*Couple things as I have been asked, this Polymega was shipped in January of this year... so no clue about different CPU's they changed to. Also I didn't buy the 2 CPU's I showed in the video.. they were from a bin of PC scrap.. So don't know the values of what they should go for. Items used in video: Electronics Tool kit: amzn.to/3OYKtjv (Cheap price, great kit!) Thermal Grease: amzn.to/3If1Zw4 Intel Core i7-8700t CPU on ebay: ebay.us/DjxF8H My original online shop www.madpixelshop.com is back! Buy 1 get 1 30% off! New Game Preorders On Amazon: amzn.to/3sRKOMY Checkout my new marketplace for Retro Gamers! www.madpixelmarket.com/ You can buy and sell along with me! Use code MADPIXEL to save $5 off your first purchase! Become a channel member: bit.ly/2KeqCuN Buy Asian Import Games Play-Asia: bit.ly/2m4xq5c Shop at Stone Age Gamer to help support my channel: bit.ly/3pUMUoS As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases from links posted in my description & comments section. Other links listed are affiliate links as well and purchases made via any links may result in my earning a small commission. Become a Patron: bit.ly/33wCm3Z
So the intel celeron chip that was in the system was a dual core CPU that's it while the core i7 8700 is a 6 core 12 thread a much better cpu in every way
I was able to pause the video at 8:32 while watching at 0.25 speed just as you finish saying "screen" and damn, like the bottom third of the screen shifts to the right, goes black and white with black lines running down it, never seen an emulator do that for SNES. Glad it's running better for you after the upgrade.
@@Viking_Cookie yeah thats exactly what I was talking about. Glad its actually present in the video to show what I mean, thought between rendering the footage and youtube processing it wasnt going to be visible.
Celerons are terrible CPUs for emulation. I thought they were supposed to be I5 processors. Some people are saying they used a diffrent chip that stopped production, but even then they should have been able to get i-3 cpus for this for about the price of a celeron, and it would likely not have this issue. Celerons are for the most basic of devices that only need to get on the net, and do documents. They have always been jank for emulation
@ibrohiem the interface for the polymega is really nice. Playing original carts is a nice plus, too. However, not being able to back up your save data is inexcusable at this price.
I don't understand how they charge that much for the crappy processor. I don't see it as worth it, especially since you can't save your save data to the device and vice versa.
Because it's a low volume product from a very small company. Sourcing the parts, assembly, packaging and distribution must be very expensive. They don't have the same leverage as Nintendo with something like the Switch or even Sony with the PS5. These bigger companies have huge supply chains and build millions of consoles VS tens of units like Polymega.
@@Aki_Lesbrincomany super small Chinese companies can put out consoles that run N64 great. Polymega was just a bad idea executed poorly by people without enough knowledge and skill.
Pretty cool that it is easy to just drop in a new compatible CPU. I was definitely interested in one of these at one point but I ended up just jail breaking a Retron 5 to do the bulk of my ROM rips and just made my own mini-PC to play my collection on along with Launch Box for a front end.
@@Weneedaplague your mileage may certainly vary and there are other front ends to use. I just liked how seamlessly launch box and big box worked with retroarch.
Nearly everything related to retro gaming is expensive AF: the FPGA consoles, the $300+ upscalers, the second hand games, the modkits and the list goes on.
So it's essentially either an ITX PC,or a mini PC. You can probably build a better machine for less money. You won't have the cartridge modules,but you can find game ROM's to fix that problem.
Agreed. Even a simple HP Elite Desk G4 mini and up with an Intel i5 or a 705 G5 with a Ryzen 3200GE running Batocera is going to do much better than the Polymega out of the box. Either of those machines will run you no higher than $150 even with 8gb a RAM or higher and an SSD. I collect all kinds of original hardware and physical games but I still like to use my 705 G5 mini Ryzen 3400GE for stuff I don't own and older arcade games. Heck I've even used an older G2 mini with an old intel i7 some years ago and it did absolutely fine running games as high as Dreamcast and most PS2. My rule of thumb is if you're going to use real cartridges/discs, get original hardware or a good FPGA based console. If you want to emulate older games just run ROMs on a budget PC with a good CPU or APU, at least 8GB of RAM and a cheap SSD or NVMe stick.
@@GLXY23 That's a perfectly good way to approach it. I don't mind owning pricey games and even own quite a few that cost more than they should, but it's not always financially smart to do that these days. That's where my Ryzen 3400GE-equipped 705 G5 mini comes in handy. Running Batocera on that makes playing retro games I don't own really fun and easy. It's also the best way to play Virtual Boy since playing on an actual Virtual Boy console really sucks but its game library is surprisingly well rounded.
@urgeGod definitely will look up some of those small pcs and yeah i suppose at this time games are pricy, so your option is the better out of it all. if you do have a modded 3ds check out red viper, it's an emulator for the VB, and it has support for the 3ds 3D effect and it's flawless.
Not sure when you captured your Pilotwings 64 "before" footage, but I just tried it on my Polymega I got 2 years ago and the emulation is perfect with no CPU upgrade. With N64, make sure to have the console online as it downloads support files for each game to run optimally.
It's absolutely inexcusable that the machine is CPU limited like that out of the box. This isn't some budget device from Wal-Mart. I really want to like this system but they make it really hard.
