comes down to couch gaming like playing at your home and you have a nice pc and you don't mind setting it up this might be a really great local streaming option and of course it's not all about games this is essentially an android phone which means you could do other types of media consumption so for example i run my own plex server here at the house and so i'm able to navigate through my library and play movies directly onto my device and on top of that plex has a really great picture and picture option and so that's kind of a neat multi-tasking experience that's available when you use an android device like this one all right we've been at this forever this is officially the longest video i've ever made so let's get into what i like and what i don't like about the odin we'll start with what i like number one as you've seen in this video the performance on this is pretty great all the way up to a lot of ps2 games play really well the overall craftsmanship of this device is very impressive it's amazing that this is the first device ever made by this company the build quality almost rivals something like a first party device the display is really nice on this it has a very low brightness if you want it low and it has very bright if you want it bright on top of that the color balance is pretty good and the touch screen is nice and responsive overall the feel of the shell is pretty nice it has a nice matte texture to it and is fairly fingerprint resistant i also enjoy the led lights that are available on the device i wish they changed color and that you could dim them but all the same i do like them and the battery life on this is really impressive even when turning on the fan and having a high brightness it's going to last about 6 hours and if you turn down the brightness and minimize those fans you're going to be able to get upwards of 10 hours of gameplay or more and thanks to the dimmable display and the relatively quiet buttons this is a great device to play in bed without disturbing your significant other and as much as i don't think that the android operating system is the most intuitive when it comes to handheld gaming i do appreciate that ayn took the time to make their software very customizable in terms of size i would say this device is mostly portable it's not something i'm going to throw in my pocket and run around town with but all the same i think would be a great for road trips or when on travel on top of that i think this device is pretty good for streaming we saw some limitations earlier in this video but overall i would say the odin is a goldilocks experience it's not too big it's not too small and the price to performance is just right now that being said this is not a perfect device no device is so let's talk about the things i don't like about the odin number one i think this device is greatly in need of a physical back button and it's unfortunate because the two m buttons on the back of the device can't function as a back button within the android operating system so when exiting out of a game you're going to spend a lot of time swiping just to get out of it and that kind of breaks that retro handheld experience when you use something like emulation station on a linux handheld you don't have that issue at all and so unfortunately this device requires you to use physical buttons and touchscreen presses at the same time and to me i'm not a big fan of that experience on top of that i'm not a big fan of some of the button placement decisions for example there have been times when i accidentally pressed the start and select buttons with the palm of my hand as i'm playing just by virtue of having them on the bottom right on top of that i think the odin logo on the bottom left is a little bit garish and it's wasted space because that could have had the back and home buttons and that would have freed up space to put the start and select buttons on the top left and right instead now i didn't get into it in this video but i will cover it in my doc video later on but this device does have some video out issues at least initially for example emulation performance does go down slightly when you have it plugged into an external display on top of that there's no way to turn off the onboard controls on the device itself when docked which means with some emulators you're going to have a conflict when it comes to choosing player one i also think that the fan gradient on this device is a little bit unbalanced for example you can either turn the fan on to super quiet or super loud there's nothing in between i also wish they had changed the physical abxy order on the device itself to be more aligned to modern android games yes there is a use case when it comes to some nintendo games but the vast majority of what you're going to be playing is going to expect the a button to be on the bottom and not on the right and let's face it this is not a plug and play device and so i worry that a lot of people are going to buy this device thinking they can just open it up and start playing their favorite nintendo games not knowing they're going to have to learn the ins and outs of retroarch and front ends and all that other stuff now help is on the way and i'm going to make a starter guide soon but all the same i would love it if i didn't have to make one in the first place and like i mentioned before i do find that the analog sticks are a little bit too small and i have minor gripes about the face button travel as well as the analog triggers but if i had to change one thing on this device i would make the analog sticks a little bit bigger and finally as we saw xbox streaming and playstation remote play are a little bit limited and of course that limitation is going to vary by game but all the same it's unfortunate that they are not fully fleshed out with this device okay so wrapping up here with this very long video do i think the ayn oden is worth your money now this is something i'm taking pretty seriously because i think if anyone pays over 200 for a device that's quite an investment and on top of that your real world costs may be over two to three hundred dollars depending on where you live you may have import taxes or extra shipping things like that and so i had a couple thoughts going into this the first thought was that by virtue of just having an expanded system that it emulates all the way up to ps2 in this case it does significantly increase the value of this device even though the price is quite a bit more than something like the retro pocket 2 plus the sheer amount of gameplay performance that you get out of this does compensate for it in my opinion and so in that sense when you just talk about the whole amount of games that you can play on this device and play them very well then yes i do think this device is worth two to three hundred dollars now if something like size is not an issue to you i do think that the steam deck is going to be more value for your money because at 400 dollars that's going to be able to play all these systems no problem in addition to natively playing a bunch of pc games too but i think for that mid-range price point this is still a great deal and i don't expect to see competition at this price point for quite some time to come now the retro handheld world moves very quickly so a year from now we might be seeing a different tune but as it stands right now this is the device to beat and so if you are only going to buy one device and never look at retro handhelds again i would say that for the price two to three hundred dollars if you bought this device you would be happy for many years to come because the honest truth there are more games that can be played on this system at a perfect resolution than you actually have time to play and so in that sense this device is a true winner alright everyone that's it for this video it took me forever to put this thing together but i do hope that you got some value out of it and like i said a couple times now be sure to check in tomorrow for my gameplay test video which will show a little bit more gameplay and how i got there in the first place and if you aren't subscribed then now's a great time to do it so you get a notification when that video pops as always thanks for watching let me know if you have any questions in the comments below and we will see you next time happy gaming [Music] you

Channel: Retro Game Corps

Views: 317,914

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Id: TK9-5fdpicg

Length: 49min 33sec (2973 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 06 2022