- This is going to be somewhat arduous.
For you see,
this video isn't quite about
the Arduboy FX here.
It kind of is
and what we have here is a little credit card sized,
what would you call it?
Almost like a Game Boy
that we actually looked at the earlier version of this
on LTT, "Handy Tech under a 100."
And the problem with that one was
that it could only hold one game.
This adds a little chip here,
which is 16 megabytes of flash
to allow for up to 200 plus games.
I mean obviously, depending on the complexity of the games.
Okay, so we've got instructions.
Yep, and we can download stuff directly to it
using our computer,
but we don't need a computer, unlike the old one.
The old one required you to have a computer
to load new games onto it,
whereas this is a lot more user-friendly.
The idea for this actually came from a mod
that got really popular.
They're actually selling that mod
for I think $20 on the Arduboy store
but, for now
we're looking at the whole unit.
It's got this nice little magnetic USB Micro
to, well it's not even a full sized A,
it's like just the plastic part of the A
which is something I've seen before
but is fairly uncommon.
This means you can actually plug it in upside down
but it won't hurt anything
because there's no pins on that side.
As for this,
it's a nice solid piece of kit.
Now our review or mini review,
capsule review, kind of thing on LTT,
said that the buttons were subjectively awesome
and they misquoted us on the website
as saying, "It's objectively awesome."
They feel pretty good.
They're not the snappy
like Micro Switch buttons
that some things this size have.
They actually feel like, you know,
game controller buttons,
which is actually, objectively pretty good.
(Anthony chuckles)
Subjectively, I feel like I could play with this
but one thing to note is that the D-pad here
is four distinct buttons with no rocker.
So you can actually mash the whole thing all at once.
Could be a good thing or a bad thing
depending on how the game uses those buttons.
This screen here, that is an OLED,
it's got a high resolution in terms of DPI I think,
but it's not a huge number of Ds, you know,
not that many dots.
Powers on instantly.
This is gonna be difficult to film
because it's tiny and reflective.
There you go.
This is like this little semi-3D thing
and in this case we're just trying to get higher and higher.
I think there was a PlayStation One game
that was similar to this in concept,
at least sort of, back when the 3D era of video games
was kind of new,
and yeah, you just fall forever when you fail.
This, as cool as it is
and it has a beeper,
I'm not sure if you can hear it,
I don't know where the volume control is, if there is one.
The only thing that I don't like about this
is that it's got a Micro B slot for power.
Thankfully, they fixed that.
In these
little ESD safe baggies, the Arduino mini.
I don't know how you would even begin to use this.
Well, one thing that you'll notice right away,
aside from it being absolutely tiny,
is that there's no battery.
So I can't turn this on even if I wanted to,
I am told by the developer
that the speaker will actually be populated
on the final product
and there'll be pins like a header for the battery
instead of just these contact points.
Oh, these buttons.
Ooh, these buttons don't feel good though.
The buttons themselves feel like these buttons here,
they have the same kind of feel to them.
They go down,
they don't quite feel like a membrane,
but they also don't quite feel like a clicky switch.
The thing is,
these are the-
like buttons that are underneath
these plastic pieces that are on the buttons here.
So you're just directly pushing on those buttons.
That being said, I mean if you broke one
it's just a matter of desoldering it
and putting another one on
and that's the beauty of the Arduboy
and I mean there's even an Arduboy Nano, out there.
They don't sell it anymore.
I think they actually had it
for a little while in the store.
But it was a community project to shrink this thing down.
And it's even smaller than this,
if you can believe that.
There's a little peel on the screen here
and this is just the bare screen
unlike this where there's like an acrylic kind of overcoat
over shell to protect the whole thing
which I mean I could throw this in my wallet if I wanted to.
It's actually credit card sized.
This is very bare.
In fact, you'd probably want to bring a battery bank.
Now, unlike the Arduboy FX
this is Type-C,
also it doesn't have a power switch
because it'll just power on the instant you plug it in.
There is a reset button on the back here though.
There's a very recessed button in here.
You had to reach a pin in to push it
whereas this guy is just kind of hanging out right there.
Of course I have two of these.
One is white,
the other is black graffiti.
So you can get this in a range of colors.
White and black obviously.
There's also I think like red, yellow, green, maybe blue
and they all have the option I think,
of getting graffiti.
So they're just, yeah,
so basically just the Arduboy community developers,
just graffiti tags of those guys,
which is awesome, really.
Which one should I power on?
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Shall we power it on?
I'm told there's something special.
Here we go.
(Anthony laughs)
That's perfect.
And yeah, we have the same menu as before.