You seem like a thinking person, so this product isn't for you. So you will end up with a random brand mini ITX workstation for the price of a pair of caramel macchiato venti frappuchinos with hazzlenut-banana muffins.
@nxp Not sure why the snark was warranted, but yeah, you're right. When you have a $550 device ($800 for the full bundle) choking on 25-30 year-old games, it becomes really hard to justify the ridiculous hardware price point for something using an outdated Celeron. For a little bit less, you can get a Xbox Series X and have it flawlessly running every retro game that ever existed up until the GameCube, PS2 and original Xbox. Of course, it won't run actual cartridges and discs but that hardly matters considering that the PolyMega still can't handle your old save files anyway. Listen, it's an extremely nice-looking bit of kit. And at one point, I was certain that I was going to buy it. But, come on - SNES games are a problem? My phone can handle those.
I wonder if it still ships with that or they at least threw an i3. This guy in the video jumped straight to i7 that of course would power threw but to be honest i was more curious about the i3.
@@SIPEROTHi3 9100t works great, i7 for this is more than overkill and over double the price. I went with TDP of 35w like the stock processor and it's a 4 core 4 thread cpu with 3.1ghz base and a 6mb cache. Way more than stock celeron which is an embarrassing cpu for something at this price point, then again the console was designed years ago and they had to work with a now outdated motherboard and outdated socket cpu, but still. i7 he went with used is 89 at the cheapest and the i3-9100t just made more sense to me for $30. Zero issues with anything I've thrown at it. Celeron it came with is laughable.
I'm more surprised that it only has 2GB of DDR4 RAM. Unlike the processor, that is soldered on and you can't upgrade it. There are cheap laptops made for schools that have twice as much RAM.
I was onboard with the Polymega when it was announced in 2017 as the RetroBlox. 1 console to play all your carts. However it going over to software emulation and being damn expensive I quickly lost interest. In that time I have built myself a nice system collection with switchers that I couldn't be happier with!
Going from 2 cores at 1.8GHz to 6 cores at 4.7GHz will definitely do the trick on anything CPU-limited. Have you ever thought of doing an input/audio latency comparison with MiSTer? Every time I see those it's against a Raspberry Pi unit, but I'm curious as to how much closer to "realtime" an i7 based PC or that Polymega would be.
BIG difference when you swapped out that CPU! It was unplayable as it came! I didn't get that much stuttering on an old $100 Anbernic RG351P! Yeah, games ran at 25-30 fps but there was no pausing.
Hmm. Still seeing some of the video stutters, but it definitely cleared up the audio ones. And there's LESS of the video stutters, at least. Definitely worth the upgrade for anyone who was suckered into buying one of these.
I did the same i7 upgrade. N64 is near perfect now. It seems that performance across the board improved. The Polymega is a great console since it is region free.
Kinda figured it was CPU related even without knowing what hardware was running inside the polymega. It became obvious when you said the game played a little better after a reload using the original celeron CPU. The CPU already had enough of the game cached to improve performance but the Celeron cache at 2MB is too small, and not enough cores (Dual core). The 8700T has 6x the cache and 3x the cores. No surprise here but unfortunate for anyone who buys this and then has to spend more money to attain desired performance. I’d be curious if the i3 played just as well.
It would have. It probably only needed a slight boost in CPU Processing to get rid of the stutter. A Pentium Gold Dual Core/ 4-thread chip probably do it at A third of the cost of a Core i7. A Core i3 or Core i5 would be fine - These are big upgrades over the Celeron
@@albey1816 the two core/four threaded pentium you’re suggesting is likely the bare minimum to get smooth performance out of the polymega N64/SNES. Still kinda crap considering all the money you pay. Polymega probably got a nice volume deal to use this CPU, which probably allowed them to squeeze some more margin per unit.
Whats crazy is we were playing near perfect N64 emulation in the early 2000's on Pentium 3 cpu's and SNES with Pentium 1 cpu's. I remember in 99 having a older laptop with a P 233 mmx cpu in it and playing SNES games on it just fine.
Looking at the stack of modules, I can't help but thinking it would be cool if someone made a uniform, stackable enclosure for the different systems. Just like the (old) stereo racks. Fit in the consoles OG motherboard (or an FPGA version), add a cartridge slot for each system, and you would have a very slick looking retro setup.
That white square of static you are talking about is momentarially visible at timestamp 8:31 ~ 8:32 in the video, if you look closely towards the bottom right of the screen.
Crazy thing is, I remember emulating N64 around 1998-99 on my Voodoo 2 and it being pretty good, aside from occasional audio issues. How are devices still struggling with this, especially at this price point?
I remember seeing these audio and fps stutters in the past with other emus on a normal PC and in this case it was because the power profile (cpu, gpu) was set to balanced or on-demand. Switching the gpu/cpu into high / max performance all the time solved this issue. The cpu/gpu have to be on fixed and maximum clocks all the time because it doesn't clock up fast enough in balanced mode and it will also clock down randomly, which will then cause the stutters. Normally things like pstate etc. would make this a non issue, but I have still seen it happen even with the best on-demand cpu/gpu power profile. No idea how this Polymega works, or if it even offers an option to adjust these things, so this is just a thought as this helped fix it on a normal PC for me. On my PC you can turn off all power saving options via the bios (i7 cpu), but you can usually also do this via the OS.
The Polymega has very limited options. You have no OS level or BIOS level options available. Just what the front end offers, and none of that is performance based really... just basic display options type of thing.
