- Pocket size game consoles
have been around for a long time, but you've always
given something up for the privilege:
bad screens, compromised game playing controls,
juggling game cartridges.
What if there were a way around all that?
Let's enter the world of unofficial handhelds
that actually promise a good pocket gaming experience,
and if you're after a good toolkit experience,
iFixit has just the right thing for you.
Learn more about the Manta Toolkit and its 112 steel bits
with two premium drivers at the end of the video.
(funky music)
When you think gaming handhelds, depending on your age,
you might think of Nintendo or Sony or SEGA,
probably in that order.
You know, big companies from Japan.
The first mental image you probably have of anything else
is something like what SouljaBoy
was passing off as his own designs, and yet these devices
came from a different country entirely.
None of them came from Japan,
and each has a different design and gameplay philosophy.
At their core, they all share one common trait:
they're designed for running retro console emulators,
but that's not all they are.
They're fully functional computers built around
Arm processors running Linux or Android.
The Anbernic RG351M is easily
the most premium feeling of the three,
with a solid aluminum enclosure, twin USB-C ports,
and premium feeling sticks and buttons.
The Retroid Pocket 2 is a much lighter unit
with a larger four by three display,
more ergonomic shoulder buttons, and a micro HDMI output.
Finally, the ODROID-GO Super has a massive screen,
full size USB Type A port,
and a static GPIO header?
Yeah, it is.
(Saw voice) So, let's play a game.
Without looking any of these up, where did they come from?
One of them is from South Korea,
and the other two are from China.
I'll tell you which at the end of the video.
Let's start off with the Anbernic RG351M.
This is a really chunky unit.
It's a unibody aluminum enclosure.
It's got twin USB Type C ports on the top,
one for charging and one for peripherals,
although you can use the charging one
for peripherals as well
The headphone jack.
On the bottom, we've got a reset button,
a micro SD card slot, which they label TF,
because of course they do.
It's for trans flash.
On the right-hand side, we've got this volume wheel,
and the placement is really unfortunate.
This is where your hand's gonna go
when you're playing games.
Maybe you're on a bus or something and you hit a bump.
It's just gonna either blast you
with something out of your headphones,
or it's gonna blast the entire area around you with noise.
On the front, we've got our D pad.
Feels all right, it's a little stiff.
The sticks here, they feel pretty good.
They're rubberized, and they click in.
Mmm, nice.
And we've got our four face buttons, start, and select.
On the top, we've got those USB Type C ports again,
but we also have two L and R buttons.
They're staggered this way instead of vertically,
so it's a little awkward to get to.
Then around back, all you've got are four hex screws,
which can be opened with a number four hex screw
on an iFixit kit, or an Allen key.
And we've got these two actually rather nice
little rubber pads.
They don't look like they do much, but
they do much.
All right, let's turn it on.
This is running 351ELEC.
It's actually a version of EmuELEC
that is specifically designed or specifically modified
for this system and its plastic version,
and they all share the same hardware under the hood.
In this case, it's a RockChip 3326 SOC,
that's a quad core with a Mali-G31 MP2 GPU
for those of you who actually care.
Now, this came with a number of games
preloaded, which is not necessarily
the most legal thing in the world,
but you know what, we'll go with it.
The interface is basically the same as what you would get
on a Raspberry PI running EmulationStation,
and that's because it mostly is, it's just there's not
a whole lot of operating system happening underneath.
You can set game settings globally or by game,
so right now we've got the game ratio,
the aspect ratio of the screen, set to be core provided,
so it'll change depending on which system you're running,
and we've got the scaling set to sharp by linear,
which I'm sure Taryn will appreciate.
It looks the best on these low resolution screens
as far as I'm concerned.
Speaking of the screen, it's 480 by 320 pixels,
and that's a two by three ratio.
That means your scaling is not going to be clean
for 240p games, so that sharp by linear filter
will come in handy.
However, what this 480 pixel width
is perfect for is PSP games.
That's a one-to-one scale
with a little bit of letter boxing.
It's a good compromise.
It's not the most loud thing in the world.
This is 100% volume.
You're probably gonna want headphones.
Input lag by default is usually pretty bad here,
and this is common across all these consoles.
You're going to need to set up your emulator
in order to get the best possible results from it.
Usually that means setting up hard GPU sync
and setting up run ahead.
That'll get you a little bit better of an experience.
