# The 1up Weekly - Episode 14 - Mini Console Wars!! **Source:** RetroRalph **Type:** video **Published:** 2020-04-20 **Duration:** 67m 38s **Beat:** Pinball **URL:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFBtvnEJjN8 --- ## Analysis RetroRalph and Jon discuss the evolution of mini console hardware from early clone consoles to modern systems like Legends Ultimate and Arcade1Up, examining different CPU architectures (ASIC vs embedded Linux vs FPGA) and explaining why some systems have poor emulation while others excel. They categorize devices by generation and technology, addressing common misconceptions about 'NES on a chip' and the tradeoffs between hardware quality, updatability, hackability, and cost. ### Key Claims - [HIGH] AtGames released two very similar-looking Genesis consoles within about a year, with the key difference being firmware updatability via SD card on the later version, which the earlier version lacked — _Jon and Ralph directly compare two physical AtGames Genesis units, explaining the SD card slot difference and logo placement as distinguishing factors_ - [HIGH] The original AtGames Genesis Mini (pre-2018) used 'FireCore' software with significant audio lag, emulation issues, and screen tearing that persisted across multiple generations without improvement — _Detailed discussion of FireCore software problems; confirmed that same architecture was repackaged without improvement until M2 version_ - [HIGH] The M2-produced official Sega Genesis Mini has audio lag in its emulation, despite popular perception as superior due to hackability with better emulators like Hak-Chi — _Jon states M2's emulation 'has audio lag' and notes people praise it primarily because it can be hacked to run superior emulators, not because of native quality_ - [HIGH] NES-on-a-chip (ASIC) devices use outdated composite video technology from 15 years ago and require poor-quality upscaling to HDMI, resulting in degraded image quality — _Hands-on demonstration of Retron 5 showing ASIC glob, composite-only output, and analog-to-digital upscaler board_ - [HIGH] Legends Ultimate and Arcade1Up Gen 2+ use embedded Linux quad-core systems with native HDMI output, making them fundamentally superior to ASIC-based systems — _Technical comparison between architectures; Ralph explains native HDMI vs upscaled composite_ - [MEDIUM] AtGames likely designed the Legends Ultimate with firmware updatability as a core feature specifically to avoid repeating the mistakes made with the Genesis Mini that couldn't be updated — _Jon speculates about AtGames' learning: 'They made that mistake with the Sega Genesis Mini...they swore to themselves clearly that they would never make that mistake again'_ - [MEDIUM] The Polymega is emerging as a new category of retro console device, distinct from mini consoles and arcade cabinets — _Lewis mentions pre-ordering the Polymega; hosts indicate it will be discussed in their categorization framework_ ### Notable Quotes > "And so the hardware itself, if you side load with Hak-Chi, other emulators like RetroArch and other things, it plays really really well. But the reason why it plays really really well is because it's powerful enough to be able to handle what you throw at it." > — **Jon**, ~35:00 > _Explains why hackable systems with sufficient hardware can succeed despite mediocre native emulation_ > "Once you go down that road [FPGA] it's really hard because if you had a Genesis and loved it, then tried to hook it up to a modern TV but didn't know how to do it right... and then you take that cartridge and put it into a Mega Drive, you're like what the hell, it actually looks better than it ever looked before." > — **Ralph**, ~28:00 > _Illustrates why some enthusiasts become 'emulation snobs' after experiencing superior FPGA quality_ > "99% of the people will never notice or care about the lag. They're just happy to play games in their old systems." > — **Super Dimensional (chat)**, ~18:00 > _Captures the tension between technical accuracy and casual user satisfaction_ > "They were really released within like maybe a year around a year of each other. The good from the bad? It was one little move. See how it says AtGames right here on the top of the Genesis? If I look over at the other one, they moved the AtGames logo... it's almost like etched in the actual device." > — **Jon**, ~12:00 > _Demonstrates how difficult it is to distinguish superior from inferior AtGames units visually_ > "If you're a super fan and you want to recreate it and you plan on logging a lot of hours, you'll be blown away by a thing like a MiSTer or Mega Drive. Don't you think?" > — **Ralph**, ~26:00 > _Argues FPGA superiority justifies premium pricing for dedicated enthusiasts_ ### Entities | Name | Type | Context | |------|------|---------| | Jon | person | Co-host of The 1up Weekly; primary technical explainer for console hardware architectures | | Ralph | person | Co-host of The 1up Weekly; equipment curator; contributes subjective experience perspective | | Retro Ralph | person | Show creator/host (full name context); produces video content on retro gaming | | AtGames | company | Manufacturer of Genesis Mini and Legends Ultimate consoles; primary focus of hardware comparison segment | | M2 | company | Emulation developer who produced the official Sega Genesis Mini for Sega after AtGames | | Legends Ultimate | product | AtGames quad-core embedded Linux console; firmware updatable; supports sideloading and Hak-Chi hacking | | Arcade1Up | company | Manufacturer of three-quarter scale arcade cabinets using embedded Linux hardware similar to mini consoles | | Sega Genesis Mini | product | Official Sega-licensed mini console produced by AtGames (first version, 2017) then M2 (improved version, 2018+); subject of detailed criticism | | Retron 5 | product | ASIC-based console using composite video with poor HDMI upscaling; represents outdated NES-on-a-chip technology | | Hak-Chi | product | Hacking/modding software that allows sideloading superior emulators onto mini consoles | | NES Classic | product | Nintendo's official mini NES that sparked widespread mini console market adoption and scalper incidents | | MiSTer | product | FPGA-based retro gaming device mentioned as superior emulation alternative; represents cutting-edge enthusiast hardware | | Polymega | product | Emerging console category; Lewis pre-ordered; mentioned as fourth category to be discussed | | Mark Kim | person | Ralph's wife; present during park outing mentioned at episode start | | Super Dimensional | person | Active chat participant; identified as particularly knowledgeable about emulation lag testing and technical details | | Zohar | person | Chat super-chatter; Genesis Mini Hak-Chi user with 200 games; advocates for aesthetic/UI preferences | | FireCore | product | Software platform used in early AtGames consoles; known for consistent audio lag, screen tearing, and emulation problems | | Rockchip | company | Manufacturer of quad-core processor (MIPS-based Monkey King/Monkey King 3.66) used in AtGames systems | | Allwinner A83T | product | Dual-core processor used in official Sega Genesis Mini; enables HDMI output and hacking support | | RetroArch | product | Multi-system emulator core that can be sideloaded onto Linux-based mini consoles for superior performance | ### Topics - **Primary:** Mini console hardware architectures and generational evolution, ASIC vs embedded Linux vs FPGA emulation technology tradeoffs, Firmware updatability as market differentiator, Emulation quality vs user perception and hackability, AtGames product history and quality degradation/improvement cycles - **Secondary:** Clone consoles and bootleg games from Chinese manufacturers, Consumer preferences for modding vs original experience, FPGA enthusiast devices (MiSTer, Mega Drive, Super NT) as premium alternative ### Sentiment **Neutral** (0.5) — Discussion is informative and balanced, acknowledging both merits and flaws of various systems. Hosts express frustration with AtGames' historical quality issues but credit their improvement trajectory. Critical tone toward ASIC technology and poor emulation, but empathetic to budget-conscious consumers. Positive toward Linux-based and FPGA solutions. ### Signals - **[sentiment_shift]** Tension between purist/nostalgic preference for unmodded original mini consoles vs pragmatic use case where modding becomes necessary for acceptable emulation quality (confidence: medium) — Ralph expresses reluctance to mod consoles despite acknowledging modding is valid solution; Super Dimensional notes most users don't notice emulation lag - **[design_philosophy]** AtGames strategy shift: 2018 Genesis Mini v2 and subsequent Legends Ultimate designed with firmware updatability as core feature, suggesting deliberate learning from prior Generation 1 failures (confidence: medium) — Jon: 'They made that mistake with the Sega Genesis Mini... they swore to themselves clearly that they would never make that mistake again' - **[market_signal]** Emerging fourth category of retro console devices (Polymega) suggesting market fragmentation and continued evolution beyond mini console/arcade cabinet binary (confidence: low) — Lewis pre-ordered Polymega; hosts indicate separate category discussion forthcoming but details deferred - **[market_signal]** NES Classic's scalping craze and supply constraints demonstrating massive consumer demand that sparked mini console market explosion and clones (confidence: high) — Jon: 'They sold how many millions of them? Remember when you couldn't even get them and people were scalping them online? It was crazy' - **[product_strategy]** Visual design and UI aesthetics (logo placement, menu design, retro appearance) becoming critical differentiator in mini console market alongside technical emulation quality (confidence: medium) — Zohar: 'Even though the AtGames run better on the mega drive, the Sega mini has a better looking UI and a more nostalgic retro look. Aesthetics is everything' - **[product_concern]** AtGames Genesis Mini and predecessor models suffered from persistent FireCore software emulation problems (audio lag, screen tearing) that