<<8-Bit Bootup sound>>
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Hello, and welcome to another episode of the 8-Bit Guy!
Now, In a previous episode, I had mentioned that I had received two commercial freebies
that I had agreed to do reviews on.
Now, I’ve already done one of those, which was the Divoom Timebox.
Now, this is the other one.
I’ve been waiting on this for quite a while and it finally arrived.
This is, arguably, the most interesting of the two items.
Let’s open the box and see what it is.
It says GPD gamepad digital.
And here we are.
It is a little palmtop computer with gamepads build into it.
So let’s see what else it came with.
So here’s the power supply, it’s just a USB charger like you would expect for a
phone or tablet.
Here’s the USB cable and some headphones.
Over here is the instruction manual.
One interesting note about the USB cable is that it is the USB C-type connector.
On the back, it has a power port.
This is that USB C-type connector, but I’m pretty sure this is only used for power.
Next we have a mini HDMI connector for video output.
Then a Micro SD card slot, presumably for more storage, or transferring data from a
camera or phone.
Then a single USB 3.0 port.
And last is the headphone port.
And while it has no network port, it does support wireless networking.
I don’t know if the battery is charged, so I’m going to plug it in first.
OK, well, it appears to be 99% charged already.
OK, so lets power this little guy on…..
OK, I guess you have to hold it down for a second or two.
There we go.
It appears to be booting up to Windows 10.
Now, I had asked the representative if I could install Windows 7 on this machine since I
absolutely hate Windows 10.
He said no, because it doesn’t have a compatible processor.
So I’m assuming this thing is running an ARM processor, which I understand Windows
10 is supporting now.
OK, so I can immediately see that one of the analog gamepad controls will double as a mouse,
which is clever.
Of course, it is a touch screen too, just like a tablet.
Speaking of tablet.
One problem I ran into right away was that it wanted to treat the screen like a tablet
and keep the screen oriented vertically like a tablet.
I could get it to flip one way or the other, but not go horizontal.
I decided to try the well-known keyboard combination for changing screen orientation on windows,
which is control, alt, and arrow keys.. and that worked.
So, I opened up the system specifications and low and behold it is an Intel Atom running
at 1.6 Ghz, with 4 Gigs of RAM.
Also I noticed the internal storage appears to be around 60 gigabytes of solid-state storage.
I installed Geekbench 4 so that those of you who care can get an idea of it’s system
performance.
Here’s the overall score for Open CL.
I don’t know if that is good or not.
And here are the scores for the CPU tested both as a single and multi-core CPU.
I realize the Atom isn’t exactly known for its performance, so I don’t think these
scores are anything terribly impressive in the gaming world.
So it appears that had I bothered to check the manual, it actually explains on the first
first page how to permanently lock the screen orientation to horizontal.
Gee…
And it lists a variety of other optimizations in here as well, so maybe I should take a
moment to do all of these things.
There are actually quite a few optimizations here, I won’t show them all, as it would
take some time.
But suffice it to say, these will all make the system run leaner.
So one that thing was NOT mentioned in the manual was this fan control switch on the
bottom.
It has 3 settings, high speed, medium speed, and off.
However, I’m not sure if there is any consequence to turn the fan off or not.
So, I’m guessing the Atom CPU does have speedstep, so maybe it just won’t perform
as well?
I don’t know.
So, when they contacted me about doing a review on this device, I told them that my channel
is not really a gaming channel, that I concentrate on retro tech.
So, I said “if you want me to review the product based on its ability to play vintage
video games, then I’ll review it.”
They said that was fine, so that’s what we’re going to do!
Now, size-wise, let me show you how big this thing is compared to a gameboy advance, or
better yet a Nintendo DS.
So that will give you an idea of the size we’re dealing with here.
The device looks sort of similar to the Pandora handheld gaming console that came out a few
years ago, which was based on an ARM processor.
So this little switch here on the top will put the game controller into 3 different modes.
In the middle, it acts like a mouse.
The analog controller on the right will move the pointer, and the analog controller on
the left will scroll up and down.
The buttons on the back are actually your left and right mouse buttons.
Now, if you switch it over to the left, it will operate as a game controller based on
the D-Input standard.
If you move it to the right, it will operate based on the X-input standard, which is based
on the XBox 360 controllers.
One thing that is absolutely for sure about this computer.
It is too small to use in your lap.
The keys are beyond tiny.
I doubt I could get 5 words a minute typing on this thing.