@@Alexander-ix2jp im not sure, but id imagine linux. I just havent found a way to access anything and the bit of research ive done havent found anyone who has either.. but maybe there is a way and I missed it.
100% with you on the fact that your current saves on your cartridges SHOULD be automatically transferred to the console once inserted. If the Retron 5 can do it, this can do it and it should have been a DAY ONE thing. It's basically preventing me from playing anything right now on my Polymega if hopes they come up with an update soon which I heard they were working on. We shall see.
A lot of people have had Polymega on order for years and can't get them because of a dispute between Playmaji and the distributor in Germany. It's all the more annoying because they said they have honoured all the UK/Europe orders. Crazy!
Can you upscale N64 games on the polymega to make the image look better? Are there any settings to make the image look as good as we see on PCs with recent emulators?
Actually, I think this is a realistic solution. This upgrade is also popular among PolyMega users in Japan, as Celeron will cause processing lag in some Sega Saturn shooting games as well as N64.
Definitely looking forward to the 3D... but also looking forward to it being delayed lol... and having issues when it launches... but still looking forward to it... hoping for the best lol.
They should just sell a box that has all the cartrage sockets and a DVD drive that connect to a computer via USB and you basically use your own hard ware and they provide you with the console operating system you can install.
For the money the performance of absolutely everything should be basically flawless. You could literally buy a OSSC and every console for around the same price and you wouldn't have performance issues. At least not ones that the original console didn't have
They should sell a device with every controller port and every game cart port and sell that, bonus points if they can sell it in someway that someone might be able to easily take it a part and added it to say, a pc case if you were willing to get your hands dirty. Then along with it you can get their software for free therefore people can use their own software or use their software. This project was always pretty unappealing to me as paying frankly insane prices to emulate was pretty unappealing but some people will like being able to easily use real controllers and their own games. But they have to find a way bring the price down.
Unacceptable for how much this costs. Thankfully MiSTer is giving me the N64 fix I need, You also get better emulation of N64 on a RPi 5 in RetroArch/Batocera
The processor (i7) upgrade is a very good one because of hyperthreading cores available and the integrated GPU. I think this device is too expensive because you have to upgrade the processor to get better performance. The original processor is not a good one at all. Thank you for the review of internals of this device, again way too expensive.
this is a big upgrade! from 2C/2T to 6C/12T, its a shame that this system is so underpowerd, it's so expensive for the performance! my phone can run n64 without a problem
Has this f'n thing ever consistently shipped? I canceled my preorder after waiting forever for them to ship it, should I just wait for Analogue's 3D FPGA? The only thing I wanted this for was to play Saturn games...
I wanted the thing for Sega Saturn too. I cancelled my preorder years ago and just built an itx pc with a bunch of emulators and called it a day. I'm still hopeful that Analogue will release an FPGA Saturn console in the future.
The G4900T is a 2 core 2 thread weakling that is best used in a office thin client terminals not as a emulation machine. If they were needing to go cheap they could have gone with a AMD Athlon PRO 300GE with a Vega iGPU. At least the 4 threads & Vega GPU would have worked far better. Anyway at least you can upgrade the CPU though for those that don't want to spend $80-$100+ on the i7-8700T a i5-8600T/8500T can be half the cost with it only being a tad slower due to it being 6c 6t instead of 6c 12t like the 8700T. For emulating the N64 it'll still be just as good (best to have at least 4 cores, or more if your using UHD graphics).
You could also get a lot of mileage from emulation via Batocera if you were to use an HP Elite Desk G4 with an Intel i5 CPU and higher or a 705 G5 with a Ryzen 3200GE APU or 3400G if you got the 65W model. These mini PC's choke on 360 and PS3 but all of them will perform great with a decent chunk of Wii U games but mostly excels at PS2 and lower. I've even used an older 800 G2 mini with an Intel i7 6700T and it absolutely chewed through anything lower than og Xbox.
Ok so after watching this i will never own one of these. The N64 emulation is horrible. I think if you want good looking N64 you’ll just have to go with an hdmi mod.
THANK YOU for making this review! I was just about to pull the trigger on this for SEGA CD. Do you know if anyone make a good SEGA CD clone that takes original disks?
First, they should've used and AMD APU, second, I can't believe the OS isn't available online and modified to accept ROMs/ISOs yet as installing this on a mini PC or used HP/Dell office PC would be awesome.
I can't believe they put in a Celeron CPU in a $500 system. That is only a dual core CPU rated at 2.8ghz with Intel graphics 610. For example what you put in as a 6c/12t CPU with better integrated graphics. If Polymega is using some kind of Linux OS as their system. A dual core CPU will be stressed just on that. Honestly a Dell Mini PC with the i7 you put in is maybe $200 on eBay and will emulate everything better out of the box.
Consumers don't know no better. It's exactly like TV stations. You can get all the channels free from servers. The companies got those stations for free and charge you $200 for cable. Lack of knowledge you will always pay.
To me, it seems like a firmware update could also resolve the poor performance issues. Needing to upgrade the CPU for consoles that are so old, seems overkill. I could be wrong, but surely the N64 uses nothing like the power of the included Celeron CPU.