weren't addressed for multiple generations, damaging brand reputation (confidence: high) — Jon: 'They were really bad, really bad, really bad... it hung around for generations because it was all the same stuff they didn't improve it till way later' - **[technology_signal]** Official M2-produced Sega Genesis Mini emulation contains audio lag despite industry perception of technical superiority, revealing emulation quality not guaranteed by manufacturer reputation (confidence: medium) — Jon: 'M2's emulation on this system has audio lag... if you compare that to other Sega Genesis emulation that's good, it doesn't have that audio lag' - **[technology_signal]** Transition from ASIC-based composite video systems to embedded Linux quad-core processors with native HDMI output represents generational hardware leap enabling firmware updates and superior emulation (confidence: high) — Technical comparison showing ASIC upscaling vs native HDMI output; firmware update capability exclusive to Linux systems --- ## Transcript Hey guys, welcome back! Yeah! What up, weekly? Yeah, guys! We're here, Ralph. How you doing, buddy? I'm good, I'm good. How was your weekend? You know, it was good. I had a pretty tough week, but I was able to kind of just take a break yesterday and today, and it's it's been good that's good that's good mine was good we actually spent some time we we kim's parents came over and we actually went to a park that's by my house and we had like like yeah we actually like hung out outside we're throwing frisbees around and all sorts of stuff it's actually really nice Carl Weathers here right now so dude honestly i really needed that so i'm gonna tell you justin i'm going insane in the house insane but i mean i know it's necessary i'm going crazy right really and you know that you you you you witness it firsthand when i go crazy so i have then it's it's not a pretty sight i'll tell you that so what's our topic today because uh because looking at the thumbnail looks like we're talking about star wars i'm pretty excited about that no no there's no star wars just because it says clones clone consoles doesn't mean clone wars you're you're now just well you know kind of like you know if you look at the state of all the consoles that are out there it kind of reminds me of the civil war that was happening in episode two of star wars you know you're such a dork no let's please move forward dork ball dork ball 5000 alert what are we talking about then if we're talking about mini consoles okay so so the thing is though justin it's like a wide topic and i'll tell you why because before all these mini consoles exist there were clone consoles for a long time right some of them came from china some of them were coming from at games but they were well they're all from china but like at games was pushing these things you know genesis they had atari they have you know they never did nes but there's a whole bunch of different ones out there there was a ton of nes ones it wasn't until recently that we had like officially licensed versions of these mini consoles but they did exist in some form before some of them looking like the original consoles or trying to without the sega logo like or whatever it was whatever you know console they were trying to copy i don't know if you remember do you remember like maybe four or five christmases ago all over every mall you'd go in there'd be a kiosk with this fake looking nes thing it might have been or actually it might have been more recent but uh you remember those right it was like playing all these nes games we're like wait this ain't legit like what are they doing well and some of the games they'd weave in so a lot of the ones coming from china they'd weave in these bs titles that were like their home brews they're like really not legitimate nes games right there's clones of their own games so it's it's multiple versions of the same game, but slightly tweaked. Yeah, it's been crazy. So all of this stuff is relatively new, but the cool thing about it is I think a lot of our audience probably has their original consoles, may even still use them, but some people might not have them anymore, so it's a way for you to re-experience these things in a different form, which is cool. I actually appreciate that element of it. Yeah, so we might think that it's only been around for a little while because what made, you know, probably what really kicked off the making it ubiquitous is the NES Classic, right? That came out. I mean, they sold how many millions of them, right? I mean, remember when you couldn't even get them? Remember when you couldn't even get them and, like, people were scalping them online? I mean, it was crazy, the cost of them online. That's right. So, Zohar, thank you so much for the super chat. He says, Genesis Mini is the best, especially with Hak-Chi. I have 200 games on it, and I love it. And so we're going to talk about that, like why it's possible to even hack these units comes to the actual hardware that it's running. And I think we have a really good right here. We got all the various consoles and we're going to we're going to go through it kind of like how they changed over time and categorize them. Maybe help you understand what exactly you're playing. We're not going to nerd out too much, but I think it's going to be pretty exciting. So what do you think, Ralph? Yeah, because I mean, Justin, you said something. like we we've talked about these mini consoles at at length what's actually inside them which actually becomes sort of an interesting conversation because i guess i never we we had a conversation a while ago where i was like why did all of these and this is not a dig at the company it's just what they did because it's a bunch of series of like why were all those at games consoles that were trying to emulate sega so bad for so long and then all of a sudden they were good like it went from and they are we'll talk about that like they were really bad really bad really bad and all of a sudden it's a shame but there was this one that they released that was actually good all of a sudden right but no one cared because it was almost too late and then the obviously the nes or the m2 did the uh genesis mini so it was like kind of interesting so let's take it backwards so everyone knows about the legends ultimate right and by the way one quite one thing so so super dimensional is asking what's that trash in the middle go back to the table cam if you don't mind for a minute yeah yeah i'm i have everything here because i the reason why there's a lot of things here and there's some missing there's some missing like playstation classic stuff like that playstation mini whatever it was called uh the reason why i have these here is because there's some commonality that you'd be surprised between these consoles some really good and some really bad but there's some commonality that we want to talk about that's why i brought out like a variety some that are good and some that are actually pretty bad yeah so i think a really cool way to explain it is if if we talk first about the legends ultimate because people are pretty familiar with that guy. So that one's using what we're calling, you know, system on a chip or an embedded Linux system. You know, it's actually running Linux on it. It's a quad core processor made by Rockchip. So if you go, let's go ahead and point Ralph at the Sega Genesis made by AtGames. Sure. This guy right here. No, no, no, no. We're going to go there, right? So this is actually some of the same architecture that's on the Legends Ultimate. It's just back a few generation so this is kind of like the legend's ultimate predecessor so it's running um what's called the monkey was it the monkey king is that what it's called which is uh yeah monkey king 3.66 that's right here right which is basically just a rock chip uh rebranded but this one is the dual core cortex a7 so this guy can run you know linux on it so there's an operating system layer and then there's emulators that run on it and well the other cool thing justin about this one in particular this was the first one they had where you could actually update it so should they have had they have gotten something wrong like let's say something wasn't working right they had this um sd card slot on the side i'll point it to you so you can see it so you could update it so this was new they didn't have this before and it did still have one of the unique features of this console was that you could uh put a cartridge in it right so it does have a cartridge slot that does work yeah see so zohar check this out man this is what we're trying to help you out like a lot of people are giving at games some hate but the console that everyone's talking about that they hate from at games is not the one that ralph has on the table this is basically the legends ultimate 0.5 it's actually really good just like a lot of the one everyone hated right it's really confusing because look they look similar ralph could you show the difference between yes so everyone hated on this hard they were like emulation is still bad audio emulation is still bad now the thing that was that was tricky is these were really released within like maybe a year around a year of each other right how you know the good from the bad it was one little move see how it says at games right here on like the top of the genesis if i look over at the the other one uh they moved the at games logo to this it's like almost like etched in the actual device it's kind of like almost burnt in it looks like i don't know what you call that when you like etch into plastic like that yeah but if you can look you'll see that's how you can tell that's the only way you can tell actually move the logos right but there's more to it right the night the better one we'll call it the better one actually has an sd card um you can firmware update it it has a lot of the same features that eventually made it into the legends ultimate right so that was a feature that at games clearly wanted to do going forth and in our community the legends ultimate being firmware updatable is is really really