Have you used any of these emulation boxes before? What have your experiences been? Let us know below! Buy a Data Frog MI Pad-80 on AliExpress: lmg.gg/SRJ1H Buy a Gamestation 5 on AliExpress: lmg.gg/iWXJ8 Buy an Arcade Box on AliExpress: lmg.gg/V7WNA Buy a Hyper Base FC Retro Game Console on AliExpress: lmg.gg/vtQhQ Buy a Beelink GT King WiFi6 Smart TV box on AliExpress: lmg.gg/Cia5Z Buy a Retro Super Console X Pro Plus on AliExpress: lmg.gg/KKJzO Purchases made through some store links may provide some compensation to Linus Media Group.
😎 Actually I have the Retro Monster which is similar power to Hyper base. I am very happy with it. I don’t care about more powerful systems because I grew up in the arcade. I love that I can play MAME games and the interface is great. Some do suck bad, like you pointed out.
At least those knockoff consoles come with actual games, even though they are pirated. When I was a kid, the "Gamestation" equivalent was called a "Polystation," and they always advertised themselves as having 200+ games, but what they often ended up having was 200 different versions of Tetris.
There was also a generic famiclone that had a Playstation shaped shell but when you opened the top loader door it had a cartridge port where the cd player would be on a Playstation which made it look more accurate and also protected the port from dust, the controllers looked nothing like Playstation controllers though.
FYi the schmoo at 3:54 is not used for obfuscation, but as an extreme form of cost cutting, as it is cheaper to glue the bare die to the pcb and wire bond out the IOs, as for commodity ICs packaging is more expensive than the die itself (this technique is heavily used in simple mass scale manufactured goods like calculators)
I've also seen this with cards that play music. No packaging means no hard edges in the paper, just a bump, and they might be able to squeeze a few more cards in a box for shipping.
A couple of those (specifically the ones that lack HDMI) aren't emulators - they're SoC implementations of actual NES hardware. Even the GameStation 5. The epoxy blob was covering the NOAC (Nintendo-on-a-chip) and the other component was a microcontroller for reading the USB ports and translating them to something that NES hardware can understand (a real NES uses a shift register to capture the controller state at a moment in time and then read it serially)
And the NES on chip in general is not known for being a very faithful hardware recreation of the NES with many sound artifacts and inconsistent speed and low quality video output. Any time people talk about reverse engineered hardware being inherently better than software emulators I think of how good NES software emulation is (good enough that it is Speedrun legal) and I think of how bad the NES on chips are, ultimately it all comes down to implementation.
@@TobyCowles To be fair, that chip is probably older than you and never had a second revision to make it feature complete. If they'd kept developing it like emulation technology, then it'd be on par feature-wise and who knows, we might've seen other consoles get that treatment and work better than the emulators.
@@anon_y_mousse oh certainly, they have been building those NES on chips basically unchanged since the mid 90s and a lot has changed in that time. And there are reasons why hardware based solutions should in theory be better, you just have so much more control of the signal timings when you are working with something that low level. But it increasingly feels like we are in a weird place where with enough optimization software solutions can actually achieve similar or better results to hardware based ones. The PicoFly vs HWFly for instance - the HWFly needed an FPGA to produce the glitch pulse with a precise enough timing to glitch a switch, and when the PicoFly was in development a lot of people were skeptical that a microcontroller could get a consistent glitch but it was able to. I would love to see hardware based clones of more recent consoles. But I doubt we ever will because by the time that the tools to properly produce reverse engineered hardware for a more complicated console are available the software solution will likely have had so much development time and optimization put into it that it isn't even worth it to bother with a hardware clone except for a few die hard people. Something like MISTER is I suppose a challenge to this theory - but that is still a relatively niche product that still focuses largely on older consoles.
Do you actually know that last part? Because my assumption was that the chip on the carrier was the ROM with all the games on it, and the "USB ports" are just NES controller ports with USB connectors.
Also another fun fact: NOACs have been so prolific and cheap to buy that when they made the Atari Flashback, they actually ported all the games to NES and used a NOAC rather than try to emulate a VCS.
@@otherssingpuree1779my parent bought me a knockoff and I was grateful for them to care about me, you don't judge parents buddy Is your fault for not saying what you like
@@TheAkashicTraveller definetly would be a challenge! but they got a lot of creative genius there and Im sure they could get something cool. Probibly will have to use mobile/laptop parts or a Raspberry Pi
15:50 "if you're comfortable with the piracy and profiting off of other's IP..." Considering Nintendo and Sony's willingness to price jab for retro games these days... yeah, I don't have much sympathy for them. They're the ones raking in all the money while the original developers only see pennies on the dollar from it, anyway.
@6:47 the "X" and "O" are reversed is because they are probably running off a japanese playstation. In Japan, "X" is used to cancel "O" is used to confirm, where in Canada and US, it is the reverse where "X" is confirm and "O" is to cancel/go back. Learned pretty quick when relatives in Asia were sending games over for holidays and such~
Agree with Linus on playability for the price point. 30 bucks for a system that has some jank in it, we all can live with. It's when your $500 XBox Bricks on startup that blows peoples minds.
The black dot on the pcb isn't to hide the chip under it. The black dot is the chip. It's cheaper to mount the silicon die directly onto the pcb rather than packaging it into a whole discrete chip which then has to soldered on separately.
@@AkirIkasu When they're as bad as shown, it's very likely not just the TV. I'll agree the video quality's the TV, but definitely not the input latency.
When I set my Pi library up, I read a lot about N64 being a sticking point for some emulation infrastructures because of the way they were coded rather than a performance issue. It takes separate effort to properly emulate them which a lot of these guys may just decide is not worth it when they can throw thousands of other types of games on there and hit the target number for the page headline.
Even Nintendo can't emulate their own shit perfectly. The recently released Switch Online version of Pilotwings 64 was criticized for running at a too-fast speed, effectively ruining the Birdman stages because you have to mash the button way more than you should.