I’m sorry if you have to pay for an additional cpu and install it yourself for you to correctly emulate an already expensive overpriced emulation box, that is a massive fail. For the purposes of experimenting and proving it helps I give you props
Considering the price of old games im not sure this unit is worth buying. If old games sold for the prices they used to i would buy one because i love 16 bit games
In defence of Polymega, no one thought N64 cores would mature this much in such a short span of time for FPGA hardware. It is still poor that they skimped out on processing power for what should be a premium product.
This thing is literally more expensive than of one of those micro PCs that are powerful enough to emulate PS3 and WiiU games...and that's BEFORE you buy any of the modules you'll need to play all of your games. I get that if you have a big library of physical games, this allows you to plug those in, and it can be fun to plug in carts and insert discs...but it isn't running those games the same way that OG hardware or FPGA clones do. It's just dumping the roms and running them in a software emulation layer. This thing is a glorified Retron 5 that costs 5 times as much...again...before you even buy any cartridge modules.
I think I7 is way overkill for n64. I had a pentium 4 20 some years ago and that ran n64 upscalled to 1920x1200 just fine. I did have some hikups on my xperia play 14 years ago but, other than that, N64 always ran fine on pretty much any thing, that did not come down to emulation issues atleast.
So let me analyse this... you bougth a PolyMega a bunch of crap, you bought special adapters another bunch of crap, and you need to pay again to play N64 ? ... this is crazy !!! By the way, NeoGeo CD is playable on this device ??? cause this should be a goo reason to take one for me :)
I’m not trusting this company, much. On their website they say their OS is a Linux-based Proprietary operating system. How is that possible? I thought using GPL software made it impossible to make your project proprietary? Maybe I’m misunderstanding something?
Hi, thanks for your video. I left the Polymega off for about 1 month and now that I've turned it back on, it no longer transmits the video signal. when I press the power button, it starts up as if everything were normal, the TV detects the HDMI signal, but I don't see the console screen. I wrote to support but they will reply who knows when. in the meantime, do you think I could also solve the problem by replacing the CPU? Thanks again!🖖🏻
It appears to be using a near perfect accuracy graphics plugin by default. Either Angrylion or ParaLLEl-RDP. You can easily tell by the anti-aliasing that N64 games tended to have being reflected here. So any potential graphical issues are very rare to nonexistent, but the video output is usually limited to the N64's original render resolution for that game. The problem is if they ARE using Angrylion, that plugin places the burden of rendering the graphics ENTIRELY on the CPU, which is a big reason why the stutters are likely happening.
![BLACK BAG - Official Trailer [HD] - Only in Theaters March 14](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Du0Xp8WX_7I/mqdefault.jpg)
*Couple things as I have been asked, this Polymega was shipped in January of this year... so no clue about different CPU's they changed to. Also I didn't buy the 2 CPU's I showed in the video.. they were from a bin of PC scrap.. So don't know the values of what they should go for.
Items used in video:
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So the intel celeron chip that was in the system was a dual core CPU that's it while the core i7 8700 is a 6 core 12 thread a much better cpu in every way
I was able to pause the video at 8:32 while watching at 0.25 speed just as you finish saying "screen" and damn, like the bottom third of the screen shifts to the right, goes black and white with black lines running down it, never seen an emulator do that for SNES. Glad it's running better for you after the upgrade.
@@Viking_Cookie yeah thats exactly what I was talking about. Glad its actually present in the video to show what I mean, thought between rendering the footage and youtube processing it wasnt going to be visible.
So what's the best CPU it can accept in the socket even if the GUI doesn't support the extra cores yet? The i7 or a i9?
Celerons are terrible CPUs for emulation. I thought they were supposed to be I5 processors. Some people are saying they used a diffrent chip that stopped production, but even then they should have been able to get i-3 cpus for this for about the price of a celeron, and it would likely not have this issue. Celerons are for the most basic of devices that only need to get on the net, and do documents. They have always been jank for emulation
I feel bad for everyone who spent $500 on this and now need to spend an additional $100+ on a cpu to play the product as intended.
I swear a rapsberry pi 5 runs all of these a lot better.
@ibrohiem the interface for the polymega is really nice. Playing original carts is a nice plus, too. However, not being able to back up your save data is inexcusable at this price.
@@michaels9917 Have there been any workarounds for the save data? Usually the retro community gets on top of things pretty quickly.
@@ibrohiem rofl... n00b
@@michaels9917But you’re not actually playing from the original cart. It’s just a $500 glorified cartridge dumper that then uses emulation (badly)
I don't understand how they charge that much for the crappy processor. I don't see it as worth it, especially since you can't save your save data to the device and vice versa.
They were out of money, simply. To manufacture preexisting orders they needed to rely on the backs of new orders.
Because it's a low volume product from a very small company. Sourcing the parts, assembly, packaging and distribution must be very expensive. They don't have the same leverage as Nintendo with something like the Switch or even Sony with the PS5. These bigger companies have huge supply chains and build millions of consoles VS tens of units like Polymega.
@@Aki_Lesbrincomany super small Chinese companies can put out consoles that run N64 great. Polymega was just a bad idea executed poorly by people without enough knowledge and skill.
I thought it was supposed to be an I-5. Why is it a CELERON.
Pretty cool that it is easy to just drop in a new compatible CPU. I was definitely interested in one of these at one point but I ended up just jail breaking a Retron 5 to do the bulk of my ROM rips and just made my own mini-PC to play my collection on along with Launch Box for a front end.