popular but the mistake that games made is their previous version was not firmware updatable it looks like if you look on the inside it does have a usb slide on side but you'd have to take it apart right so there's no external way to easily access the the first sega genesis and the emulation didn't come out great they made some mistakes and they got burned for it they really got someone did mention someone did mention uh super dimensional mentioned this. I do have this one. It was just I didn't have time to bring it upstairs. There's one that looks like about this big. Oh, right. Yeah. And that one's terrible too. But we're going to actually show you that there's some commonality in them because they ran some software that they used to call FireCore. Any of the ones with that FireCore software, you're going to notice a lot of lag. You're going to notice audio problems on the Genesis. You're also going to notice a lot of um screen tearing in certain games so like but the thing is it it hung around for generations because it was all the same stuff they didn't improve it till way later they just packaged it differently right so you gotta give them props for at least like the thing that sucks is it really does suck in a way that at games like okay they for a long time was really bad but then they really started to improve and it's a shame that that console the one that they actually did well the genesis one it was too late because they had already i guess sega had already decided to go another way now we don't know all the details behind that but when sega decided to do the m2 thing i think at games probably could have packaged this maybe updated the the ui a little bit made it have a little better user interface people would have been happy with it i think that's right and it was unfortunate because if you look at the the m2 version we call that the m2 because they did the emulation but it's like the um it's the what would you call the OEM Sega Genesis Mini. And so what this one got right is they didn't get the emulation right. So a lot of people are saying that this thing is fantastic. But if you go look at people that lag tested this, M2's emulation on this system has audio lag. And so if you compare that to like other Sega Genesis emulation, that's good. It doesn't have that audio lag. So everyone's giving the Sega Genesis official one great props, but I think it's like Zohar was saying, it's because you can hack it and put a different emulator on it, an emulator that's more popular and that has better quality. And so the hardware itself, I'm not sure what that one is. I think it's an all-winner, maybe a dual core. Let me see if I can do it off-camera because it's really hard for me to see. uh no it's something called azuki okay uiki z7213 yeah but but i think it's it's using um there's a trick with hack chi you know the way they hack it you know they basically put the ssc in a debug um mode and then basically they can write to you know they write a fake drive and then you can start loading your games onto it and tell it to boot to that um and so we're jumping around justin but i didn't want to show this real quick so so hopefully i can get this in the camera so you can see it so there are a lot of at games older systems that actually had this you'll notice you'll boot it up and this is the menu system it'll have like this it'll say fire core on the top left almost all these are really bad but they were also really cheap like this device did not cost much yeah um you know so so i mean you kind of got what you paid for but it had you know it had some of those like weird uh you know games on it that really didn't make sense why they were on here but it did have like a decent i don't know why it's going all the way to let me see maybe they had the menu different i suppose i'm looking at it backwards but i don't remember how to get the page too i think see this is the other thing they have weird menus where like you have to press different letters to get the different pages i can't remember but uh super dimensional makes a really good point he said 99 of the people uh will never notice or care about the lag they're just happy to play in hd in those old games and yeah i think it's true it's it's partly true like you can it's kind of like this like if you get the emulation good enough no one will really notice but there are a set of products that get the emulation so bad that the average person does actually go wait like like it ends up being that cash grab they buy they hook it up they're disappointed and they're like oh i guess that part of my life is over this is that device i mean this device is terrible like it it's bad like if you if you even like a casual Sega fan you'd you'd pick it up and be like oh man but the thing is like if you gave this to a kid like a little kid a little kid I don't think they'd know they'd probably have good time with it um although your daughter wouldn't because you've trained her to like be able to detect every single every single problem in a console but but no I mean it isn't very good um but I mean I feel like do you want to circle back up really quick before we dive in about That game's Legends Ultimate, it actually emulates a lot of systems via bring your own game really well. But the reason why is because they can put on a good emulator. They put on a good emulator core. They can do whatever they want. They recently announced Sega CD support. Well, the Pico emulator has had Sega CD support for a while. And it does it pretty well. So now you can do it on your Legends Ultimate. So it's almost like since they cracked it open to say, hey, if we have the ability to use whatever emulator we want that's available and working well, then the experience is actually better. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And so if you look at like the third generation arcade one-up cabinets or the Legends Ultimate itself, it has that baseline that's where it's powerful enough where people can, you know, if they were to sideload games, which is popular among Legends Ultimate, but not popular on the arcade one-up quad core system that they have. then you know it's just like the like zohar was talking about with the sega genesis mini it's powerful enough the hardware it's baseline that if you side load with hack g other emulators like retroarch and other things it plays really really well but the reason why it plays really really well is because it's it's powerful enough to be able to handle what you throw at it super dimensional is jumping ahead a bit on what we're going to talk about but i think we should just read this real quick and kind of put this in our brain because we're going to get park this for a minute but he says i feel like once my mister gets here i'm going to become an emulation snob he's laughing about it there's some truth to that because uh if anybody's ever went out and bought a mega sg which uses fpga technology which we'll get into that we don't i don't want to get into it too quick but once you go down that road it's really hard because if you had a genesis and loved it then tried to hook it up to a modern tv but didn't know how to do it right so you were you didn't have a good experience and then you take that cartridge and put it into a mega sg you're like what the hell like it actually looks better than it ever looked before like it blows your mind yeah so so i think some people are quick to go well that's an elitist they spent a lot of money but i gotta say like some of these devices they're worth it like there's if you're a big fan and you want to recreate it and you you spend a lot you plan on logging a lot of hours you'll be blown away by a thing like a mister or mega sg don't you think or a super nt yeah lewis brings up so i did pre-order the the polymega and the polymega is yet another category of devices that that it's new right so let's run into that real quick let's categorize so we can all use language that we can understand so a lot of these units why don't you point them out so like the joystick on there these come from this guy these come from the nes on a chip uh era right so once you go ahead and show what that yeah i'm going to open it up how to detect if a system is a NES on a chip. So you can't see it here. I got to flip this over because the chip is actually the chip is on the other side. So whenever you see that little circle glob, that's typically either an NES on a chip or one similar to it. So this is actually not a... Explain that though, Justin. When you say NES on a chip, I feel like I was confused the first time you introduced me to that concept. Because when you say NES on a chip, I think, oh, this must just play NES games. So explain to us a little bit about that because I think that's Yeah, things I was confused about. So the idea is the chip itself basically has all the units of an NES. It it hardware emulation So you got to be careful with your language because people are like oh hardware emulation is amazing right Like an FPGA Well technically this really horrible one is hardware emulation but it using what called an ASIC And an ASIC itself is not what makes it good or bad It the technology that you put into that And so among the Mr. Among the FPGAs, you say the emulation is only as bad as the developer putting into it. Or if you have a really, really good developer doing FPGA, then you're going to get really good hardware emulation. But the ASIC is basically once you build it, once you build that circuitry, they're going to build a chip that is exactly all of those gates and blocks forever. That's it. You can never update it. It's like a chip that emulates other chips and that's it. And so it has all the same circuits as like, you know, the NES does. But there was a series of other manufacturers or maybe the same manufacturer that built a whole bunch of chips that emulate all of these old systems. But they built it like 15 years ago. And so the technology is basically what the technology was 10, 15 years ago, which was composite video. So show them like the Retron HD. That's an example. So this is a newer unit, right? So guys, you