Tabletop, Racing, RPGs,
yeah, there's RPGs that are like kind of-
like full RPGs.
Game pad.
Oh right.
You can plug this into a PC
and pass the game pad through to your PC
because it's just a microcontroller
it can do whatever you want.
Where's the previous version?
The FX,
had over 200 games.
This, has over 300.
Although I'm not sure if all 300
are loaded onto this pre-release version.
Multiple screensavers-
Uh-oh.
The power draw for this thing is so low
that the battery bank shut off.
Oh, the battery bank's actually kinda low too,
but like it's not in danger mode.
It just shut off cuz it thinks
there's no load on this thing.
I'm gonna need the plugin adapter.
_ For you, sir.
- Thank you.
Alright, let's go ahead and play some games.
"Catacombs of the Damned!"
Now I saw this briefly on the Kickstarter
and this is actually a fully 3D game.
Okay so that's attack and holding that strafes.
Okay.
It's really difficult to see much going on here.
Also there's like,
yeah this is like a-
almost like a full 3D engine,
which is kind of weird
cuz like when I turn the whole thing kind of tilts
and of course just like with the Playdate
this thing doesn't have multiple different shades
of black and white.
It's literally just black and white.
So that's part of how I can manage all of that.
But it's still really impressive
and you can learn to do it for yourself.
Like this was actually coded by
not somebody who's like making the Arduboy
but like a community member.
If we want to go back,
there's a reset button on the back here
and I can just hit that.
I think if you hit I guess A
or whatever this bottom right button is supposed to be,
Enter or Select,
it'll just bring you to the last game you played
which in this case,
"Catacombs of the Damned!".
The bullets are way too small
for me to see reliably in like,
at this angle and from this far away from my face.
It's, like I said,
surprisingly good in terms of like resolution
and in terms of brightness as well.
Well okay, it's not super studio light-ey in here.
We've got got a light over there
and I can see this just fine
when I get the angle right
so that there's no reflections.
The mini is more like a tool/less hectic gameplay experience
kind of thing.
And I guess that leads us to, "Why?"
Right?
Like this is already super small.
Like I could probably literally
like I've got a Ridge Wallet!
And I could probably fit it in there.
Yeah, there.
These are significantly less expensive.
This is like,
this has got a stamped aluminum back,
it's got an acrylic front, it's got the buttons.
It's significantly more correct
in terms of like-
it's a complete console experience, sort of.
Whereas this is the bare bones,
this is meant to be hackable
and it's meant
to be a
really low cost way to get into this.
Like this is not expensive,
it's like 60 bucks
but this is like 30 bucks.
If I had access to this when I was in like junior high,
even maybe elementary school
then it could have changed the course
of my life, quite significantly.
I could have been like a coder
like somebody who creates programs
that other people use.
And I admire that complete dedication
to just making things out of thin air a lot.
And this is doing both the hardware and the software.
You can actually build this yourself if you want to
or something like it.
There are classes out there
that do put these together on breadboards,
like solderless breadboards.
And it just gets you more involved
and that's something that you don't really get so much
with a completed product like this.
You've got, you know,
it's fully contained
and yeah it looks kind of hacky and cool
cuz it's got the-
you can see all the components
and you know you can build one of these yourself too,
but it's not quite the same experience as this.
It's obviously not going to be for everyone.
Like I said,
I probably wouldn't carry this around with me.
I would probably destroy it instantly.
Whereas this is more, I guess my speed.
This is something that is open source
that plays open source software
and you know, I can hack.
I can go into the games and adjust parameters,
change the jump heights of characters or,
you know, make it different
from how it like normally is.
I'm kind of into hacking.
Would I buy it?
I mean, maybe not me.
It is really, really amusing how small it is.
It's smaller than the tag the banana comes with.
Smaller in every dimension-
well, okay, not every dimension.
It's not thinner,
but it's not that thick.
So yeah, it's probably not for me
but like it's super awesome.
I love it.
So should you want to buy one,
if you get in line now
then you should get yours in June
or you should at least be able to to buy one in June.
I mean, I personally hope
that you do think that this is worth buying
because stuff like this just really makes me happy,
you know.
Maybe it makes you happy too.
Like we didn't really go into super detail
in the Arduboy
back in that "Handy Tech under a 100" episode
and I don't feel like I went into sufficient detail
in this,
to kind of really sell it
in terms of what it's supposed to be for, you know,
it's more of a surface level thing.
And if you want to see more of this,
just let us know down in the comments below,
like seriously,
it's definitely something that I want to look into more.
For now though, thanks for watching.
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