@@kanedaku You should try building from source then, because pcsx-rearmed always worked full speed for me. Just make sure you enable Neon so it utilizes the hardware more fully.
I was in an electronics store the other day, and I remember seeing a gameboy-looking pirate console with, I think, 500 games. I was tempted to check it out, but then I saw they were selling it for $80 USD; no way was I paying for that.
@@kameljoe21 Those consoles only hold roms for, at the latest, ps1 games. Those aren't licensed either, so you're far better off downloading those roms yourself.
@@DanielFerreira-ez8qd Yeah pretty much, rather than letting some random company (that had nothing to do with either games or the actual original hardware) that makes it's money on ripping other companies off. You might as well just rip the original company off directly, as you would be doing it anyway even purchasing a console as such.
@@DanielFerreira-ez8qd PS1? Those with "only" 500 games will likely have an incomplete library of NES and gameboy at best, or more likely will be full of games from the Atari 2600 and C64. Those games were fun back then and can still be nice to play, but you'll probably get bored of them within 5-10 minutes. Not worth paying more than on any modern game that you might play for hours before being done with it. Edit: also PS1 library will likely be incomplete, since those games occupy a "large" amount of storage (hundreds of MB!). It's unlikely that they'll put PS1 games on something like an EMMC that's got up to 8GB of storage instead of a 16kb one on the NES.
80? I sold Paper Mario TTYD (gamecube) for $135 USD recently (NM disc, and manual) lol. Retro games paid for my new car...and house. 10/10 would recommend
plastic screws are actually more expensive than metal ones, those are probably nylon, and they used them probably because they did not want to crack acrylic cases, or maybe they just had them laying around from something else
@@WXKFAI had an experience with those screws that break the heads off when you go to remove them.... Like 1/3 of them broke. The quality looked like an old document that was a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy.....
@@murtisoft but you can also program the controller so that when the joystick is in some quadrant, it maps to a d-pad input rather than a joystick input
@@murtisoft You're not wrong that quality and design varies, but it's also common for controllers to be set up wildly incorrectly by lazy devs, especially for bootleg stuff. For example, I had an N64 USB controller and even with the well known and popular Project64 it worked horribly until I went into the settings and messed with the calibration and sensitivity sliders and by the time I was done it was just about as good as a real N64 controller. If devs get even lazier and just map the analog joystick to digital D-pad inputs (not uncommon at all), it will be even worse.
The first two systems are what are known as Famicom on a chip. They are a true software pirate's favorite way to produce NES clones, as they are very cheap compared to the Android boxes
A note about only having two dongles for four controllers: KinHank states that you can use one dongle per two controllers. Though from what I understand, it's a bit tricky to set up. I've only needed just one controller.
yeah i have a kinhank console, can confirm seriously though those controllers are TRASH, they're passable for grandma's house give it to a five year old but if you are an adult with more than $10 to your name, buying an 8bitdo usb controller is totally worth the money for those android consoles (and it'll work on your computer, too)
I think there was a legit Sega licenced plug-and-play that came in that Sonic shaped controller shell. Presumably they sold off the tooling afterwards and it's now just used as a generic controller shell for any Chinese bootleg going.
The "schmoo" is a super common, low-cost way of adding cheap, bare silicon dies to pcbs. The bonding leads that would typically connect the silicon die inside a molded casing, to its external legs or pads, is instead bonded directly to pads on the pcb. Then the fragile silicon die and bonding leads get covered in a blob of epoxy to protect them.
In a sense, I'm quite uninterested in tech. But I just keep watching LTT due to the crazy amounts of charisma on display by most hosts. Linus and his energy and honesty are just so inspirational to me that after 3 years of watching LTT, I had to drop a comment. Please, keep doing what you doing because I get to laugh and smile for free once a day. Thank you!
I think it's time to do the opposite of "the cheapest emulators/consoles" and look at the biggest and best. The one you never need to replace and don't have to go to grandma's house to play. I'm talking about the Megacade from Extreme Home arcades. I'd love to see a deep dive into this machine. It would also be great to know how to build our own arcade based PC for home.
Beats of Rage was a single fan tribute game had sprites/graphics from the Streets of Rage games, then it got turned into its own engine that you can make a customable Beat em up game from any franchise out there ie Ultimate Double Dragon, Atomiswave was an arcade system like the Neo Geo, in fact SNK developed games after discontinuing their NG
5:18 that's Hudson Soft's Nuts & Milk originally released for the Famicom on July 20, 1984 releasing on the same day as Lode Runner it's actually a historically important game for being one of the first third party releases on a Nintendo console
10:45 anyone that claims the N64 controller joystick had massive dead zones, never actually used an N64 controller. Of course it had long term durability issues, but outside of that it was incredibly accurate.
Throwing out the "I wouldn't pilot a submarine with them" and then not even winking or flinching or reacting in anyway was for some reason very funny for me...
I've actually thought about doing that before, but it would probably be better and simpler to use a more simple communication standard to send just the id of the cartridge and load it from an SSD inside the console
OMG. i as just about to say Linus is trying so hard not to just break the thing open, then the next shot is him ripping it open with his bare hands. god bless him.
What is truly amazing about these kinds of consoles is that they often dont have the number of games they advertise. They have that amout of programs sure but often they use rom hacks of games already on system or they have duplicate titles to pad out the numbers. I have seen some where some of them are broken to be unplayable in some. Truly these things are a work of art. You cant fake this kind of awful.
The guy who played a game fruit game with you and said " I have the same information you do..." I actually laughed out loud, perfect delivery of a nonsense situation. Cheers !
"schmoo on here" - Linus, look up COB (Chip on Board) construction, it's fascinating. That's basically a bare die glued and wire bonded to a PCB, and epoxied to protect the bonds and against light.