remember what you just looked at, right? You remember what you saw in that unit. I'm going to crack this open and ba-bam. You see, it's the NES on a chip. It's that little, they blob some black stuff over it because they don't want you to know exactly how it works or whatever. But it's an ASIC chip, and that thing only outputs composite video. Remember the yellow and white wires back in the day? That's what's coming out of it. So look at it. You see it's got the yellow, white, and red. But how does it do HDMI? See, it has HDMI. Well, they're actually upscaling that. It's going from analog to digital on that second board. And inside there, there's a really poor quality upscaler. And that's why when you plug that guy in, it's not a great experience. It's because you're upscaling something that the source is poor. Now, in its defense, these are budget devices. They don't claim to be awesome, by the way. But to me, if you're someone that's like, hey, I have some NES cards laying around. I'd love to play them for a little bit. But maybe you don't want to spend a lot of money. You can buy something like that fairly cheap, and you'll have fun with it. But when you see what it could look like, I think that's when you go, oh, man. If you're a super fan, you start to go like, let's say you were going to log some considerable hours on it. you will you i don't think you'd regret a little bit of more money spent if you could afford it right so let's uh let's break it down real quick into these three categories we'll introduce a fourth soon by the way stringer films films thank you for the what's up to you too and thank you for the super chat appreciate that bud yeah thank you so much so go ahead and point out so the ones that hold on wait a minute justin hold on lewis has said the most before this episode put me back on camera god damn it before this episode for this episode lewis i said to justin you should have to come over here and unscrew all these damn things there were screws flying everywhere all over my desk and i was actually like really mad with justin before we started this i actually was he doesn't know this i was walking downstairs and kim saw me and i she's what's wrong i go i'm getting mad at justin right now i feel bad no i don't i told you in the beginning this is the trick when you start taking apart consoles you get these little plastic containers right you get several of them and then you just pop them in there damn you justin damn you whatever okay so let's check this out real quick so if you look at it all right let's not miss zohar's super chat thank you so much so hard he goes even though the games run better on the mega sg the sega sega mini has a better looking ui and a more nostalgic hysteria look aesthetics is everything I 100% agree with you, Zohar. We're going to be talking about that more. So check this out. So why don't you point out all the ones that are the poor quality composite upscaling, you know, ASICs. So we got the joystick, right? So you got this guy. Yep. You've got this guy. We didn't even talk about this guy, but it's not really fair. This is a really old school. Yeah. I just put it on there for reference. You've got this guy. This guy does have output. You've got... So then you got... Now we're moving on to... And then the Retron HD. Oh, now we're out of... Yeah, in the RetroNight HD. Okay, so those are all really old. It's going to look really bad. Nowadays, if you've got an LCD, it's just going to look bad. But then you move on to embedded Linux systems, like system on a chip that are running either a dual-core, a Cortex ARM chip, or a quad-core. And those are the minis that we know and love. Basically, the technology caught up so that you can – it's basically like a Raspberry Pi. It's a similar architecture. and these look really good because they natively do HDMI. Like that's its native output. The system on the chip outputs HDMI digital directly from it and so naturally it's going to look good. Oops, it lost itself. Sorry, little buddy. Yeah, and that brings us into the Arcade 1-Up and the Legends Ultimate phase because the Legends Ultimate and the... Sorry, hold on a second. The Legends Ultimate and the Arcade 1-Up use that same hardware as the Mini. They're, you know, three-quarter, you know, in the case of Arcade 1UP, it's a three-quarter scale. They're using that Mini technology where it's an embedded system running Linux, operating system, and they throw emulators on there. In the case of Arcade 1UP, commercial emulators that run, you know, the real ROMs. And then Legends Ultimate, you know, it's kind of a free-for-all these days. You can sideload a lot of things, just like you can do at Hakuchi. You know, you can sideload some NES. So when you think about it, you know, if we were being like if we look at like gen one right so the the the biggest benefit that someone has with an act games legends ultimate let's say versus like i mean there's a lot of benefits but versus version one arcade one up right i don't think that when arcade one up went version one they were focusing a lot on how it would emulate and how it would look and if we would have shimmering and if we would have screen tear like they didn't care it was more of like uh at the time i don't think they really cared then as they saw adoption raise people were actually trying to hold them to some standards they got better at it that's right but but it wasn't like you could go software update those version one boards so i mean if anything you know if you wanted to look at there was some advantages to at game starting late because they were probably like let's make it a system that we can actually update so that if for some reason we had problems with sound or problems with emulation like someone like super dimensional super anal if i know super dimensional is going to be my my audience i'm gonna be like damn i better be able to software update this because he's going to notice pixel shimmering in this section. Yeah, well, that's the thing. With the Legends Ultimate, they already made that mistake with the Sega Genesis Mini that came out in 2017, and they swore to themselves clearly that they would never make that mistake again. So in 2018, when they came out with the version 2 of the Sega Genesis, you could firmware update. And they got that team making firmware updates, and then Legends Ultimate came out, and they're like, we're going to base it on that same architecture where we can firmware update like crazy. Yeah. But we're going to do it too much but but then but then we're gonna make um you know go quad core you know so it's gonna be even a even a faster platform um so then so then so you got those two categories there was a good point too justin i feel like i feel like super dimensional is like all over this topic tonight this is we have to remember to get to this oh excuse me i almost did the burp thing before the show's over there is something weird some people don't like hacking the mini consoles and and i and i actually understand why but i think that's more of like a nostalgic feeling kind of thing but let's let's park that one because that's a wicked good topic i want to make sure we get to because i think we were going to talk about that anyway let's talk about it now we can bust let's talk about it now we can move around okay all right cool so do you do you want me to i'll share my lead on this one yeah go for it so my opinion on it it's weird so i have a million ways to play all these games right i've got pandora's boxes i've got the legends ultimate it i've got pcs with hyperspin and coin ops and so for me when i get these i kind of like leaving them alone i don't like even though i've modded them for the channel for little videos and stuff here and there i actually like leaving them alone i don't know it's just a weird thing i feel like i've ruined it when i mod it i don't know why i like leaving it alone now my flip side to that where i'm going to contradict myself is if if that thing is the only thing you can buy sure like and it becomes a good basis for an emulation system. So I understand if someone doesn't have the space and the resources, then you could technically take one of these and make it an end-all, be-all, for the most part, for retro games, for retro gaming. So that's my take on it. Yeah, when I bought the NES, Super NES Classic, I didn't mod them. Really, I played them for a while, and I thought they were really, really cool, and then I went on to other consoles. It was just one of the many consoles that I bought. I did get into FPGA, you know, I bought the analog NT, the analog mini NT, and the Sega SG, and the, what is it, the Super Nintendo one, the Super NT. All of those are really, really great. And to go back to talking about how the downside of the FPGA, you know, emulation's high, quality is really high, but the UI is really low. it's a lot of text-based scrolling through the games like what zohar was saying where man like even the the new turbo graphics and pc engine where they show the emulation of like what it basically shows um animation of the scene going in like that's a huge advantage no it was it was cool like talking about something that that little feature that was for you sam that was that was probably the dorkiest thing i've ever done on the show by the way flexing my muscles but that's funny as hell uh no you know i i agree with you dude i feel like that little feature they added pulled on so much nostalgia it literally really did sound like a cd-rom booting like you would lose some of that stuff to potentially it depends i know i know those those new mods are reversible and sometimes you can run both at the same time but that is a really cool thing that they did yeah so that hook you i i kind of hope arcade or i really hope that at games is listening when the community is saying, to be completely honest, I'd be like, hey, guys, you can take a break from all the functionality for a month. Just stop. Stop with new features and make the UI look prettier. Just spend an entire month just making it look cleaner. Add animation, add something, make the UI have shelves