Honestly can't stand launch box. It's just so clunky. And doesn't support animated box art
@@Weneedaplague your mileage may certainly vary and there are other front ends to use. I just liked how seamlessly launch box and big box worked with retroarch.
If your retro game machine is more expensive then a PS5 or Series X you done f*cked up
In your opinion. With all the parts I got to mod my Dreamcast it cost more than a ps5 and it was absolutely worth it.
@@GhibliNovawhat mods did u do?
Nearly everything related to retro gaming is expensive AF: the FPGA consoles, the $300+ upscalers, the second hand games, the modkits and the list goes on.
@@GhibliNova I agree with modding real hardware, but an emulation machine that it's supposed to run the games perfectly....nah.
@@adrenalinex4 shell swap, Hdmi, Mode, battery/controller fuse, noctua fan
So it's essentially either an ITX PC,or a mini PC. You can probably build a better machine for less money. You won't have the cartridge modules,but you can find game ROM's to fix that problem.
Agreed. Even a simple HP Elite Desk G4 mini and up with an Intel i5 or a 705 G5 with a Ryzen 3200GE running Batocera is going to do much better than the Polymega out of the box. Either of those machines will run you no higher than $150 even with 8gb a RAM or higher and an SSD. I collect all kinds of original hardware and physical games but I still like to use my 705 G5 mini Ryzen 3400GE for stuff I don't own and older arcade games. Heck I've even used an older G2 mini with an old intel i7 some years ago and it did absolutely fine running games as high as Dreamcast and most PS2. My rule of thumb is if you're going to use real cartridges/discs, get original hardware or a good FPGA based console. If you want to emulate older games just run ROMs on a budget PC with a good CPU or APU, at least 8GB of RAM and a cheap SSD or NVMe stick.
@urgeGod i do the same in a way kinda like a hybrid approach. i have real hardware for games i want and for the more rarer games i emulate
@@GLXY23 That's a perfectly good way to approach it. I don't mind owning pricey games and even own quite a few that cost more than they should, but it's not always financially smart to do that these days. That's where my Ryzen 3400GE-equipped 705 G5 mini comes in handy. Running Batocera on that makes playing retro games I don't own really fun and easy. It's also the best way to play Virtual Boy since playing on an actual Virtual Boy console really sucks but its game library is surprisingly well rounded.
@urgeGod definitely will look up some of those small pcs and yeah i suppose at this time games are pricy, so your option is the better out of it all. if you do have a modded 3ds check out red viper, it's an emulator for the VB, and it has support for the 3ds 3D effect and it's flawless.
Not sure when you captured your Pilotwings 64 "before" footage, but I just tried it on my Polymega I got 2 years ago and the emulation is perfect with no CPU upgrade. With N64, make sure to have the console online as it downloads support files for each game to run optimally.
It's absolutely inexcusable that the machine is CPU limited like that out of the box. This isn't some budget device from Wal-Mart. I really want to like this system but they make it really hard.
You seem like a thinking person, so this product isn't for you. So you will end up with a random brand mini ITX workstation for the price of a pair of caramel macchiato venti frappuchinos with hazzlenut-banana muffins.
@nxp Not sure why the snark was warranted, but yeah, you're right. When you have a $550 device ($800 for the full bundle) choking on 25-30 year-old games, it becomes really hard to justify the ridiculous hardware price point for something using an outdated Celeron. For a little bit less, you can get a Xbox Series X and have it flawlessly running every retro game that ever existed up until the GameCube, PS2 and original Xbox. Of course, it won't run actual cartridges and discs but that hardly matters considering that the PolyMega still can't handle your old save files anyway. Listen, it's an extremely nice-looking bit of kit. And at one point, I was certain that I was going to buy it. But, come on - SNES games are a problem? My phone can handle those.
I wonder if it still ships with that or they at least threw an i3. This guy in the video jumped straight to i7 that of course would power threw but to be honest i was more curious about the i3.
@@SIPEROTHi3 9100t works great, i7 for this is more than overkill and over double the price. I went with TDP of 35w like the stock processor and it's a 4 core 4 thread cpu with 3.1ghz base and a 6mb cache. Way more than stock celeron which is an embarrassing cpu for something at this price point, then again the console was designed years ago and they had to work with a now outdated motherboard and outdated socket cpu, but still. i7 he went with used is 89 at the cheapest and the i3-9100t just made more sense to me for $30. Zero issues with anything I've thrown at it. Celeron it came with is laughable.
I'm more surprised that it only has 2GB of DDR4 RAM. Unlike the processor, that is soldered on and you can't upgrade it. There are cheap laptops made for schools that have twice as much RAM.
I was onboard with the Polymega when it was announced in 2017 as the RetroBlox. 1 console to play all your carts. However it going over to software emulation and being damn expensive I quickly lost interest. In that time I have built myself a nice system collection with switchers that I couldn't be happier with!
They shipped your system with a celeron?! Even a Pentium Gold would have been more understandable, but this is low.
I believe the older consoles came with a Pentium gold. Intel probably stopped manufacturing them, so the Polymega people didn't have much choice.
Well they did as this video proves!@@Aki_Lesbrinco
Going from 2 cores at 1.8GHz to 6 cores at 4.7GHz will definitely do the trick on anything CPU-limited.
Have you ever thought of doing an input/audio latency comparison with MiSTer? Every time I see those it's against a Raspberry Pi unit, but I'm curious as to how much closer to "realtime" an i7 based PC or that Polymega would be.