It's still got some input lag, but for the most part is
pretty much fine.
Input lag will be a little bit worse with net play.
Yeah, this thing has WiFi built in.
It can actually either connect to other Anbernic devices
that have wifi, or it can connect to Retroids with WiFi,
or it can also connect to, theoretically,
a PC or a Raspberry Pi running RetroArch
'cause that's what's behind all of this here.
You press these two buttons in and you get RetroArch.
Unfortunately, not all cores support net play.
Your mileage may vary, but it's a pretty cool feature
that honestly is something that I would have loved
to have as a kid.
And that's not to say that all it can do
is 16 bit games like Super Nintendo.
This will actually run N64 games, PlayStation games,
and I mean, depending on your definition of run,
they'll run Dreamcast games as well.
Although those will run at about half speed.
It might be okay for some games, but the console's library
is primarily made up of faster paced games
so it's not that great, but I mean, that is asking a lot.
Unfortunately, and this may or may not be a deal breaker
for you, the USB Type C ports cannot be used
for display output, only for peripherals and charging.
There's no way of getting capture off of this.
That's why we're recording with a second camera.
Now let's take a look at the Retroid Pocket 2.
This handheld is significantly more plastic.
In fact, it's all plastic except for the screen,
which is tempered glass.
It's got a different kind of feel to it.
The face buttons are all micro switches,
including the D pad, not something I'm a huge fan of.
However, it does have staggered L and R switches,
which is much more ergonomic in my opinion.
This actually feels really nice in the hand.
We've got a micro HDMI output here.
That is gonna rub some people the wrong way,
but it's the only one here that has any kind of display out,
but it does do USB Type C charging,
and I believe this also supports peripherals as well.
This is a traditional type stick.
I don't know why, but this is just a slider.
- [Brandon] It's like the 3DS.
- Yeah, it's like the 3DS.
It doesn't feel great.
It kind of, like hitches a little bit, and also
it kind of turns a lot more than you might expect.
Nothing on the sides, and on the bottom,
we've got a headphone jack and a micro SD card slot,
which is held in by this nice rubber grommet.
Under the hood, this thing runs a Mediatek MT6580A.
Still a quad core SOC, but the GPU is much weaker
than the RockChip, and so is the CPU.
It's just slower across the board.
Is that going to hold it back, though?
Maybe, maybe not.
Let's power it on.
And you'll probably notice the display is a four by three.
It's actually 640 by 480, so this makes
most scaling completely straightforward.
Everything, pretty much will scale up to that no problem.
However, I still recommend the sharp by linear scaler
because any NES and SNES titles, those run
at a weird resolution, 256 by 224.
It takes a minute to boot.
There's a reason for that though.
It runs Android.
Yeah, this is Android 6 with the Play Store included.
It is upgradable to 8.1 if you wanna do that,
but you probably don't wanna do that.
One of the things about this is that you can change
the controls to either emulate a mouse, a touch input,
or a game pad, and that might seem like a great idea,
but in reality, it's not so good because you kind of need
it to navigate throughout the operating system.
There are some things that you just cannot do
with the game pad alone, and there are some things,
like gaming, that you cannot do with the mouse alone.
There's a few things preloaded on here.
None of them are pirated, so that's a big plus in its favor
if you prefer not to pirate your games.
There is a game that Nintendo did take down though: AM2R.
Unfortunately, Nintendo completely nuked that from orbit,
but it's here.
It also includes Flycast, which is a Dreamcast emulator,
ClassicBoy, a GameBoy emulator, N64 emulator, PSP emulator,
and of course, RetroArch.
It also has Moonlight,
which is a Nvidia Shields kind of emulator,
so you can cast to this device, as well as Steam Link.
I don't know if you want to do that.
Do you want to play your games in SD at four by three?
Probably not, but the option is there if you really want to.
The star of the show is of course RetroArch,
just like before.
Unfortunately, because this runs Android,
none of it feels very cohesive.
In order to load content, you need to go through
your SD card and kind of just manually pick it all out.
It's more versatile than you would think,
but at the same time, because it has Android,
it's a lot clunkier than you would expect and hope.
There is one thing that kind of redeems it.
There's an icon here for what's called Retroid.
Hit that, reboot to Retroid Pocket Operating System,
yeah, let's do it.
It's like an older version of Android.
I think it must be Ice Cream Sandwich or something.