like every other console out there. And they're behind the times when it comes to the look. We know their technology can handle it, right? It's a quad core processor similar to these other chips, but why haven't they spent the time making it look modern? Like it's just something they need to spend the time with. And yeah, Zohar is saying UI is so important. And when you're picking the games, you kind of want that. How are they going to do it? You know, because it's kind of this arcade cabinet they want to make. They need to somehow recreate. And I'm sorry, but being able to be able to put your own background in the Legends Ultimate was not a feature that I was asking for. I think that is seriously, I'm sorry, I'm going to probably piss a bunch of people off. I think it's super lame because what happens is people put these backgrounds on, and then the whole look and feel of the GUI looks like ass. It doesn't look good anymore. You're not a UI designer, and so you don't know what a good background would look like against that UI. And I think it was just a patch. They were like, oh, we'll just throw it out there because people are complaining about the UI looking bad. I think they should have made a whole bunch of free backgrounds or something that do look good, specifically designed for the legends ultimate and say here now you pick you know from all the default one that to make it look better if you want this look or that look um but i so i i gotta call out this super dimensions like all over this episode and i kind of thought he would be uh from prior comments that he's made on shows and stuff but he's talking about like the feel it gave him to hear that cd spin um when it actually was happening when he had that console probably originally and what that felt like to recreate that you know what i mean like it's really cool um i think it's awesome yeah we got a couple super chats so we thank you so much hobby hands who says nothing he says nothing but still yeah thank you so much thank you so much and then uh stringer films i said it right that time my first mod was the ps2 boot disk chip nice yeah remember that hack right the p i think they did that in the ps1 as well right where you could do the quick hot swap uh anyway there's a bunch of weird yeah there's a bunch of weird exploits from different consoles of the past um yeah i don't know man i don't want to and i don't want you guys to think i actually really do enjoy the legends ultimate i actually think it's a pretty cool device we were talking recently about of any con any uh arcade that you can buy it's got the best sticks out of any of them you know it's the sticks i would say the sticks on the legends ultimate are better than the san juan's that are inside um i don't know what it is the san juan clones you mean not no no like i have the marvel superheroes with san juan genuines in it oh and you think it feels better yeah well there's something about take let's take this offline buddy no no no like when you when it's like got a stronger spring in it or something the legends ultimate is spring year so i can't i'll have to i'd have to take them both out but i do think that i'll take them both out because honestly the marvel superheroes is in storage right now so i can't do that but i will say the sticks and buttons in the legends ultimate are actually quite good for being an out of the box if i compare them to to arcade one up they're much better they're much better um and that's a testament to they actually i think thought to themselves all right hey if this is going to be like this multi-cade we got to make sure the controls are pretty good yes there's going to be people that are going to want to change them if they're really into fighting games they may want to put hap sticks in it or or or san was if they prefer san was but actually they're pretty good like i gotta give them credit on that you should try it i see what like actually do like the flick test it'll go back to the center faster on the legends ultimate than genuine san was that i have it could be as simply as the micro switches have a better spring in it or something like that and and maybe maybe the san was are more sensitive but i'm just someone's making fun of me in the chat for having the best arcade one up one in storage i know but if those of you watching the channel i've been taking a i've been trying to make room for real arcades and for just a couple of the one-ups i want to keep around so i'm probably gonna sell a lot of them the ones that i have in my storage and kind of make room for the next gen ones because the problem is is like i can't literally have a channel where i review arcade one-up stuff and buy every cabinet unless i sell some of the cabinets like i would have a house filled with cap like it's just i can't do that and i wouldn't be able to feasibly like afford that so i that's a that's a direction i'm going where i'm unless i'm in love with the arcade one of cabinet they're more going to be for me to give you guys my opinion of them and then they move on to the next you know kind of next one i'll keep a small subset of them yeah and classic kim will throw them out of course according to that m and m and m all right let's let's get to this uh once you go ahead ralph with the super chat yeah all right sorry i was distracted because everyone's making kim comments that are funny like that kim will throw them out stringer films uh i don't miss the disc sound before disc read error yeah that's true that would suck when you had like a dirty disc and you're like please please a disc that was either dirty or scratched and you could tell it was like trying so hard to read it and then it doesn't like that was the worst thing see sam knows what i'm talking about okay all right let me go back i i wanna i'm not gonna i'm not gonna make any determination until i try it myself but um i want to go back and check that Because maybe that's 100% right. So let's take a look at it. What we have here, right, getting back to it, is just the NES on a chip with the glob. And then we got the system on a chip. That's the best we have up till now. But then the FPGAs. You want me to go get a mister? Yeah. I have a mister that's close by. Yeah, why don't you grab that mister? And so we're going to be talking about the mister here for a second. So we're kind of going through. and don't worry, there's a fourth category that's coming up that's going to try to bring it all together. That's not NES on a chip. That's not a system on a chip. And it's not FPGA. It's something completely new that will potentially give you the best of best That at least what some companies are promising so with the FPGA that that Ralph has here come on come on now she prematurely put me on but I so so we can put under the other camera if I can get a good shot at it but there is your see if it a lot of focus a prior won't because the way I have my camera setup let's put under the desk and okay let's do it this one so this is you know it's a development board is what it really is this is Yeah, so this is called the DE10 Nano. It's an Intel DE10 Nano. It's really designed for hardware developers to build an ASIC chip. So let's say that you want to build, you know, you're hired by a company to build a very specific, not a general purpose, but a very specific chip to solve some hardware problem. You would develop it on an FPGA. And so you can, these are gates and circuits that are completely hardware emulated. And so this is the development board. And what's funny about them is you can get them for about $150, but I think they actually cost more. Right now, Justin, there's something weird going on with them, and maybe someone in the chat can put this in here. They got really expensive. By the way, this is the basic model with just the acrylic around it, and it's got an SD RAM upgrade. So the reason why I wanted the SD RAM upgrade is because it allows you to play a wider variety of games. but you can buy these with these legit cases and stuff. Because I'm not putting this, this is something that I play with, and I'm going to be putting it in and out of a rack and stuff, and it's not going to be sitting nice on a coffee table or something like a console. I'm not using it like a console. I'm using it more to just play with and experience. But these are great. Yeah. So the reason why it's great is, think about it, you're a developer and you want to build an ASIC chip that hardware emulates some other... You want to build an ASIC chip that's going to have blocks in it that do your logic and your circuits or whatever. So you develop it in a language that you can update. It's kind of like flashing the firmware of the FPGA. And it actually causes the FPGA to mimic those exact circuits and logics that you're trying to design. And so that's what the board is made for. That's what the company who makes those, there are four developers to build that. But the Mr. Team took that, right, and said, well, why don't you go buy those? And we're building the hardware emulators for the FPGA that actually emulates the arcade cabinet, that emulates the Nintendo console. So when they say emulate, it's actually emulating the exact chips inside the arcade cabinet, inside an NES, inside a Sega Genesis, hardware by hardware. And you can keep flashing and taking updates. Yeah, we actually, so just to put into perspective, I didn't really know about FPGA for gaming for a little while. But we use FPGAs in the products that the company I work for makes. And the reason why we do is because we sell mainly devices that use SSD or NAND, which is like flash memory devices. The thing is, sometimes technology, hardware technology around it changes. So instead of us having to put in a new device every time, we can actually change the logic around it, which is really cool. So if we wanted to act a certain way, we can actually flash it versus having to actually do a hardware upgrade, which is huge if you're a hardware vendor. Like someone that actually sells hardware, if you can keep doing upgrades to the existing platform without having to actually have someone buy something