4:15 The visible portion of the manual, translated (yes, it makes as much sense in Russian as it does here): GAME STATION Read the instruction : 1. Connect the detail, as shown on the picture . 2. Teleprogramme : May watch television only when game console is turned off . 3. How to Play : After connect the game device to the television . Please carefully read the description . 1). Turn on the television . 2). Choose the channel for this gaming device using the VHF channel switcher , then plug the audio-video cable into the AV input of the television and
I was hoping you would peek into the Retro Gaming Handheld scene; maybe a future episode of this? So many to pick from, more features and cheaper than the options shown here. -Retroid Pocket 3+ -Miyoo Mini Plus -DataFrog SN2000 and many more!
adding to the list: -Anbernic RG35xx -Powkiddy X55 -Retroid Pocket Flip -AYN Odin Lite and maybe if is possible: -PS Vita with homebrew -3DS with homebrew
Caution with malware with these, pretty similar to the android tv boxes and those were found with malware pre installed or with major security flaws in the past
Most of emulator ones have no way to connect to a network anyway, I'm sure the ones that connect the controller via Bluetooth can cause some issues, but most of them things have no way of connecting anyway, now if your gonna try plugging one of the micro SD cards into a connected device then that is a whole different story lol
Id love to see you guys do a write up like this on the pirate game HDD "consoles" . They come loaded with games all they way up to current consoles and is set up as a plug and play type system but using a PC. They're between 40 and 100$ and seem a little too good to be true
Even with controller deadzones, that FC box definitely seems worth the buy at $ 65. Especially as a gift for someone who wants to get into retro games but doesn't feel comfortable getting into emulation and piracy.
It's still not cool to make money from emulation scene just to be honest with you, all of this knock-off console, they literally stole everything from roms to emulator.
I've had a few of these type boxes. The best & easiest was the Super Console X King like the one Linus has in the video. It might not be able to play everything (mostly no PS2 & beyond), there is enough on there that you don't miss them much. The fact it can do AtomisWave was quite welcome. Other than that, I use a hacked PS Classic with USB sticks or an i5-10400F system I tossed together just for emulation.
Wrt Game Station 5 manual. In the early 90s Russian (and former USSR) market was flooded with NES clone called Dandy. There were two ways of connecting it: using RCA connectors for video/audio and the one shown in the manual. You would use the latter in case your TV does not have RCA. Then you plug RCAs from the console into a special box and you connect the box via coaxial cable to your TV's VHF input. Then you tune the channel et voila, you are playing. Additional fun was in the fact that these RCA-to-coaxial boxes were cheaply made and were basically acting as transmitters. So you could tune into someone else's game session and just watch it :) Granted, the range was just couple of apartments, but still. And the picture in the manual shows one of the versions of the console which included light gun. Although, I have no idea why captions on the figure are in Italian
@@mal0gen they were the same as on NES. I do not know how it worked, but my bet is that game "cartridges" were not original :D And also there were a lot of 999..9-games-in-one cartridges. These were terrible as you may guess (usually its Super Mario, Tetris and some other lightweight stuff). But the real games were all the rage: multiple TMNTs, Micro Machines and a lot of other games I can't remember now
The schmoo at 3:52 isn't even trying to hide the chip markings; because there are no markings ... and no chip package! That's Chip-on-board; the silicon die is just dropped onto the PCB, bond-wired to the pcb traces, and covered in epoxy gunk. This makes it ever so slightly cheaper, vs having an actual package....
I love the shoddy knockoffs that have been made to resemble some console but which are 99% empty inside (and could have been made significantly smaller if they didn't try to copy the appearance of the other console).
I reviewed a similar game stick console from Temu, it has 10 000 + retro games on it, and for 30 $ it is actually pretty good entertainment for some time.
My parents would have totally bought me and my siblings a Gamestation 5 if we all were born 25 years later, as proof they bought us Neogeo Pocket Colots instead of Gameboys because they were on sale and thought that they were the same thing And yes, I'm still angry
At 3:51 the "schmoo" on the board is not because they are trying to hide anything, but is actually just what's called a "chip-on-board"; the raw chip is glued to the PCB and small gold wires are connected directly to the board from the chip before it is covered in this black epoxy to protect it. It is a cost saving measure, as you don't need to pay for the package and pads. If you've ever opened a cheap electronic such as a calculator, you will almost certainly see this inside them.
That Arcade Box uses standard emulators and EmulationStation (similar to RetroPie) so that’ll be why you’re getting a much better experience compared to some of the more basic ones.
Yeah I found that what it comes with is pretty solid. I have two and clone what it comes with to a bigger SD card and put more stuff on it when I got one for by niece who just wanted something to play retro games. Its emulation on a lot of dreamcast stuff is pretty solid. PSP can be a bit hit or miss.
3:54 They don't use the schmoo because they don't want you to know what chip that is. It's called a COB (Chip On Board), and it's essentially a bare die connected to the PCB via bond wires, and the black epoxy blob is there to protect it since there's no conventional package like with a proper packaged and soldered chip
There is similar anti reverse engineering epoxy. They arent here for electrical engineering. Theyre an entertainment channel always have been but usually are a great fun fast reference
The Emulation set up on the Arcade Box is actually really solid. And most stuff from NES up to more then you expect Dreamcast games run well on it. But you have to get a bigger mem card if you want to put a PS1 and Dreamcast library on it cause the 64gig it comes with is not going to cut it.
Yeah, I just picked one up and opted for the 64GB model then just purchased a 128GB Integral card. I removed a load of the oldest games and kept everything from Master System/NES and newer on there. I added some PS1 games and it still has 50GB free. Cloning the card was fun though as the box didn't like it at first. I had to do a sector by sector clone then expand the partition to get it to work. It was definitely well worth it though.