It has the hollow UI, but it's running a custom launcher,
and presumably, it has very few background tasks running,
so it's similar in spirit to what you got on the Anbernic.
Unfortunately, as you might see here,
we don't have any games installed.
That's because it actually uses a weird folder layout
that is different from the folder layout
that you would normally be using
so you kind of have to choose
whether you want to use it in Retroid pocket mode,
like this, or in Android mode, like before.
The problem with Android mode, of course,
is that if you've got WiFi connected, Google Play is gonna
do stuff in the background, and there's just gonna be
all kinds of things that'll
make your experience less good.
Oh yeah, and the screen is not a touch screen,
and these sticks do not click in.
That'll also make your experience a little less good.
And considering that it runs Android and none of it's
pre-customized, it means you have to set up
all your emulators, all the settings for them
pretty much as soon as you get the machine.
You can't quite just plug and play it.
Some things will work like that,
but for the best experience,
you should actually set all your emulators up.
They agree.
Overall though, it's pretty solid
once you get it all set up.
I mean, it can do a lot of the things
that the Anbernic can do.
It can play N64 games and it's not much of an issue,
but it just takes a little bit more doing,
which is where the ODROID-GO Super comes in.
If the Anbernic was a chonker, this is significantly larger,
although it's not quite as heavy, I don't think,
because it's made of plastic.
It's kind of like a Switch Lite, except the analog sticks
are hanging out down at the bottom,
and those analog sticks, unfortunately, they rock okay,
they're kind of smooth, but the sticks themselves,
they're hard plastic with a sharp edge.
They dig into your finger.
They're not pleasant to use.
The rest of the buttons feel okay,
with the D pad being a little mushy.
It's kinda weird to feel a diagonal like that,
it feels like nothing's moving, but yeah,
these are all membrane buttons,
these are tactile switches,
these are just rubber,
and these shoulder buttons on the top,
those are tactile as well.
Also on the top, we've got volume controls,
kinda weird spot for them.
You can't really, there's no way to get at them
during gameplay, so that's a bit of an issue.
And we've also got a USB Type C,
which is for charging only as far as I know,
as well as a full size USB Type A.
That is interesting.
What's even more interesting is this.
Yeah, those are GPIO pins.
This is actually based on the ODROID Single Board Computer.
It's like a Rapsberry Pi, it's just,
they've got the RockChip.
Down on bottom, we've just got a micro SD card slot.
I'm just gonna steal the one out of the Retroid.
On the back, we got a rather large vent here.
There's no fan, and I can't see heat sinks either,
so it's kind of weird that that's there,
and there's the speaker.
The first thing you'll notice when we power this thing on
is it's got a 16 by 9 screen.
It's a five inch screen, think a 480p wide, so 854 by 480.
It's pretty bright, it looks great,
but why the oddball resolution?
Well, having a 16 by 9 screen at this resolution means
that you can actually use 16 by 9 games.
So say you've got a widescreen hack for Super Mario World,
or you've got PlayStation Portable games, et cetera,
these'll fill the entire screen.
Then you just need to deal with litter boxing
for other types of games.
If you buy one of these for yourself,
probably the first thing you'll notice when you turn it on
is you don't have an operating system.
That's because it doesn't come with one.
They recommend, or at least they link to Ubuntu Minimal,
which is frankly a terrible experience.
I went and got EmuELEC for this,
just like the Anbernic here.
So it uses a pretty similar interface.
It's a little bit different,
but it has pretty much the same settings.
I don't know what's going on with this theme,
but it's kind of terrifying.
Like all of these things just look wrong.
Under the hood, this thing actually has
the same amount of the power as the Anbernic.
In fact, it's very similar to the Anbernic
in pretty much all aspects, except for the fact that
it's got a little bit of a more plastic build quality to it,
and it's got that larger screen.
This is another scenario where you kind of have to tune
the emulator to get the best performance out of it.
This thing is not gonna be able to play N64 games
with the most quality possible.
You're certainly not gonna upscale them.
It's worth noting that there is
an overclock option in the settings.
They do say that it can cause instability,
and I have seen instability happen.
Your mileage may vary there, but it might get you
that extra little bit towards being perfectly playable.
Get back to the menus, just hit these two buttons here
on the outside, and yeah, look at that.
It's RetroArch again.