BIG difference when you swapped out that CPU! It was unplayable as it came! I didn't get that much stuttering on an old $100 Anbernic RG351P! Yeah, games ran at 25-30 fps but there was no pausing.
Hmm. Still seeing some of the video stutters, but it definitely cleared up the audio ones. And there's LESS of the video stutters, at least. Definitely worth the upgrade for anyone who was suckered into buying one of these.
I did the same i7 upgrade. N64 is near perfect now. It seems that performance across the board improved. The Polymega is a great console since it is region free.
After all that the 64 still looks grainy as hell. I really wish they could of upped the resolution to 720p.
Kinda figured it was CPU related even without knowing what hardware was running inside the polymega. It became obvious when you said the game played a little better after a reload using the original celeron CPU. The CPU already had enough of the game cached to improve performance but the Celeron cache at 2MB is too small, and not enough cores (Dual core).
The 8700T has 6x the cache and 3x the cores. No surprise here but unfortunate for anyone who buys this and then has to spend more money to attain desired performance.
I’d be curious if the i3 played just as well.
Yeah I saw a guy in Japan use the i3 and it seemed to perform just as well with N64.
It would have. It probably only needed a slight boost in CPU Processing to get rid of the stutter. A Pentium Gold Dual Core/ 4-thread chip probably do it at A third of the cost of a Core i7.
A Core i3 or Core i5 would be fine - These are big upgrades over the Celeron
@@Madlittlepixel nice. Thanks for the video.
@@albey1816 the two core/four threaded pentium you’re suggesting is likely the bare minimum to get smooth performance out of the polymega N64/SNES. Still kinda crap considering all the money you pay. Polymega probably got a nice volume deal to use this CPU, which probably allowed them to squeeze some more margin per unit.
I'm just ready for the Analogue 3D.
Whats crazy is we were playing near perfect N64 emulation in the early 2000's on Pentium 3 cpu's and SNES with Pentium 1 cpu's. I remember in 99 having a older laptop with a P 233 mmx cpu in it and playing SNES games on it just fine.
They played fine. Near perfect though, not so much.
Thank you Ron. You are on the tender side.
Looking at the stack of modules, I can't help but thinking it would be cool if someone made a uniform, stackable enclosure for the different systems. Just like the (old) stereo racks. Fit in the consoles OG motherboard (or an FPGA version), add a cartridge slot for each system, and you would have a very slick looking retro setup.
That white square of static you are talking about is momentarially visible at timestamp 8:31 ~ 8:32 in the video, if you look closely towards the bottom right of the screen.
It’s cool you can upgrade the cpu in the console
Thank you for the updated review, but I'm going to wait until Analogue comes out wit their version. I've been happy overall with Analogue's products.
Great video and discovery! I wonder what would happen if they released a firmware update. Hoping it won't brick any modded systems out there...
That a good thing you upgraded the processor for better performance
The OG jungle green with EON adapter. Never happier!
Eon is a joke. Hahaha
hey at least you got your polymega!
Makes a big diff! Sad you had to do that! Cool that you did though!
Crazy thing is, I remember emulating N64 around 1998-99 on my Voodoo 2 and it being pretty good, aside from occasional audio issues. How are devices still struggling with this, especially at this price point?
I feel like this wouldn't have been as big of an issue had Polymega adopted FPGA technology.
If you're at the point of putting an i7 inside your emulation box, you might as well just run a long hdmi cable from your pc and skip the box.
I remember seeing these audio and fps stutters in the past with other emus on a normal PC and in this case it was because the power profile (cpu, gpu) was set to balanced or on-demand. Switching the gpu/cpu into high / max performance all the time solved this issue. The cpu/gpu have to be on fixed and maximum clocks all the time because it doesn't clock up fast enough in balanced mode and it will also clock down randomly, which will then cause the stutters. Normally things like pstate etc. would make this a non issue, but I have still seen it happen even with the best on-demand cpu/gpu power profile. No idea how this Polymega works, or if it even offers an option to adjust these things, so this is just a thought as this helped fix it on a normal PC for me. On my PC you can turn off all power saving options via the bios (i7 cpu), but you can usually also do this via the OS.
The Polymega has very limited options. You have no OS level or BIOS level options available. Just what the front end offers, and none of that is performance based really... just basic display options type of thing.
@@Madlittlepixel What it the os based on? Is it Linux?
@@Alexander-ix2jp im not sure, but id imagine linux. I just havent found a way to access anything and the bit of research ive done havent found anyone who has either.. but maybe there is a way and I missed it.
I was really excited when they first planned this as fpga format. Good thing i didn't reserve it. Oh well.
100% with you on the fact that your current saves on your cartridges SHOULD be automatically transferred to the console once inserted. If the Retron 5 can do it, this can do it and it should have been a DAY ONE thing. It's basically preventing me from playing anything right now on my Polymega if hopes they come up with an update soon which I heard they were working on. We shall see.
A lot of people have had Polymega on order for years and can't get them because of a dispute between Playmaji and the distributor in Germany.
It's all the more annoying because they said they have honoured all the UK/Europe orders.
Crazy!
Still not sure why they aren't just using Ryzen APU chips for these guys. It would be less expensive with better performance.
ya, no
Can you upscale N64 games on the polymega to make the image look better? Are there any settings to make the image look as good as we see on PCs with recent emulators?