What i think is really important to know is if the composite out consoles are sending a sweet 240p video signal that will look great on scanning. Oh so sexy scanlines... or if they are set to that 480i bullshit that looks flickering crap on a crt. But your playing them on an HDTV, where they are just gonna look like crap no matter what
Can't wait for you to start reviewing all those after-market retro consoles that actually play NES/SNES/Genesis games, all the Hyperkin Retrons and all that.
4:39 yes there's actually a CoD player that has picked up a controller upside down as a child and started playing like this and keeps playing with an upsidedown Controller.
Have you used any of these emulation boxes before? What have your experiences been? Let us know below!
Buy a Data Frog MI Pad-80 on AliExpress: lmg.gg/SRJ1H
Buy a Gamestation 5 on AliExpress: lmg.gg/iWXJ8
Buy an Arcade Box on AliExpress: lmg.gg/V7WNA
Buy a Hyper Base FC Retro Game Console on AliExpress: lmg.gg/vtQhQ
Buy a Beelink GT King WiFi6 Smart TV box on AliExpress: lmg.gg/Cia5Z
Buy a Retro Super Console X Pro Plus on AliExpress: lmg.gg/KKJzO
Purchases made through some store links may provide some compensation to Linus Media Group.
I like money
I will not be purchasing these products xoxo.
😎 Actually I have the Retro Monster which is similar power to Hyper base. I am very happy with it. I don’t care about more powerful systems because I grew up in the arcade. I love that I can play MAME games and the interface is great. Some do suck bad, like you pointed out.
Okay whoever paired an NES controller with a Super Famicom is an expert troll.
kids have their phones theae days
"I wouldn't pilot a submarine with them" is my new favourite phrase to describe the quality of a controller
Absolutly legendary sentence (also the scene is at 10:20)
As soon as i heard linus say that i went into the comments
Savage...
Agree. He said it so casually too. lol
He tried saying it on another video but got stopped mid way “too early?”
At least those knockoff consoles come with actual games, even though they are pirated. When I was a kid, the "Gamestation" equivalent was called a "Polystation," and they always advertised themselves as having 200+ games, but what they often ended up having was 200 different versions of Tetris.
And would be heavily advertised in EGM
Core memory unlocked 🤣
*IT'S JUST NOT A GAME ANYMORE*
There was also a generic famiclone that had a Playstation shaped shell but when you opened the top loader door it had a cartridge port where the cd player would be on a Playstation which made it look more accurate and also protected the port from dust, the controllers looked nothing like Playstation controllers though.
You can play any retro game you want, so long as it's Tetris, Frogger, or Snake!
FYi the schmoo at 3:54 is not used for obfuscation, but as an extreme form of cost cutting, as it is cheaper to glue the bare die to the pcb and wire bond out the IOs, as for commodity ICs packaging is more expensive than the die itself (this technique is heavily used in simple mass scale manufactured goods like calculators)
I've also seen this with cards that play music. No packaging means no hard edges in the paper, just a bump, and they might be able to squeeze a few more cards in a box for shipping.
I just made the same comment... I don't even think it's extreme, just makes sense if you gonna do a fixed run like this.
you're right. i remember prying off the black glue from the pcb of an old calculator when i was a kid. good times XD
4:16 I especially like how the manual is in Russian but the diagram is labeled in Spanish.
Spanish?
@@FRANCESCO20-24Si el diagrama está en español, puedes ver las palabras pistola, casete de juego, control, consola y adaptador
@@Mextalhead wow 😱, Yo soy hablante nativo del idioma español 🙈🤭🍫
@@FRANCESCO20-24 Ostia chaval eso sí que mola 😲
@@Mextalhead también se ingles
A couple of those (specifically the ones that lack HDMI) aren't emulators - they're SoC implementations of actual NES hardware. Even the GameStation 5. The epoxy blob was covering the NOAC (Nintendo-on-a-chip) and the other component was a microcontroller for reading the USB ports and translating them to something that NES hardware can understand (a real NES uses a shift register to capture the controller state at a moment in time and then read it serially)
And the NES on chip in general is not known for being a very faithful hardware recreation of the NES with many sound artifacts and inconsistent speed and low quality video output. Any time people talk about reverse engineered hardware being inherently better than software emulators I think of how good NES software emulation is (good enough that it is Speedrun legal) and I think of how bad the NES on chips are, ultimately it all comes down to implementation.
@@TobyCowles To be fair, that chip is probably older than you and never had a second revision to make it feature complete. If they'd kept developing it like emulation technology, then it'd be on par feature-wise and who knows, we might've seen other consoles get that treatment and work better than the emulators.
@@anon_y_mousse oh certainly, they have been building those NES on chips basically unchanged since the mid 90s and a lot has changed in that time. And there are reasons why hardware based solutions should in theory be better, you just have so much more control of the signal timings when you are working with something that low level. But it increasingly feels like we are in a weird place where with enough optimization software solutions can actually achieve similar or better results to hardware based ones.
The PicoFly vs HWFly for instance - the HWFly needed an FPGA to produce the glitch pulse with a precise enough timing to glitch a switch, and when the PicoFly was in development a lot of people were skeptical that a microcontroller could get a consistent glitch but it was able to.
I would love to see hardware based clones of more recent consoles. But I doubt we ever will because by the time that the tools to properly produce reverse engineered hardware for a more complicated console are available the software solution will likely have had so much development time and optimization put into it that it isn't even worth it to bother with a hardware clone except for a few die hard people.
Something like MISTER is I suppose a challenge to this theory - but that is still a relatively niche product that still focuses largely on older consoles.
Do you actually know that last part? Because my assumption was that the chip on the carrier was the ROM with all the games on it, and the "USB ports" are just NES controller ports with USB connectors.
Also another fun fact: NOACs have been so prolific and cheap to buy that when they made the Atari Flashback, they actually ported all the games to NES and used a NOAC rather than try to emulate a VCS.