And I’m not likely to be bringing it into my local Starbucks to type out my latest scripts
like a hipster.
So, getting these various emulators installed and working is going to be a pain… but there
may be a better way.
Since it has that mini HDMI output, I’m hoping I can connect this Mini to full HDMI
adapter and connect that to this HDMI to DVI cable.
With any luck I can connect this to a DVI monitor I have in the house, since none of
mine support HDMI, and let’s see what happens.
Wow!
It works!
Of course the screen is vertically oriented.
But I bet I can fix that.
But I’m also going to need a keyboard and a mouse.
That’s where the USB port comes in handy on the back.
Now it only has one port, but fortunately, this monitor does have a 4 port USB hub built
in, so that solves that problem.
So, it turns out if I just tell it to extend the display, basically treating the monitor
like a second display, that solves everything and now I can work on this computer like a
regular desktop computer.
The only remaining annoyance is the fact the built-in screen is still on.
Well, when dealing with laptops I have found that if I just go into the power management
settings and tell it to do nothing when I close the lid, that should solve it.
except, on this computer, it doesn’t work as expected.
It just goes to sleep anyway.
Rats.
OK, so I got some emulators and other games setup and installed on the device, let’s
try out the first one, eduke, which is a modern 32-bit implementation of the Duke Nukem 3D
engine.
It took some fiddling with the joystick controls and calibrations, but I finally got it working
acceptably.
The next thing I tried was the VICE emulator, which emulates the Commodore 64.
So, again, I had to fiddle a bit with the joystick controls in the settings, but eventually
got it working as well.
One interesting thing I noticed is that the speaker is on the side of the unit, and so
depending on how you hold your hand, it could muffle the sound, or actually make it sound
even better.
The next thing I tried was Project 64, which emulates the Nintendo 64.
I thought maybe I could play some Mario Kart.
Well, this program runs fine in a window, but it will NOT go full screen.
It will always try to go sideways and if I try to correct it, then the screen just goes
blank.
I’m sure this is more of a Windows 10 incompatibility than anything else.
And this video won’t be complete without trying to emulate the classic Nintendo entertainment
system.
I ran into similar problems here, not being able to get a full screen, so being forced
to play it in a window.
All right, so it’s time for some critical assessment.
What do I really think of this device?
Well, it’s pretty cool.
But, it has some serious problems.
And, I’m not going to beat around the bush.
The biggest problem I had was dealing with the mouse.
Because, you can have the option, as I mentioned earlier in the video, of switching these controllers
from being a mouse or a gamepad.
Now, the problem is, it does have a touch screen, but because the text is so small,
it’s almost impossible to use the touch screen to navigate the menus in the emulator
software.
The emulators were pretty much designed for bigger monitors.
So, the problem is I need the mouse in order to go in and configure, for example, the joystick
controls.
Now, that’s a problem because if I have the joystick turned off so that I can use
the mouse, the emulators won’t detect that there’s a joystick attached to the computer
at all.
And so, I can’t configure it.
So, I have to turn the mouse off before I open the emulator.
So that was a real nuisance.
I found myself often having to use the keyboard commands to navigate through the menus on
the emulators, which is very difficult in many cases.
On some of them, I even had to plug an external mouse into the USB port so that I could configure
the joystick to work.
And that’s just not something that I think most people are going to want to deal with
when they are on the go, in the exact type of places you’re going to wind up wanting
to use a device like this.
The other problem I had was, of course, with the screen.
Getting it to do full-screen in many of the applications was just not feasible.
Now, I don’t blame the hardware as much as I blame windows 10.
Which, by the way, in case I haven’t already mentioned it enough times, I hate windows
10 with a passion.
But, most of the emulators were really not designed to work with Windows 10.
They may technically run on Windows 10, but they’re really not optimized for it.
So, I think maybe in a few years once the emulators have caught up to being more optimized
for Windows 10, they may actually end up working better on a device like this than they do
today.
But for $399 list price, I can’t really personally recommend this as a retro-gaming
machine.
It might work better with the more modern games, but I’m not qualified to review it
for that because I don’t own any modern games that run on the PC.
You’ll have to go to somebody else for a review on that.
Well, otherwise, I hope you found the video interesting, and I do thank them for sending
me this piece of hardware.
It is a really interesting piece of hardware.
It’s a pity it doesn’t work as well as I hoped it would.
Anyway, thanks for watching and stick around, I’ve got more stuff coming!