it's retro no it's not not today anyway
8bitdo is known for their retro
controllers or retro style controllers
but these are a little bit different
they're more contemporary kind of like
the
xbox controller here and this is kind of
the yardstick i'm going to use to
measure them
so these are the pro 2 controllers what
are pro twos like the pros
were controllers that had the handles
and the sticks
along with the kind of retro style
aesthetic while the pro twos
well looking at it i i don't really see
much of a difference
so let's see what they have to say about
themselves not a whole lot on the back
here it just says that it
supports the switch version 1.0 and
above for the i guess the traditional
switch it's the firmware
and 9.0 and above for the switch light
windows
android mac os steam i mean
if it works with the operating system
why would it not work with steam at
raspberry pi as well with bluetooth 2.0
and above
interesting so i can't imagine the
bluetooth 2.0
experience would be very good but i
don't have a pie handy to test that with
yeah not a whole lot else going on in
the box so i guess it's time to take it
out
i am a bit of a fan of 8-bit dose
packaging okay
that is kind kinda neat looking but i do
not like the plastic
it needs to all be cardboard be
environmentally friendly
first of all i feel like they've changed
the shape of the grips
they were basically like circular before
like just
basically you're holding onto cones
whereas now they're
a little bit more triangular prismy
shaped sort of
it's kind of weird to describe but it's
it's
better it feels better in the hand
analog triggers
yeah that's something that 8bitdo hasn't
had i don't think the pro
original pro controllers had them uh you
can correct me if i'm wrong
that is huge and also i'm noticing i'm
pressing these little pedals
on the back here yeah it's got grip
triggers as well which i think you can
program
to be separate functions like i'm not
sure if they can be macros or what
but yeah that's kind of cool sticks
they feel all right i have grown
very accustomed to having the sticks in
this position
which i mean at first i didn't like it
because i was used to the playstation
but now i'm not and this
no longer is all that comfortable to me
but your mileage may vary
there's another thing that i noticed on
the back here that is not on the pro
as well the original pro and that is a
battery door
yeah it's got a built-in battery that
can be taken out
and you can just replace it with uh
double a's
how about that yeah so you don't have to
worry about your 8-bit doe controller
dying over time and you had to use it
wired all the time capacity
is a thousand milliamp hours uh i don't
know what the battery life is though
twenty play hours of four hours of
charging time yeah that's about right i
guess
obviously i was putting it in wrong
before i guess it goes in
contacts first and then it yeah slips
down like that
neat because yeah you can't remove the
battery at least not easily
from other 8bitdo controllers that i've
used
or the playstation 5 controller
microsoft's been pretty good about that
over the years
yeah i'm not a fanboy or anything like i
run linux but their controller is just
nice so let's put this aside for now and
go through the rest of the box
there's not a lot in here you get uh
usb type c i believe yes usb type c
charging cable which uh yeah it's type c
to a
and it is wired for data but usb 2.0
only
which is fine for a controller but don't
use it to plug in a usb
ssd or something and also we have the
instruction manual
and is this also plastic feels like it's
plastic and it's glued in
i mean it's fine i guess
i'm i'm not sure what aspect ratio you
would call this
cvs receipt yeah cvs receipt yeah there
you go and on the back
we've got a mode switch that is
interesting because before you had to
hold down a face button while turning on
the controller to change different modes
which is super confusing and i to this
day do not remember how all of them work
they say that they don't support hd
rumble ir camera of course they don't
notification led or anything like that
nor can the system be woken up
wirelessly
really does nintendo not wirelessly turn
on the
switch when you turn on a controller i
thought the switch pro controller did
that
i think it does yeah that sucks
good thing i'm not using it on the
switch but before i use it on anything
else i need to talk to you about
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okay that looks cool we've got
profiles that we can set up here that's
what the profile button is all about
uh i think technically they could
display
as many as six profiles with these leds
but you only get three
so it's not the most intuitive interface
in the world
in order to map everything you've got
your controller map here you would think
that you'd like click on
something and it would like give you an
option
but no over here is what you're looking
at so l2 goes to left trigger
you can assign that to whatever you want
same with l up down left right
so you can literally modify any
anything you want here so let's see can
i do turbo from here i know there's a
turbo setting you can do
separately so let's say i want y oh
no no you can't do that okay
that's a little unfortunate but not a
big deal i mean
once you change something you just click
sync to controller and it syncs and then
please turn off the software after
customization in order
for the controller to return to its
required mode for playing games on usb
what i don't understand what it's
telling me i guess it means quit the
software
uh press to load profile okay cool so
let's go back to what it was
and it actually shows thankfully it
shows the default
with a little dot here regardless as to
what you have it set to so if i have it
set to x
for the x button it still has y as where
it
should be and it is it's currently saved
as the x button
so if i set it to y sync it again there
you go
that's helpful let's see the sticks
it's not the highest resolution thing in
the world
it's kind of skipping over a bunch of
steps so we can adjust the dead zone
i don't know why this says zero here it
should be adjusting to show me a
number so i can get like the actual
percentage i want uh again that's kind
of interface fail but
it's nice to be able to adjust these
things so with the
dead zone set like this i can go this
far
actually without actuating anything and
then we go out to here and it's 100
we can also set it so that the actual
active area
is much smaller so you get 100 much
sooner
that is kind of cool what that allows
you to do is make it so that you don't