My parents almost bought one of these knockoffs for my birthday. Glad I told them that I didn’t need anything else.
lucky
@HeisenbergIsHerewow am i glad youtube has a translation feature built in
@HeisenbergIsHereholy smokes google translates spam too
My parents once bought me a knock off that was more expensive than what I wanted.
@@otherssingpuree1779my parent bought me a knockoff and I was grateful for them to care about me, you don't judge parents buddy
Is your fault for not saying what you like
10:23 HAHAHAHA!!! "i would not pilot a submarine with them" Well Played, Linus!!
We need a list of the best emulators with software loaded for home built arcade cabinets. LETS GO
fr that would be amazing
Just get a Mister FPGA with the jamma connector, the update all script grabs a shit load of arcade cores
MAME is a well known arcade emulator, supports just about everything too.
RaccoonBox
Software: MAME and Retroarch
For hardware emulation of course you want a Mister.
"I have the same information as you do" is about the greatest response there could possibly have been.
You should test if there is anything malicious on them
Linus, you should use the GS5 shell as a case for a tiny PC build. Would be a cool idea for a future video!
so true :D the copy consoles is kind of cool with the design both gs5 and Hyper base fc :D bot be nice for special tiny pc build for retro :D
Not sure you could do much other than put a single board computer in it.
@@TheAkashicTraveller definetly would be a challenge! but they got a lot of creative genius there and Im sure they could get something cool. Probibly will have to use mobile/laptop parts or a Raspberry Pi
Maybe a raspberry PC/android OS that could run Nvidia GeForce now
That would be one TINY ASS pc...
10:22 damn Linus didn't have to do them like that
Yeah true he fook them up
15:50 "if you're comfortable with the piracy and profiting off of other's IP..." Considering Nintendo and Sony's willingness to price jab for retro games these days... yeah, I don't have much sympathy for them. They're the ones raking in all the money while the original developers only see pennies on the dollar from it, anyway.
I think these products are for impoverished people who don’t have the funds to pay for IPs
This is underrated
Remember folks, Linus has gone on record multiple times saying that he thinks adblockers are piracy.
@@runed0s86 Linus has said a lot of dumb s**t over the years that he immediately backpedals on when he gets called out.
Linus is not exactly smart or wise.
@6:47 the "X" and "O" are reversed is because they are probably running off a japanese playstation. In Japan, "X" is used to cancel "O" is used to confirm, where in Canada and US, it is the reverse where "X" is confirm and "O" is to cancel/go back. Learned pretty quick when relatives in Asia were sending games over for holidays and such~
Agree with Linus on playability for the price point. 30 bucks for a system that has some jank in it, we all can live with. It's when your $500 XBox Bricks on startup that blows peoples minds.
The black dot on the pcb isn't to hide the chip under it. The black dot is the chip. It's cheaper to mount the silicon die directly onto the pcb rather than packaging it into a whole discrete chip which then has to soldered on separately.
Yep, super common in pirated games too, chinese snes/gameboy repros use this approach a lot.
I was honestly surprised Linus didn't know what it was. COBs or "Blobs" are everywhere.
@@treborrrrr I've heard him talk about them before he could have just read it off the script without thinking or just forgot about it
Between this and Linus not realizing the scaling and latency issues were from the TV I’m a bit disappointed.
@@AkirIkasu When they're as bad as shown, it's very likely not just the TV. I'll agree the video quality's the TV, but definitely not the input latency.
10:20 loving the comparison of controllers to submarine piloting 😂
I was looking for this comment hahaha
@@diegoatlas Me too!
'I mean you're not wrongggg, but you didn't have to say itttt' vibes
Wow, just what I needed, a flashlight built into a game console.
I bet it'll sell like hotcakes with that feature alone.
pretty sure it does sell like hotcakes to soccer moms, i mean soccer birth givers.
Actually it's freaking awesome. Anyone who's ever tried to plug stuff into the back of a TV where is dark would agree with that.
Ha I read that as flashlight at first
I don't think that was an uncommon feature on old cheap plastic game thingies
@@Link200767 you're so funny
When I set my Pi library up, I read a lot about N64 being a sticking point for some emulation infrastructures because of the way they were coded rather than a performance issue. It takes separate effort to properly emulate them which a lot of these guys may just decide is not worth it when they can throw thousands of other types of games on there and hit the target number for the page headline.
Pi 3B sucks at PSX emulation. Barely playable.
@@anon_y_mousse I have used both RetroArch and Bacocera(?) And neither plays PSX games properly so I gave up on them.
@@anon_y_mousse **on PSX games, not the emulators
Even Nintendo can't emulate their own shit perfectly. The recently released Switch Online version of Pilotwings 64 was criticized for running at a too-fast speed, effectively ruining the Birdman stages because you have to mash the button way more than you should.
@@kanedaku You should try building from source then, because pcsx-rearmed always worked full speed for me. Just make sure you enable Neon so it utilizes the hardware more fully.
to be honest the lantern is quite useful, imagine trying to connect it behind the tv, with the lights off
XD😂😅
I was in an electronics store the other day, and I remember seeing a gameboy-looking pirate console with, I think, 500 games. I was tempted to check it out, but then I saw they were selling it for $80 USD; no way was I paying for that.
Generally games cost 50 or more dollars so 80 dollars is not far off.
@@kameljoe21 Those consoles only hold roms for, at the latest, ps1 games. Those aren't licensed either, so you're far better off downloading those roms yourself.
@@DanielFerreira-ez8qd Yeah pretty much, rather than letting some random company (that had nothing to do with either games or the actual original hardware) that makes it's money on ripping other companies off. You might as well just rip the original company off directly, as you would be doing it anyway even purchasing a console as such.
@@DanielFerreira-ez8qd PS1? Those with "only" 500 games will likely have an incomplete library of NES and gameboy at best, or more likely will be full of games from the Atari 2600 and C64. Those games were fun back then and can still be nice to play, but you'll probably get bored of them within 5-10 minutes. Not worth paying more than on any modern game that you might play for hours before being done with it.