It is essentially a PC, so Polymega should provide this option if they don’t already.
These picture quality looks terrible. For the price, I would think it has similar power to the Odin 2 or at least RP 4 Pro.
Actually, I think this is a realistic solution.
This upgrade is also popular among PolyMega users in Japan, as Celeron will cause processing lag in some Sega Saturn shooting games as well as N64.
I'd get the Analogue 3D instead
Definitely looking forward to the 3D... but also looking forward to it being delayed lol... and having issues when it launches... but still looking forward to it... hoping for the best lol.
Anologue 3d will be like $1000 lmao
@@KevinFoughtlol what, no it won't.
@ought - No way, i would say $299~$399 USD
They should just sell a box that has all the cartrage sockets and a DVD drive that connect to a computer via USB and you basically use your own hard ware and they provide you with the console operating system you can install.
Pretty Damn Cool... But, also kinda sad that the MLP had to show these mofo's how to do it... Crazy...
Make the thing right the first time...
For the money the performance of absolutely everything should be basically flawless. You could literally buy a OSSC and every console for around the same price and you wouldn't have performance issues. At least not ones that the original console didn't have
It came with a celeron...yikes. yeah that i7 is a huge cpu boost and emulation is pretty cpu dependent. Cool stuff MLP!
In my opinion if the polymega was priced better with decent cpu .it would be more demand
OMFG, Celeron was inside?! Wtf Polymega
They should sell a device with every controller port and every game cart port and sell that, bonus points if they can sell it in someway that someone might be able to easily take it a part and added it to say, a pc case if you were willing to get your hands dirty. Then along with it you can get their software for free therefore people can use their own software or use their software. This project was always pretty unappealing to me as paying frankly insane prices to emulate was pretty unappealing but some people will like being able to easily use real controllers and their own games. But they have to find a way bring the price down.
Unacceptable for how much this costs. Thankfully MiSTer is giving me the N64 fix I need, You also get better emulation of N64 on a RPi 5 in RetroArch/Batocera
The processor (i7) upgrade is a very good one because of hyperthreading cores available and the integrated GPU. I think this device is too expensive because you have to upgrade the processor to get better performance. The original processor is not a good one at all. Thank you for the review of internals of this device, again way too expensive.
this is a big upgrade! from 2C/2T to 6C/12T, its a shame that this system is so underpowerd, it's so expensive for the performance! my phone can run n64 without a problem
That is pretty cool after the upgrade.
Will it work perfectly with the intel core i9 processor and possibly have better gameplay too?
I want to see it pushed to max
Now that is waaaayyy better !
Its crazy to think what you pay for a Polyimega and all thats under the hood is an outdated Celeron processor.
Has this f'n thing ever consistently shipped? I canceled my preorder after waiting forever for them to ship it, should I just wait for Analogue's 3D FPGA? The only thing I wanted this for was to play Saturn games...
I wanted the thing for Sega Saturn too. I cancelled my preorder years ago and just built an itx pc with a bunch of emulators and called it a day. I'm still hopeful that Analogue will release an FPGA Saturn console in the future.
The G4900T is a 2 core 2 thread weakling that is best used in a office thin client terminals not as a emulation machine. If they were needing to go cheap they could have gone with a AMD Athlon PRO 300GE with a Vega iGPU. At least the 4 threads & Vega GPU would have worked far better. Anyway at least you can upgrade the CPU though for those that don't want to spend $80-$100+ on the i7-8700T a i5-8600T/8500T can be half the cost with it only being a tad slower due to it being 6c 6t instead of 6c 12t like the 8700T. For emulating the N64 it'll still be just as good (best to have at least 4 cores, or more if your using UHD graphics).
You could also get a lot of mileage from emulation via Batocera if you were to use an HP Elite Desk G4 with an Intel i5 CPU and higher or a 705 G5 with a Ryzen 3200GE APU or 3400G if you got the 65W model. These mini PC's choke on 360 and PS3 but all of them will perform great with a decent chunk of Wii U games but mostly excels at PS2 and lower. I've even used an older 800 G2 mini with an Intel i7 6700T and it absolutely chewed through anything lower than og Xbox.
Ok so after watching this i will never own one of these. The N64 emulation is horrible. I think if you want good looking N64 you’ll just have to go with an hdmi mod.
THANK YOU for making this review! I was just about to pull the trigger on this for SEGA CD. Do you know if anyone make a good SEGA CD clone that takes original disks?
Pretty much limited to this. But you could also load them on your computer with an emulator
Damn ... Can't unsee this, need to spend extra cash for that CPU upgrade 😢 Playmaji ? Why ?!
First, they should've used and AMD APU, second, I can't believe the OS isn't available online and modified to accept ROMs/ISOs yet as installing this on a mini PC or used HP/Dell office PC would be awesome.
Loving the Polymega experience so far, haven't used the N64 aspect yet, but every other console experience has been bang on.
I can't believe they put in a Celeron CPU in a $500 system. That is only a dual core CPU rated at 2.8ghz with Intel graphics 610. For example what you put in as a 6c/12t CPU with better integrated graphics. If Polymega is using some kind of Linux OS as their system. A dual core CPU will be stressed just on that. Honestly a Dell Mini PC with the i7 you put in is maybe $200 on eBay and will emulate everything better out of the box.