have to flick
quite so far in order to get to 100 of
your
motion so if you're playing a
driving game and you are well insane
you can make it so that 100 is
pretty much instantaneous that's kind of
cool you can invert your sticks here
along both axes that's interesting
you can swap the sticks so for games
that for whatever reason
have movement on the right stick you can
swap them the triggers
so these have the same kind of range of
motion adjustment
now it's not going to actually change
the range of motion of the controller
itself
it's still going to go the whole way but
i can make it so the left trigger's full
actuation
is like right there so basically giving
you a hair trigger i can make it even
shorter
so it's got two vibration motors so the
right motor is obviously the fine motor
and the left motor is the chorus motor
and i guess yeah you can adjust how
powerful you want your
rumble to be so you can actually set it
to zero if you don't like it like
some people i know do you can set it for
five which is the highest possible so
you have the biggest range of
vibration yeah that's actually a really
cool feature because not all games let
you change
the strength of the intensity of the
rumble and finally we have the macros
here
so macros hmm how do we make one
okay so down down forward
forward and um let's say
why yeah so that'll now do uh
basically immediately so i don't see a
way to even
so much as tests the motion capabilities
of this controller
but it looks like the switch mode
is required for it so nintendo switch
mode it emulates a pro controller
and interestingly in switch mode it has
a fairly deep
dead zone of like it says it's like 25
but it feels more like okay maybe it is
25 so yeah i'm just gonna go ahead and
not do that there we go now i've got the
full range of motion on that
yeah that should be just about right so
switch mode in case you didn't know
should work
perfectly fine with steam with retroarch
with
a number of things that actually support
it steam should work with gyro aiming
with flick stick
i haven't tried it yet and i may not
because we're currently signed in as
david and i don't know if he wants me to
kill his
kdr in cs go or whatever
so um let's play to this thing's
strengths
and play some retro games feels solid
actually like i was using those retro
handhelds before
they had uh you know a fair amount of
input lag at least by default you can
set them up for
much better input lag configurations
if you put the part like the time into
it i feel like
that's probably part of why this feels
so good but like this is bluetooth
you wouldn't normally expect bluetooth
controllers particularly on windows
to be quite so good okay so that d-pad
is
very responsive all of the buttons are
very responsive actually
there's a nice snap to them i don't
normally really
like that but for a membrane controller
like this there's a rubber membrane
underneath these uh these buttons
it's pretty good like it feels good it
feels
right to me now linus who grew up as a
nintendo kid
and you know is entirely in love with
the super nintendo controller will
probably have plenty of things to say
about this
but uh you know for me i actually
kind of like it it's comfortable you've
got the handles
and you do have these sort of grip
buttons
they're okay how do we put this
those grip buttons can be used yes for
turbo and
yes for like holding down buttons stuff
like that which is great
but there's no reason why you couldn't
have set up any of the other buttons for
that as well
it's just not exposed in the software so
we're looking at the software here now i
can assign any button to any button
that's that's the thing i can do
but only on these extra buttons like the
uh the star button
or these trigger buttons can i do
turbo or hold or swap or any other
special function i guess those are the
only three
that seems really arbitrary to me there
might be times that i want to have
the y button here set to the b button
and the b button here set to the a
button
but there might also be times where i
want like this
and then these to be turbo and like
being able to select between profiles
like that on the controller without
having to go through the emulator
would be a lot easier to me
with that being said maybe i can set it
up so that when i'm holding down these
switches
those changes are made but it seems a
little clunkier than it really should be
now linus just walked into the building
and i'm sure i could find something that
would make him
upset about it is it cool yeah it's cool
enough
that's all right it's kind of trying to
be a snes
and a ps1 controller
and it's sort of neither yeah how's
input lag over bluetooth
okay i swear like not all my bees were
going through hmm
come on one up i need more water oops no
that's not a one-up that's the opposite
of a one-up
wired wire so there you go like i don't
like everything that 8-bit doe does
their original pro controllers they
didn't really wow me in the same way
like i was like oh yeah
finally a retro style controller with
handles that i can kind of hold and
you know it just didn't really do much
else other than have the handles
compared to the sn30 so with that in
mind this feels like a lot more
of a mature product it's got a lot more
features to it it's got the rumble it's
got the 6x controls it's got the
removable battery
it's got usb type-c it's got switch
pairing mode it's got
pretty much everything you can want it's
programmable
and yeah i mean how much is it like 50
bucks
not in stock but yeah 49.99 it gets you
a very competent controller that feels
right
for retro games these sticks aren't
going to blow you away
they feel fine they're perfectly
serviceable
but they're certainly not on the level
of the
xbox series controllers nor the
dual sense or even the dual shocks but
that's not what these sticks are for
these sticks are
there for more of a general purpose kind
of thing
it's for your playstation 1 games your
n64 games basically for games that are
going to be you know old enough that
the sticks that were on the original
consoles weren't all that great
but these are better they're not amazing
and
that's kind of what this controller is
all about it's bringing back that
feel of the classic controllers but
better
is it worth the 50 i would say so i
would say that if you're into retro
gaming at all
yeah you could do way worse than getting
an 8-bit dough controller especially
one like this well thanks for putting up
with another
retro short circuit get subscribed so
you get to see
more like this one or not like this one
if this wasn't your gem
and i'll see you soon