new, that's a huge value. just like that'd be the same as me giving you a console that like let's say a gaming console or kind of like the legends ultimate but different where i can go hey i can keep making this thing better over time to a point while you you we're extending the amount of time before you have to make another investment and that's huge if you're a gamer you buy something you want to enjoy it for a long period of time without having to buy something new and fpgas have given a lot of these companies the ability to like continue to upgrade things without actually having a physically hardware upgraded every every you know so often that's right and so in our case we can use this hardware what's great about it is it has hdmi out so this particular development board is designed for someone to build the circuitries for a video audio system that has hdmi out which is perfect for hardware emulating an arcade cabinet that you want to plug in to a modern display right so you actually have and there's a whole bunch of add-ons that are being developed like there's a a Mr. JAMA coming out, so you can actually connect into the input-output the JAMA connectors, so you can actually potentially put it in an arcade cabinet that already has JAMA support. The reason why that's so cool is that there's a lot of boards out there, including the 60-in-1, there's Pandora's Boxes, there's all these things that people will go and retrofit arcades with. The problem is, the emulation for games like Donkey Kong, if you play it the right way, which so many people haven't played donkey kong for for a long time the right way if you're not playing it off the original pcb the sound is better the movements are better it's fast you know the speed makes the speed actually matches what the game that the speed the game was intended to play so one of the best ways to actually recreate donkey kong is with an fpga so there's just so many but the zohar brought up a really good comment earlier before you put this one up there was that the ui uh yes it wasn't that one but yeah yeah the user interface in a in a mr to date right now no one has like cracked the code on creating like some amazing looking user interface it just it's mainly just text so so some people might go oh but i'm losing that feeling that i get when i boot up my my mini console and it does all that especially like the new turbo graphics if we want to point there the nostalgic feels are there where you're not going to get that so much in the menu system. The menu system is going to be just basic. Right. Unfortunately, there's that right. Justin, with all these things, don't you feel like it all comes down to like there's pros and cons of all of them? There isn't like one. Is there one like end all be all solution? I would argue there really isn't. It's kind of a combination sometimes. Yeah. Depending on what you want. I think I think you're right. It's it's I think time will tell. I think it's possible that we may get um you know we may get some systems out there because people you know people kind of know what they're looking for what they want um they want a system that's like you know an an nes classic that has the really high-end uh ui that looks that looks great um but they also want you know pretty good emulation so we we wanted to talk about the polymega because this is damn i didn't know you were doing this this is oh can i can i add something before you even start yeah go for it Guess what the light gun is on the poly mofo mega. What's that? It's the side in oh yeah What is it pronounced side in or send in whatever set aside and I call it side now, okay? But yeah, so which is really cool, but anyways we'll go back to that I'll let you know cuz he's got a lot of knowledge on this this is a whole new category This is not NES on a chip. This is not a system on a chip. That's running Linux This is not an FPGA now when the company first came out. They did say they were gonna do hybrid FPGA. And everyone was like, what the heck does that mean? Is that some marketing term? And they just messed up on it. What they wanted to do was basically build a mister with a UI that looked really good. They look pretty. Yeah. Yeah. So they're like, look, we'll put like some Linux operating system on the front end. But all you're doing is when you pick the game, it's going to load the firmware or the core onto the FPGA really fast and then switch over to the FPGA. That's what they wanted to do. I know, because really, if that actually was what happened, when you really think about it, that's not difficult to do. You're just saying, all right, when you execute the game, you're using Mr. Core, right? Like using one of the Mr. Cores, like that'd be pretty easy to do. Yeah, and they said they were going to like build their own cores. You know, I don't want to confuse people. They weren't actually going to use the Mr. Core, but it was going to be a core, you know, that emulated NES, Super Nintendo, Sega, TurboGrafx, PC Engine, all that stuff. But that's not what they ended up doing. But what they ended up doing was creating a new category. This is a PC. This is different. It's not Linux. It's a closed system. They said, well, I'm sure someone will probably figure out how to hack it. Why did they pivot, though, Justin? Did the pivot come from cost? Because I can imagine cost was probably... Because they're not doing it the way you explained it, right? They're not going to just call a core, an FPGA core at the back end. I heard they lost their developer. That's the rumor I heard. They had a developer that was doing the FPGA hybrid emulation. There was some argument and he left and once he left the project it was hard to replace them But they replaced them with developers that could do it all you know with a PC So this is this is a custom system right that that is running windows underneath And I guess the processing power on it is is pretty high-end So it's it's I guess compared to like a Raspberry Pi. It's like way better right like I I'm trying to find the specs here, but I remember looking at it, and it's like, oh, it's going to blow. It's also like $600, though. Yeah, that's the killer, though. But also look at what it emulates here. Yeah, the support is huge. And then they're doing pretty cool things. I remember reading into it, the reason why they're getting high compatibility, they're not using MAME. They are actually going out to commercial emulators that have support and integrating it onto their system, which we've talked about before how how arcade one up uses code mystics which is a commercial emulator company you know polymega is following that same ideas they're they're paying for the license for some of these high-end uh emulation systems and i think a few of them maybe were developed uh by their team so justin you and i have talked about this before like this to me is trying to be i think you you're you didn't even we didn't even talk about rehearsing it this way you did this so great but the way you flew into this like this is trying to be that perfect solution to the person that wants everything right it's like i want everything yeah one console now you're gonna obviously i mean check out check out the ui here man the ui does look pretty awesome so i mean they got carousels they got grids they got you know they're gonna allow you to uh do a search which is what you look at the animations on scrolling um see how they shade the The rows, I'm sorry, this is what I do for a living is I do UI development for, you know, for a pretty big company, right? And this is attention to detail. Look how well this UI is. And when you go into like it as a content detail page, you know, and the whole idea, this thing, everything you're seeing, you don't download ROMs, you actually dump the ROMs. Like you take a cartridge, it's all legit. you take the cartridge and you like um you know put it in and then you can dump it onto uh it's got like what is it like a two terabyte drive i want to say i'm sorry mr i'm sorry mr ui developer for a very big company what i don't know that that that came out weird i don't usually like to say where i work and it i just wanted to i just love it um i just wanted to emphasize that that's why i'm geeking out because literally all day long you know guys i'm a ui developer for a extremely large company I'm just kidding it didn't sound that way I'm just being a jerk yeah man but check it out imagine you know taking all the games that you have in your catalog CD based or cartridge based and loading it onto your own system and maybe someone will hack it so you can side load games but you also don't have to you could just I have a collection of a hundred of my favorite NES games and I think about 40 of my Super Nintendo games I'm starting to grow on Sega and the CD games you know are some of them are expensive some of them are cheap but I think I could really enjoy this system so yeah yeah no I'm actually looking forward to it you know what actually I know we're going off topic but you know what I pre-ordered that I was like I got all caught up in it I don't know why and I don't want to go down this route because I don't feel very well prepared to talk about it but i i i actually pre-ordered the uh intellivision amico i i pre-ordered that what i know i know i know but let's let's save that for another day because i think the chat's probably gonna blow up with a whole bunch of comments on that i don't want to go there on this episode but i did i did pre-order that uh i'm interested in it for the sense that i want to treat it like this is supposed to be some new console but let's not even go there i don't even and go there oh that's right this is this is the one that actually has like they're kind of trying to do the atari thing right where you're like hey i know those old games like we'll only get you so far so we're building new ones too and actually the atari was a pretty good one right because if it ever eventually comes out it actually has that same game that you love from the uh that dvd player that you bought what was it called the new one oh the new one yeah it doesn't