Edit: also PS1 library will likely be incomplete, since those games occupy a "large" amount of storage (hundreds of MB!). It's unlikely that they'll put PS1 games on something like an EMMC that's got up to 8GB of storage instead of a 16kb one on the NES.
80? I sold Paper Mario TTYD (gamecube) for $135 USD recently (NM disc, and manual) lol. Retro games paid for my new car...and house. 10/10 would recommend
plastic screws are actually more expensive than metal ones, those are probably nylon, and they used them probably because they did not want to crack acrylic cases, or maybe they just had them laying around from something else
Cheap plastic screws that are one-time use only and super cheap metal screws that pop their head right off when you try to unscrew them. Evil.
@@WXKFAI had an experience with those screws that break the heads off when you go to remove them.... Like 1/3 of them broke. The quality looked like an old document that was a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy.....
That submarine controller comment caught me off guard. Great stuff.
4:17 the Sam Rainey Spiderman text font had me laughing 😂
Grandma, nowadays, buys Little Timmy the best gaming consoles out or Little Timmy wont visit!😂
I think a lot of those "analog" controllers mapped to a D-pad which is why there was such a large dead zone.
@@murtisoft but you can also program the controller so that when the joystick is in some quadrant, it maps to a d-pad input rather than a joystick input
@@murtisoft You're not wrong that quality and design varies, but it's also common for controllers to be set up wildly incorrectly by lazy devs, especially for bootleg stuff. For example, I had an N64 USB controller and even with the well known and popular Project64 it worked horribly until I went into the settings and messed with the calibration and sensitivity sliders and by the time I was done it was just about as good as a real N64 controller. If devs get even lazier and just map the analog joystick to digital D-pad inputs (not uncommon at all), it will be even worse.
Love how the manual at 4:23 is in Russian, but the illustration has labels in Spanish
It's also clearly Google translated Russian
@@bean367 да (yes) 😝
The first two systems are what are known as Famicom on a chip. They are a true software pirate's favorite way to produce NES clones, as they are very cheap compared to the Android boxes
Poison ivy can be so itchy
A note about only having two dongles for four controllers: KinHank states that you can use one dongle per two controllers. Though from what I understand, it's a bit tricky to set up. I've only needed just one controller.
yeah i have a kinhank console, can confirm
seriously though those controllers are TRASH, they're passable for grandma's house give it to a five year old but if you are an adult with more than $10 to your name, buying an 8bitdo usb controller is totally worth the money for those android consoles (and it'll work on your computer, too)
I've always been curious what's actually in these boxes, but never been game to find out. Thanks LTT for sating my curiosity.
3:10 Linus really scared me into thinking we were going to get another sponsor segue.
The "shmoo" on the GS5 is a silicon die directly bonded to the PCB. It's called "'chip on board" and is cheaper than bonding to a separate package.
I think there was a legit Sega licenced plug-and-play that came in that Sonic shaped controller shell. Presumably they sold off the tooling afterwards and it's now just used as a generic controller shell for any Chinese bootleg going.
The "schmoo" is a super common, low-cost way of adding cheap, bare silicon dies to pcbs. The bonding leads that would typically connect the silicon die inside a molded casing, to its external legs or pads, is instead bonded directly to pads on the pcb. Then the fragile silicon die and bonding leads get covered in a blob of epoxy to protect them.
I love these types of videos. Testing older or off the wall tech.
Love the new submarine standardization for game controllers 😂
In a sense, I'm quite uninterested in tech. But I just keep watching LTT due to the crazy amounts of charisma on display by most hosts. Linus and his energy and honesty are just so inspirational to me that after 3 years of watching LTT, I had to drop a comment. Please, keep doing what you doing because I get to laugh and smile for free once a day. Thank you!
Man, this is positive and all, but you can't seriously just left out his co-host.
I think it's time to do the opposite of "the cheapest emulators/consoles" and look at the biggest and best. The one you never need to replace and don't have to go to grandma's house to play. I'm talking about the Megacade from Extreme Home arcades. I'd love to see a deep dive into this machine. It would also be great to know how to build our own arcade based PC for home.
This please❤
At those prices building a gaming PC with a 4090 is better.
That’s a gaming PC
It's just a gaming PC running RetroArch and a frontend.
They have already reviewed the most expensive emulator
4:22 Its the manual for the first Game Station they go back to the late 90s
They had a Knockof PS1 with cartridge slot under the CD clap.
10:20 "To be clear, these are not amazing controllers by any stretch of the imagination... I wouldn't pilot a submarine with them..." *SHOTS FIRED*
Beats of Rage was a single fan tribute game had sprites/graphics from the Streets of Rage games, then it got turned into its own engine that you can make a customable Beat em up game from any franchise out there ie Ultimate Double Dragon, Atomiswave was an arcade system like the Neo Geo, in fact SNK developed games after discontinuing their NG
“I wouldn’t pilot a submarine with them”
i swr that got me lol🤣
5:18 that's Hudson Soft's Nuts & Milk originally released for the Famicom on July 20, 1984 releasing on the same day as Lode Runner
it's actually a historically important game for being one of the first third party releases on a Nintendo console
I remember playing it on a knock off snes console way back in 1999.
10:45 anyone that claims the N64 controller joystick had massive dead zones, never actually used an N64 controller. Of course it had long term durability issues, but outside of that it was incredibly accurate.
5:12 omg linus, u just unlocked millions of forgoten memories of playing that game with my brother. Oh the nostalgia 😌
Just FYI: Those controllers from 4:00 ARE NOT USB 2.0 The pinout on the board and the controller is used differently.
I love how for the gs5 the manual is in russian but the labeling for the extremely helpful graphic is in Spanish.
thought i was the only one who noticed lmao
For a moment I thought I knew Russian when I read the image. Nope.