Consumers don't know no better. It's exactly like TV stations. You can get all the channels free from servers. The companies got those stations for free and charge you $200 for cable. Lack of knowledge you will always pay.
The only thing the Polymega has going for it is the nice UI
Being able to rip your games to the system is also a big plus. Still not enough for me to get one. I'll stick with original and analogue hardware.
Most of the terrible sttrering was gone after the CPU swap. The original CPu was definitely struggling.
i never knew this was a mini pc
Doesn't it make more sense to just go get a Steamdeck that can emulate all these systems for much cheaper?
Still waiting for mine after I purchased it in June 2023.
To me, it seems like a firmware update could also resolve the poor performance issues. Needing to upgrade the CPU for consoles that are so old, seems overkill. I could be wrong, but surely the N64 uses nothing like the power of the included Celeron CPU.
You’re doing great.
I swear these were originally meant to ship with an amd cpu unless im thinking of another system.
I’m sorry if you have to pay for an additional cpu and install it yourself for you to correctly emulate an already expensive overpriced emulation box, that is a massive fail. For the purposes of experimenting and proving it helps I give you props
Im so glad I didn't pick a polymega up...lets see what analogue do with their N64...great video though.
Why not 9700t instead of 8700t for an upgrade? Both are Socket 1151
Thank you 🙏
Considering the price of old games im not sure this unit is worth buying. If old games sold for the prices they used to i would buy one because i love 16 bit games
That issues on the SNES has never showed on mine.
Celeron G4900T, absolute trash. A cheap mini PC will give better performance out of the box, heck you could buy a high-end mini PC for the price.
In defence of Polymega, no one thought N64 cores would mature this much in such a short span of time for FPGA hardware. It is still poor that they skimped out on processing power for what should be a premium product.
Meanwhile, the MiSTer has wonderful N64 support. ;)
Have you updated to new firmware and does this work with it.
Wow, huge difference
This thing is literally more expensive than of one of those micro PCs that are powerful enough to emulate PS3 and WiiU games...and that's BEFORE you buy any of the modules you'll need to play all of your games. I get that if you have a big library of physical games, this allows you to plug those in, and it can be fun to plug in carts and insert discs...but it isn't running those games the same way that OG hardware or FPGA clones do. It's just dumping the roms and running them in a software emulation layer. This thing is a glorified Retron 5 that costs 5 times as much...again...before you even buy any cartridge modules.
I think I7 is way overkill for n64. I had a pentium 4 20 some years ago and that ran n64 upscalled to 1920x1200 just fine. I did have some hikups on my xperia play 14 years ago but, other than that, N64 always ran fine on pretty much any thing, that did not come down to emulation issues atleast.
Did you put thermal grease on the fan and the cpu or just the cpu and does the thermal grease kit come with a way to get off the old grease
Most PS1 and Snes games have a 1 second delay when you press a button. Will changing the CPU fix this issue as well?
Nope unfortunately
@@cooparchive7857 What an unfinished piece of junk. Thank man for the reply
So let me analyse this... you bougth a PolyMega a bunch of crap, you bought special adapters another bunch of crap, and you need to pay again to play N64 ? ... this is crazy !!!
By the way, NeoGeo CD is playable on this device ??? cause this should be a goo reason to take one for me :)
Yeah, nothing beats playing the N64 via quality s-video cables on a CRT. But I know I’m crazy 🤷♂️
Funny how quickly the Mister FPGA tech has already surpassed this.
I’m not trusting this company, much. On their website they say their OS is a Linux-based Proprietary operating system. How is that possible? I thought using GPL software made it impossible to make your project proprietary?
Maybe I’m misunderstanding something?
Yeah, you're right. I guess they goofed and meant to say FreeBSD-based instead? That's my guess.
is the RAM socketed? it only has 2GB apparently. that's probably more limiting than that CPU.
If you have some carts then its probably worth it. If they added the Atari 2600 as an option then I would probably get one.
Imo, I like the idea of the Polymega, but I want to see this exact same idea done as an FPGA-Based System Rather than an Emulation Box.
The Sega Tower of Power is back!! Look at all those ridiculous module's
Hi, thanks for your video. I left the Polymega off for about 1 month and now that I've turned it back on, it no longer transmits the video signal. when I press the power button, it starts up as if everything were normal, the TV detects the HDMI signal, but I don't see the console screen. I wrote to support but they will reply who knows when. in the meantime, do you think I could also solve the problem by replacing the CPU? Thanks again!🖖🏻
are there any graphical glitches? I know a lot of n64 games have a lot of them on pc emus
and such
It appears to be using a near perfect accuracy graphics plugin by default. Either Angrylion or ParaLLEl-RDP. You can easily tell by the anti-aliasing that N64 games tended to have being reflected here.
So any potential graphical issues are very rare to nonexistent, but the video output is usually limited to the N64's original render resolution for that game. The problem is if they ARE using Angrylion, that plugin places the burden of rendering the graphics ENTIRELY on the CPU, which is a big reason why the stutters are likely happening.
ah I see makes sense thanks@@DarkBowser64
Can you use any Intel SR3WX Core i7-8700T Computer Processor? Do pins matter?
that cpu is significantly faster than the stock one
Any fan issues after upgrading the cpu?
Pretty nuts charging ps5 price for a sega saturn and ps1 emulator
I'm shocked, shocked I tell ye, that Polymega used a cheaper CPU to get this to market. Shocked.