have was no no no no no no uh i thought it has tempest tempest 3000 not 3000 no 3000 was only on the new one yeah so is it like tempest 4000 or something like that is very similar anyway so like a lot of people were like beating me up on that like i can't believe you did all that to play tempest 3000 but it wasn't about that it was about going back to some of the people the things that people had said i had an experience where i went to circuit city bought this goofy dvd player because some guy convinced me to and he's like he plays games and the first game i put in it was that Tempest 3000, I was like, dude, what the hell? This is cool. At that time period, Tempest 3000 looked badass, and the soundtrack was so cool. So if you never saw that live stream I did on it, it's pretty neat. And then we even explored some of the other games in the catalog after I troubleshooted it. It was funny. That episode, people would help me troubleshoot it because it was having some issues. But yeah, no, super fun. I love that. The Amico is a whole different thing. We'll have to talk about it. I think it'd be good for us to do a deep dive on the Amico and how we feel about it because I feel like it's being talked about a lot online right now. All right. So to wrap up this topic, out of all of the many consoles, I'm sure that many of you have bought many of the consoles. Why don't you go ahead and give us a one-word, one- or two-word chat. Which one was your favorite? Did you really, really love the NES Classic, the Super Nintendo Classic? Any of the AtGames old ones? does anyone have that second version of their sega genesis that actually takes carts and emulates really really well or did you like the sega genesis many are you liking to to hack cheat up on any of these consoles did you absolutely like the rest of us die and love the sony playstation classic not that was a real disappointment i was really excited about the dude i know the playstation classic really bummed me out like i was actually really excited about like i that one just pisses me it's a great emulation device if you want to then load it load emulators on it and hack it um you know and the easiest way to hack it to me is the mod my classic website like they've got a lot of resources to do it super simple but the thing is like that was a really big bummer like sega had the opportunity or sony had the opportunity to be really special with that it was so generic it had no soul it was like cool we're gonna release this and we don't it to me someone at sony has to have had but gotten fired for that because they took something that could have been this awesome opportunity and kind of poo-pooed on it and released something crappy it's really unfortunate so inspired imagining llc said the atari 2600 brandon with the yeah snes because it has starbucks too that was also really cool that they released that was actually really cool that's cool when they go and do you know what else is a super trend in gaming right now that i love have you seen where like they'll release a retro game uh or a modern game and they'll have like the retro version of it be like interchangeable with the game so they're doing that with Streets of Rage 4, you're going to be able to play with the old music. Streets of Rage 4 looks awesome. I'm so excited, actually. And we're going to figure out because on that day, I don't care if I have to take the day off of work. I know I'm going off topic is I am streaming Streets of Rage 4 that day. I don't even care. I'll stream it for hours, even if there's like two people online. Yeah, you guys are going to join us. We're going to do an all-day stream or something like that. So we got more kudos to the Super Nintendo Mini, the Mini and the Sega Mini. Yep, Zohar says the NES Mini was good. Genesis Mini is amazing. Yeah, I'll have to check out the build that you're doing. Paul Pru, heck yeah, baby. Streets of Rage 4. What do we got? We got, I'm sorry. I, like, lost a whole bunch. Okay, so we got Drifter. Sorry, I got to give Paul some credit. I'm taking it back. Hey, no. We're going down. We'll get there eventually, Ralph. All right, fine. I just want Paul. Paul's from my hometown. We grew up together I need to give Paul some love Okay we give Paul some love Let read through these You can read faster than me Why don you read them Drift for Comics SNES Classic NES Classic was great but the controllers were short Agreed. Actually, I did a video on that that no one watched. SNES Classic got it right and was an overall great buy. I agree. SNES Classic was awesome. I love that. I actually travel with one in my bag usually, so I have one in my bag with a little Elgato capture card if I want to stream something. I love the SNES Classic. I'm right there with you. PlayStation Classic sucks so bad. it was like 20 bucks for clearance that's right i think i have actually like two of them because like a walmart had it for like five bucks so i was like why yeah i know i bought another second one too and i don't know why uh oh dude uh first of all michael b the game genie pretty cool a canadian a canadian joining the show actually we have several canadian viewers so and michael actually has a youtube channel as well so definitely check that out only i really ever knew the nes classic until i started following retro ralph retro rap la i'm just kidding what's up paul he was replying to somebody so then we got the mod he modded sam bodded moth modded both the nes and splashed it back to normal nice with the face i love that emoji by the way you got to do zohar now nothing beats the huge ugly genesis three button controller i love it it's true they did a good job with that Genesis controller they threw in with the Sega Mini. That was pretty cool. And this is pretty cool. Jay Jones says he loves his PS Classic because he uses it like a pie in his 1-Up. Yeah. So just curious, actually, put that comment back up real quick. I'm curious, what USB encoder are you using with your PS Classic? I'm going to guess you're using a Zero Delay one, but I might be wrong. So let us know. That's actually pretty cool because if someone else wants to do that in an arcade 1-Up or something, it might be cool to know what USB encoder you're using. That's right. Let's see. I got the PlayStation Classic Cleric for like $15 and modded it. Super dimensional. At least you got the hardware right on the PS minis. Yeah, you know, luckily that worked out pretty good. You know what someone mentioned in the chat and what I think is next? Dude, we talked about this before, you and I. The next thing that if they want to just go nostalgia crazy, if they want to take everyone on this, everyone that watches our show and basically anyone that's about our age and just capture them with one device make a solid really awesome n64 mini oh man and you've got everyone on here will buy one guaranteed i guarantee you they would as long as the game you know pick the right games don't screw up on the game list people would buy the crap out of that i know it so i was thinking about don't think yeah yeah back in the day i talked to my buddy and i was like okay so here's the thing about the n64 mini if they ever do it the controller would be bigger than the mini itself so there's like shipping issues right like you know what i mean like hey we're gonna put it in a box you open up the box you got this gigantic controller and this tiny console it's like oh we're spending so much money on the box just to ship the gigantic controller um yeah that's true well we'll see maybe they could make a maybe they could somehow make like a i don't know like a sam says the n64 mini with online capabilities yes boom yep imagine that that'd be awesome i yeah i think one of those things so so one thing that would be really cool and this might be the evolution of these mini consoles like all of these companies are offering these like unlockable things like hold select here or press down and then select the game and you'll get another game available to you. But what do you think it would be like if they just made them online enabled and you could buy packs of games? I would probably do that. So kind of like the Switch classic, but without the Switch? Yeah, like let me buy packs. I would actually do that to keep it stock. If someone said that, I want to support. I know I do some videos that are questionable on the channel. I legitimately want to support the people that made the games. I do. like in most of the thing what so hard with this virtual boy mini you know that's really funny chris guys ought who does the ralph's retrospect he loves the virtual boy i think there's it had some fans here and there i don't feel like i ever really gave it a fair chance but also there's a lot of things that break in those over time you need to like update them and i he did like a bunch of fixes to it and he says he really enjoys it so i don't know i'll have to would you buy a jaguar mini hmm the jaguar is one of those systems man i don't know i don't know why i don't have any love for the jaguar i don't know maybe it was just because it was super expensive it seemed unattainable and even in my like later years where i had money i didn't just i don't know i didn't want to do it do you guys want if they had a jaguar mini like i don't feel like there's when i talk to people about retro gaming i don't see a lot of people like screaming from the mountaintops on the atari jaguar that's an interesting question dude you bring up a really interesting topic yeah i think we're getting chris did mention it this is what you needed to do i have no idea what so i have ribbons hard solder so i knew chris there was something to your there was something to your uh virtual boy experience yeah um i i did i gotta dude i gotta agree with this dude the jaguar controller what the hell it was like it was like an old grandma telephone or something like you could pre-detect it reminded me of a telephone where you remember those old phones you could put on your desk and you could actually hard you could write in the names of people oh yeah i expect you to be able to hit the button to call people yeah