That was so funny.
That submarine joke was out of left field and absolutely hilarious 😂
Throwing out the "I wouldn't pilot a submarine with them" and then not even winking or flinching or reacting in anyway was for some reason very funny for me...
“As a 9 year old visiting grandma in the summer”
I literally had one of these for that purpose back in the day. My mom got it for me at a flea market
That one with the cartridge shaped drive is kind of cool.
I've actually thought about doing that before, but it would probably be better and simpler to use a more simple communication standard to send just the id of the cartridge and load it from an SSD inside the console
_"Look at the dead zone!"_
Yes, that's what happens when you play a *D-pad* game with a joystick.
5:08 "i have the same information you do" brooo that took me outtt 💀💀
OMG. i as just about to say Linus is trying so hard not to just break the thing open, then the next shot is him ripping it open with his bare hands. god bless him.
10:19 "I wouldn't pilot a submarine with them" is a new way of telling us the quality of the controller xD
12:14 DEAR GOD WHAT THE HELL DID THEY DO TO MY BOY BANJO
It’s the “make Microsoft money demon” that has possessed Rare into releasing $40+ of Sea Of Thieves cosmetics every month
What is truly amazing about these kinds of consoles is that they often dont have the number of games they advertise. They have that amout of programs sure but often they use rom hacks of games already on system or they have duplicate titles to pad out the numbers. I have seen some where some of them are broken to be unplayable in some. Truly these things are a work of art. You cant fake this kind of awful.
They just download whatever they can off the internet and stick it on the memory card,
There's a long precedent for this in gaming. Remember Action 52?
04:22 Lol... Manual Russian, picture Spanish... they clearly stole the picture from a Spanish manual of a different device.
The guy who played a game fruit game with you and said " I have the same information you do..." I actually laughed out loud, perfect delivery of a nonsense situation. Cheers !
"schmoo on here" - Linus, look up COB (Chip on Board) construction, it's fascinating. That's basically a bare die glued and wire bonded to a PCB, and epoxied to protect the bonds and against light.
4:15 The visible portion of the manual, translated (yes, it makes as much sense in Russian as it does here):
GAME STATION
Read the instruction :
1. Connect the detail, as shown on the picture .
2. Teleprogramme :
May watch television only when game console is turned off .
3. How to Play :
After connect the game device to the television . Please carefully read the description .
1). Turn on the television .
2). Choose the channel for this gaming device using the VHF channel switcher , then plug the audio-video cable into the AV input of the television and
I was hoping you would peek into the Retro Gaming Handheld scene; maybe a future episode of this?
So many to pick from, more features and cheaper than the options shown here.
-Retroid Pocket 3+
-Miyoo Mini Plus
-DataFrog SN2000
and many more!
Yeah! I got the RG35XX and with custom OS it is amazing little device!
adding to the list:
-Anbernic RG35xx
-Powkiddy X55
-Retroid Pocket Flip
-AYN Odin Lite
and maybe if is possible:
-PS Vita with homebrew
-3DS with homebrew
They already did take a look at it before, an updated video would still be nice
Caution with malware with these, pretty similar to the android tv boxes and those were found with malware pre installed or with major security flaws in the past
I mean, to be fair, you don't need to connect them to the internet. Plugging anything you care about into them or vice versa, though, could be scary.
bro literally mentions this in the video
@@spritelyNo, he mentioned only the Android Tv box, which is an old trend. OP said that all these consoles can be full of malware.
@@Liminal.Headspace guy in video said that too rofl
Most of emulator ones have no way to connect to a network anyway, I'm sure the ones that connect the controller via Bluetooth can cause some issues, but most of them things have no way of connecting anyway, now if your gonna try plugging one of the micro SD cards into a connected device then that is a whole different story lol
I have a Arcade Box and I love it.Plays loads of arcade games and play it for SNES more than anything,but it gets used loads.
Id love to be a fly on the wall at the poor kids xmas when grandma says " i brought that playstation 5 gizmo you wanted sweetheart"
14:42 almost certainly the laser cut acrylic burned because bad QC, and everyone knows how nasty burnt/melted plastic smells
Id love to see you guys do a write up like this on the pirate game HDD "consoles" . They come loaded with games all they way up to current consoles and is set up as a plug and play type system but using a PC. They're between 40 and 100$ and seem a little too good to be true
@ISCARI0T AliExpress
RGT 85 reviews a few of them if you are interestes
Even with controller deadzones, that FC box definitely seems worth the buy at $ 65. Especially as a gift for someone who wants to get into retro games but doesn't feel comfortable getting into emulation and piracy.
That's literally all it does, emulation and piracy.
It's still not cool to make money from emulation scene just to be honest with you, all of this knock-off console, they literally stole everything from roms to emulator.
@White_Tiger93 yes because Nintendo sure deserves that respect(Not)
Not that I care but by getting it and giving it to them, you're literally BOTH into emulation and piracy...
lmfao@@therealmistermemer
alternative title: man who has never played a bootleg game fascinated by the concept of a plug n play for seventeen minutes and thirty three seconds
6:49 I think the Arcade Box’s “X” and “O” are reversed because that’s how the PlayStation controllers were configured in Japan until around the PS3.
I've had a few of these type boxes. The best & easiest was the Super Console X King like the one Linus has in the video. It might not be able to play everything (mostly no PS2 & beyond), there is enough on there that you don't miss them much. The fact it can do AtomisWave was quite welcome. Other than that, I use a hacked PS Classic with USB sticks or an i5-10400F system I tossed together just for emulation.
Wrt Game Station 5 manual. In the early 90s Russian (and former USSR) market was flooded with NES clone called Dandy. There were two ways of connecting it: using RCA connectors for video/audio and the one shown in the manual. You would use the latter in case your TV does not have RCA. Then you plug RCAs from the console into a special box and you connect the box via coaxial cable to your TV's VHF input. Then you tune the channel et voila, you are playing. Additional fun was in the fact that these RCA-to-coaxial boxes were cheaply made and were basically acting as transmitters. So you could tune into someone else's game session and just watch it :) Granted, the range was just couple of apartments, but still.