Overall, I'd say the ODROID is a hacker friendly,
but a little bit hacky solution.
It's got a lot of buttons, certainly a great concept,
but it's also really no surprise why Anbernic uses
these designs to make a much more polished product.
The only major downside to the ODROID compared to
the rest of these consoles is that in order
to get wireless for multiplayer or any other functionality,
you need to buy an aftermarket adaptor.
Now, they sell it for about $9 on their website,
so it's not a big deal, but it would've been nice
if they could've found a way to include it in the chassis.
It's certainly big enough to do it.
So how did this burgeoning class of devices come to be?
Well it all started with the Game Park GP32 in 2001.
The GP32 was the first of its kind in offering
expandable storage in a commonly available format,
along with official Homebrew support.
This, combined with the relatively powerful for the time
and easy to develop for Arm CPU, led to emulators
and public domain software exploding on the device
and all of its successors.
Ultimately, this was a niche in its day,
and Game Park declared bankruptcy in 2007,
just in time for Homebrew on more mainstream,
but our also still early storage-enabled handhelds,
like the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS to take off.
I actually used to daily carry my PSP as an MP3 player
and a retro console emulator, and my PS Vita
continued that legacy when I got one.
Although, by then my smartphone
had taken over MP3 player duty.
But Nintendo and Sony didn't take kindly to their consoles
being used for what they saw as software piracy
on still active consoles, and they played
a constant game of cat and mouse with exploit developers
and flash cartridge vendors.
Clearly, there's a market for handhelds
with emulation capabilities, so with the broad availability
of mobile CPUs thanks to smartphones
and single board computers like the Raspberry Pi,
and low cost micro SD storage,
why not build your own with that in mind?
The smartphones themselves may be an option
if you really want to, but unless you're still rocking
a PlayStation phone, there will always be
a trade-off between carrying an unwieldy controller
or settling for on-screen controls.
And get subscribed by the way,
because we're going to look at a bunch of weird controllers
that have been released over the years,
and you're probably not gonna want to miss that.
Despite this demand and these consoles stepping up
to fill it, piracy is still the elephant in the room,
and as much as we don't like to admit it,
it almost comes part and parcel with these devices.
None of these handhelds come with a way
to dump your own cartridges, and while there are devices
like the Retrode that do, it's limited in scope
and the costs can add up quickly if you buy attachments,
like the Game Boy or N64, or, oh what were the other ones?
It only does Genesis and SNES out of the box.
CD ROM systems like the PlayStation are easy to deal with
if you've got an optical drive,
but those are among the more difficult games
to get running well, so you're trading
one difficulty for another.
I can't recommend or condone piracy, but Nintendo et al.
don't sell ROMs for you to download legally,
and with Gabe Newell's famous quote in mind,
you can see why it's the option most people go for,
even if it is illegal.
But let's assume that you actually did
back up your own ROMs.
Can I recommend or condone any of these?
Absolutely.
The ORDROID-GO Super from South Korea is $80,
and it gets you a strong CPU.
The Retroid Pocket 2 from China is $80, and gets you
a better feeling controller, a more familiar OS,
and a smaller, more thoughtful form factor.
The Anbernic, also from China, is the most expensive,
but features the most polished design
and comes in metal or plastic,
though the less expensive plastic version
doesn't have WiFi, much like the ODROID.
These are a great, relatively inexpensive way to carry
your retro game collection around in your pocket,
and frankly, I am super glad they exist.
Just like I'm glad that iFixit sponsored this video
because their Manta Kit has 112 steel bits that can
actually open either of these consoles,
comes complete with standard Phillips bits, Flathead,
and also torques, tri-point, and game bits as well.
These don't use game bits, thankfully.
The kit includes not one, but two
aluminum screwdriver handles,
including a hefty quarter-inch drive
for full-size applications and a smaller four millimeter
for precision work, and they both feature
magnetic bit sockets, knurled grips,
and silky smooth spinning tops.
The toolkit's lid doubles as a sorting tray,
just like their iFixit Pro Tech Toolkit
that I have over here, and all the iFixit kits
are backed by a lifetime warranty.
If something breaks, they'll replace it for free.
Visit ifixit.com/LTT and pick up your Manta Kit today.
Thanks for watching, guys.
Go check out a similar video we did a little while ago
on a portable Wii.
It's a good video.
I got to dremmel a Wii motherboard, very satisfying.