dude zohar you're all all on that one by the way zohar's like between zohar i gotta give like there's some notable like really solid chat going on like zohar is busting out some really good stuff we got i think i think so happy about something i think that's why it is super dimensionals busting out stuff like everyone is like i'm only naming a car but sega dreamcast mini oh well that would just dude that would just every single person would buy a sega oh this thing uh the nintendo needs to do a game boy mini so i was i yes that could a lot of people were talking about that like that could work like because we see the the game boy clones are out there right like you can get the uh what is it the flag case um i have one of those it's the um the retro flag yeah those are cool yeah those are cool because of the shutdown those are cool because when you put a pie in them they have the shutdown script that actually is pretty cool yeah if you want to build your own those are cool yeah yeah so eventually it would be cool if nintendo actually said okay we will we we will do that you know we'll do it justice we'll do it right and we'll license games on it and it would be pretty sweet what would you guys do what would you guys do here's something crazy what if what if a lot of people ask arcade one-up to make donkey kongs and all sorts of nintendo-based arcade games if nintendo themselves said i'm going to make a reaper i'm not going to license to one-up i won't do it what if nintendo's like screw them i'm not doing it and but they go but we are going to do it we're going to create our own the officially looking like a mini version not let's let's say it's like a little taller than a one-up or let's go even further let's say it's the size of a legends ultimate but the actual shape of a real nintendo cabinet just like would you buy a cabinet and then like cut it slimline a little bit slimline it a little bit so it's not quite the same the play choice 10 mini well that'd be really cool but well that'd be cool if it was this it'd be wait that's funny but no but seriously like wouldn't you guys buy like a legit looking donkey kong cabinet oh it was shaped the way the nintendo cabinet blow away every other title that arcade one-up has ever came out with to be honest donkey kong is such a huge title i know it's so weird because donkey kong is hard as shit when you really like you really think about it if you start logging some time in donkey kong it's like whoa donkey kong was hard it gives you like a wicked respect for uh for like guys like even though everyone says he cheats but i don't know whatever uh what's his name the dude with the long hair i always forget his name you know what i'm talking about right so yeah billy billy mitchell yeah actually it's funny dude i gotta tell you this really quick i know i'm all over the place i think because i had caffeine and now it's kicked in so i'm like yeah yeah justin yeah yeah we gotta do a one-up mini we're doing a one-up mini where we shrink justin and i i think he i think he meant arcade one-up many not our show i don't even know what i'm talking about right now pocket size we should do one-up mini episodes that'd be kind of cool it's actually not a bad idea one up many episodes many small episodes from you and i next week one up mini that are like quibby size or something one up weekly mini whatever i mean i like the idea we thought we've kind of done it a couple the the technically the episode where i discharged the crt was like one of those special episodes yeah steve weeby i love that i love that uh it's a fistful of donkey i can't remember the name of the documentary if someone remembers the name of the documentary if you've never seen it it's actually pretty awesome where you see billy mitchell go up against the steve weeby guy it's really cool and it kept my attention the whole movie uh regardless of if the guy is officially a cheater or not i don't know but uh but talk about a character man that guy's got a crazy personality i mean i can't tell if it's an act or if it's really how he is it's pretty funny all right oh thanks thanks mike for the crt uh yeah king of kong he also said he loved the crt episode which is really cool that just so you know that was all like pretty much legitimately my real reactions to everything i mean i really i actually had told justin before i'm like i don't know if i can even go through with it because i'll tell you guys this really quick and then i swear we'll we'll end the show but uh before justin and i were going to do that episode i was watching all these videos on how to discharge a crt but there was one where the guy was playing a prank but he was a guy that legitimately shows how to discharge crts so he has this thing where he brings in the screwdriver really close and then you hear the zap and then it like it he like blows back and there's a huge spark and he's like oh and then he tells you he's joking after but for some reason it sat in my mind as that was really going to happen to me. And so I was just like, I don't know. I was so stressed out. There was a bunch of fear in my mind because of that. But anyways. All right. Zohar did mention another something else that's pretty valuable too. What's that? He mentioned the Insert Coin documentary. I don't know when that's coming out, but that's going to be an awesome one because that focuses on Midway and Williams and sort of what happened there. That's going to probably be an awesome one that we'll want to promote the heck out of when it comes time when that's coming out. Yeah. it's funny people people keep on talking about that i need to like wail and do a lead but i don't know i'm just not feeling it tonight they want me to rock out but i'm just not i'm not i'm not i'm not really feeling it why i i think okay so right now our system says that we have 142 people watching and i have a feeling once they start playing our outro song that number is just gonna plummet it'd be really cool if the number went up it'd make me feel better i don't know hit that like button or something it might be guitar time i did ralph i i i'm gonna play a song okay everyone's going to hate it but watch ralph while i play it watch his face watch watch ralph's face when he does while i play i don't know about because i'm doing this i'm doing this corny corny song so that when i watch this show back i can watch ralph's face and i think that will be awesome like i went and found the worst song that i could perform for ralph how about this if you perform it can you then make everyone be tortured through whatever it that you're saying you're going to do but then then make everyone happy by doing rocking out afterwards maybe okay so here we go come on here okay okay so it's it's really corny okay it's really it's not shredding it's not heavy you're really scaring me right now corny well i think it would be nice If I could touch your body I know not everybody Has got a body like Ralph But I got him twice Before I give my heart away I know all the games he plays Cause I play them too Oh, but I need some time off Of that emotion Time to pick my heart off off the floor Oh, baby, now love, love comes down without devotion cause I take come on scream it with me baby but I'm showing you the door but I gotta have yeah we lost 10 people sorry guys you lost like 30 people oh man everyone's like out why do you want to touch my body that's gross I hugged and I didn't actually like mean it that way oh i mean it i i was just like playing the song because it's a creepy yeah i guess i could see how it could go that yeah it was coming it was coming over weird all right guys what can justin do to recuperate re re come back from that please can someone do something and it can't be closing time uh i got the only touching we did was in vegas when we gave the hug and it was only because you guys said that we had he's right just explaining it made it worse i just thought it would be worse like a really corny song and you know everyone asks for free bird a lot a lot it comes up a lot i think it's just it's just the song this is my reaction exactly ct that is my reaction exactly puking face emoji i think it's time for final thoughts right let's do let's do yeah sorry if you guys don't know my favorite show of all time is the office and so cringe is funny sometimes but maybe all right let's ralph all right what did we talk about today hey guys it's vital thoughts time so today we talked about this whole entire thing which is mini consoles we started with these poor emulation devices and over time people realized wow there are people that actually want to play this shit and so the companies got wise and some of them decided to do cash grabs but for the most part they actually gave us some pretty awesome devices which pulled on our nostalgic heartstrings we know that justin knows ridiculous things about the insides of these units that most of us don't give a rat's ass about. But you hung out with us for almost an hour, so that was pretty cool. And I think we all learned a little something together. We learned that we love to game. We learned that we love to play. And I didn't rehearse any of this part. Okay, I don't know. Okay, the end got really bad. I was doing alright until you got heavy I couldn't do it, I didn't know what to say what's beautiful about these endings is we don't rehearse them at all Justin will tell me sometimes he'll even say he's going to do something and he does the complete opposite so it just totally messed up on his part I know how I can win it all back for Ralph because he really likes let's do it I love this little riff. Yeah. One up weekly. All right. Thanks, guys. All right. Thanks, guys. The next one. The next one. Thanks, guys. Have a good one. Stay safe and wash your hands. Yeah. Like you said. That was really lame, Justin. I know. We should go Why are we talking like this This is stupid You want to touch my body I don't really want to Bye _(Acquisition: youtube_groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_ --- *Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: 2fbec96d-55bb-43f8-aa3a-e15e801521d6*