And the picture in the manual shows one of the versions of the console which included light gun. Although, I have no idea why captions on the figure are in Italian
Were the Dandy games good?
@@mal0gen they were the same as on NES. I do not know how it worked, but my bet is that game "cartridges" were not original :D And also there were a lot of 999..9-games-in-one cartridges. These were terrible as you may guess (usually its Super Mario, Tetris and some other lightweight stuff). But the real games were all the rage: multiple TMNTs, Micro Machines and a lot of other games I can't remember now
The way Linus plays pirate console like it normal got me dying 😂😂
14:50 - "Why does it smell?" ... takes an even deeper sniff dive...🤣🤣🤣
The schmoo at 3:52 isn't even trying to hide the chip markings; because there are no markings ... and no chip package! That's Chip-on-board; the silicon die is just dropped onto the PCB, bond-wired to the pcb traces, and covered in epoxy gunk. This makes it ever so slightly cheaper, vs having an actual package....
I love the shoddy knockoffs that have been made to resemble some console but which are 99% empty inside (and could have been made significantly smaller if they didn't try to copy the appearance of the other console).
I reviewed a similar game stick console from Temu, it has 10 000 + retro games on it, and for 30 $ it is actually pretty good entertainment for some time.
Big bet. You got a new follower
@@operatorfig Thank you! I try to make quality content
My parents would have totally bought me and my siblings a Gamestation 5 if we all were born 25 years later, as proof they bought us Neogeo Pocket Colots instead of Gameboys because they were on sale and thought that they were the same thing
And yes, I'm still angry
Neogeo pocket colors are actually better in some regards even if they aren't what you wanted. And rarer too, worth more today than gbcs.
@stigrabbid589 if I could find the NGP's, I'd sell them now, biggest problem with them is the game library definitely not being Nintendo's
@scott2100 This. Hey, at least you have like, 1000 different fighting games!
11:07 Worth the $61 for Bad Ass Babes 🤣🤣
At 3:51 the "schmoo" on the board is not because they are trying to hide anything, but is actually just what's called a "chip-on-board"; the raw chip is glued to the PCB and small gold wires are connected directly to the board from the chip before it is covered in this black epoxy to protect it. It is a cost saving measure, as you don't need to pay for the package and pads. If you've ever opened a cheap electronic such as a calculator, you will almost certainly see this inside them.
Man the new videos are enjoyable and adventures , love to see more like this linus , keep up the good work linus and the crew ❤️🎉
That Arcade Box uses standard emulators and EmulationStation (similar to RetroPie) so that’ll be why you’re getting a much better experience compared to some of the more basic ones.
Yeah I found that what it comes with is pretty solid. I have two and clone what it comes with to a bigger SD card and put more stuff on it when I got one for by niece who just wanted something to play retro games. Its emulation on a lot of dreamcast stuff is pretty solid. PSP can be a bit hit or miss.
It's solid had it for almost 2 years just add better controllers.
@@ManOnTheDune You can buy your own. I found a bunch that work with it so there is that.
this is the definition of "we have that at home"
Some of those are perfectly acceptable. Crazy value for the ones that can run endless games on emulator with TWO functional controlers.
10:22 "i wouldnt pilot a submarine with them" oceangate refference in a linus video was never expected
3:54 They don't use the schmoo because they don't want you to know what chip that is. It's called a COB (Chip On Board), and it's essentially a bare die connected to the PCB via bond wires, and the black epoxy blob is there to protect it since there's no conventional package like with a proper packaged and soldered chip
yet another RUclipsr who says things when they don't know what they are talking about. I really feel like LTT has gone downhill big time.
There is similar anti reverse engineering epoxy. They arent here for electrical engineering. Theyre an entertainment channel always have been but usually are a great fun fast reference
The Emulation set up on the Arcade Box is actually really solid. And most stuff from NES up to more then you expect Dreamcast games run well on it. But you have to get a bigger mem card if you want to put a PS1 and Dreamcast library on it cause the 64gig it comes with is not going to cut it.
Yeah, I just picked one up and opted for the 64GB model then just purchased a 128GB Integral card. I removed a load of the oldest games and kept everything from Master System/NES and newer on there. I added some PS1 games and it still has 50GB free. Cloning the card was fun though as the box didn't like it at first. I had to do a sector by sector clone then expand the partition to get it to work. It was definitely well worth it though.
Yes, the Arcade Box is pretty good . Have no complaints or no issues with it
I could watch Linus do this all day, until the end of time. Thousands upon thousands on consoles. Forever.
9:04 first time I’ve seen tanner look even slightly happy 😂
What i think is really important to know is if the composite out consoles are sending a sweet 240p video signal that will look great on scanning. Oh so sexy scanlines... or if they are set to that 480i bullshit that looks flickering crap on a crt. But your playing them on an HDTV, where they are just gonna look like crap no matter what
7:51 excuse me but wtf am I looking at
tbh all of these are super impressive considering their price and how they are able to run all the games with such a simple hardware.
4:30 the manual is in Russian, but the diagram is in Spanish, lol wtf
The GS5 manual is in Russian but the picture is in Spanish “Casete de juego” game cartridge
Can't wait for you to start reviewing all those after-market retro consoles that actually play NES/SNES/Genesis games, all the Hyperkin Retrons and all that.
1:40 You take that back!
i miss emily doing retro gaming stuff :( hopefully she makes a comeback when she's comfortable!
4:39 yes there's actually a CoD player that has picked up a controller upside down as a child and started playing like this and keeps playing with an upsidedown Controller.
This channel is a go-to for information. It's the best!