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Arcade1Up HDMI Game Console - You can add games too!

RetroRalph·video·15m 18s·analyzed·Oct 16, 2020
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.025

TL;DR

Arcade1Up HDMI console review: $40 casual device with ROM support, mediocre controller, variable emulation quality.

Summary

RetroRalph reviews the Arcade1Up HDMI Game Console, a $39.99 retro gaming device with 10 pre-loaded arcade games and the ability to add custom ROMs via microSD card. The review covers controller quality, emulation performance, controller compatibility testing, and comparisons to alternative devices like the Retro-Bit Super Retrocade.

Key Claims

  • The Arcade1Up HDMI console was shown at CES with a Sega Saturn-looking controller initially, but the final product uses a different banana-shaped controller design

    high confidence · RetroRalph directly witnessed the CES version and compared it to the final product

  • The device uses 2.4 GHz wireless connection for the controller, which provides stable connectivity without RF lag

    high confidence · Technical specification explained in review

  • The microSD card slot functionality for adding games is not advertised in the manual but believed to be functional

    medium confidence · RetroRalph states this feature exists but is undocumented, then demonstrates it working

  • All pre-loaded games run arcade ROMs rather than console versions

    high confidence · RetroRalph confirms this during gameplay demonstration

  • The device supports NES, Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, Game Boy Advance, and Atari 2600 via ROM loading, but does not play arcade or Neo Geo from sideloaded storage

    medium confidence · RetroRalph tested ROM compatibility but notes he didn't have all ROM types available for testing

  • The included controller has a mushy D-pad that requires more pressure to register inputs reliably

    high confidence · RetroRalph extensively tested the D-pad across multiple games and noted the issue consistently

  • Most third-party controllers (Retro-Bit Saturn, Hyperkin, 8bitDO M30, Retro-Bit Super Retrocade controllers) do not work with the device, but a generic Power A Xbox controller does function

    high confidence · RetroRalph tested multiple controllers with documented results

  • There is no key remapping functionality available on the device

    high confidence · RetroRalph explicitly states this limitation during testing

Notable Quotes

  • “They were using a Sega Saturn mold, I believe, initially. And if you look, I mean, there's a pretty big difference between the two. I would have preferred the Sega Saturn, but I don't know, for whatever reason, they went with this one.”

    RetroRalph@ 0:16 — Indicates design iteration and controller choice rationale

  • “The D-pad, though, however, feels real mushy to me. It feels like an extremely mushy D-pad, especially when you compare it to something like this Retro-Bit controller.”

    RetroRalph@ 0:51 — Key criticism of primary input device

  • “This micro SD slot, believe it or not, is here to add The Games, but that's not an advertised function. So that isn't in the manual, but it is something that I believe will work.”

    RetroRalph@ 2:02 — Documents undocumented feature that significantly increases device value

  • “All of these are actually running arcade ROMs, which is nice because, you know, there's been devices in the past that have hit the market that have had the console ROMs.”

    RetroRalph@ 3:03 — Confirms technical authenticity of pre-loaded games

  • “It's definitely not for the retro gaming enthusiast. It's for kind of the fly-by-night casual guy.”

    RetroRalph@ 13:13 — Clear positioning of the device's market segment

  • “You can't really customize it in any way. I do like that the screen is in 4x3, though. It's forced in that aspect ratio, so that's pretty cool.”

    RetroRalph@ 10:47 — Identifies both limitation and design choice appreciated by retro purist

Entities

Arcade1UpcompanyRetroRalphpersonRetro-BitcompanySegacompanyHyperkincompany8bitDOcompanyPower AcompanyCapcomcompanyData EastcompanyCESevent

Signals

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Arcade1Up prioritizes casual market accessibility and value ($39.99 price point) over enthusiast-grade hardware quality

    high · RetroRalph repeatedly emphasizes device is targeted at casual/fly-by-night users, not retro gaming enthusiasts, and notes various quality compromises justified by price

  • ?

    announcement: Arcade1Up released a new HDMI Game Console at CES with updated design from initial prototype

    high · RetroRalph directly references attending or viewing CES presentation showing earlier Saturn-style controller prototype

  • ?

    technology_signal: Arcade1Up implementing undocumented ROM sideloading via microSD, expanding device functionality beyond pre-loaded content

    high · RetroRalph demonstrates working ROM loading for NES, Genesis, SNES via microSD card, notes feature is not in manual but functional

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.046

0:00
Hey guys, welcome back to the channel. So today we're going to take a look at this Arcade 1UP game console. So this is brand new. We saw this thing surface at CES, except it looked a lot different. So it didn't have this almost banana-looking controller. It actually had a Sega Saturn-looking controller. So they were using a Sega Saturn mold, I believe, initially. And if you look, I mean, there's a pretty big difference between the two. I would have preferred the Sega Saturn, but I don't know, for whatever reason, they went with this one. The controller itself doesn't feel terrible in your hand. It's not too bad, but I don't really like the way it looks. They have this little sticker on the side. This is actually just a sticker. I was surprised by that. I thought it would maybe be some kind of etching, but it's just a sticker. So aesthetically, I'm not in love with it. And the buttons themselves, they just feel okay. They're not really great buttons, but I'm sure they'll be fine to casually play a device. The D-pad, though, however, feels real mushy to me. It feels like an extremely mushy D-pad, especially when you compare it to something like this Retro-Bit controller.
1:01
You know, this one's licensed by Sega. So I don't expect this thing to be amazing. The whole package itself is $39.99. So, you know, I'm not expecting the controller to be the best thing ever, but hopefully it at least functions okay. And then you got your buttons on the top. You have a power switch on off. Now, the thing is, the power switch on off is because this thing runs on two AAA batteries that you can put in the back. and then it uses a 2.4 gigahertz connection to the device itself. That's pretty good because it'd be better than using something like RF. So it should get a really stable connection. We shouldn't have any connection issues or really any additional induced lag because of that connection. So that's good. On top of that, they do have a wire that can connect from here to the console itself. That's if you don't want to use the wireless functionality and you want to, you know, hardwire it. But I can't imagine many people doing that because it would make you be a lot closer to the console than you need to be. So on the back side, you'll notice there is a micro USB port. This micro USB port is just there to power the device. Then there's an HDMI port, and then you have a micro SD slot. Now this micro SD slot, believe it or not, is here to add games, but that's not an advertised function. So that isn't in the manual, but it is something that I believe will work. So we'll have to take a look at that. And then the only other thing I'll say is if we don't end up liking this, what are our options to plug in different controllers? Is there any functionality where we can plug in additional controllers and possibly have something that we prefer a little bit more, should this be a device you want? But anyways, let's get into the device itself. We'll see what games are on it, and we'll dive a little deeper.
2:41
All right, so once it's all booted up, you see the game selection menu. You can pick from Pac-Mania, Dig Dug, Pac-Man, Mappy, Rally-X, Dragon Spirit, Super Xevious, Galaga 88, Rolling Thunder, and Galaga. So I'm going to enter Galaga really quick. Before you hit the game and you start, it tells you how to play the game. So it tells you what buttons to use to play it if you're unfamiliar. And then when you enter the game, you will notice these are the arcade ROMs. So all of these are actually running arcade ROMs, which is nice because, you know, there's been devices in the past that have hit the market that have had the console ROMs. And if you're gonna buy a device like this to play arcade games, it's nice to know you're getting the arcade ROM. So, that was a good call on their part. When I'm playing the game, I notice the D-pad feels decent, and, you know, with this game being pretty simplistic, you just hit A and right and left, you know, the D-pad's doing the job for what it is. Now, it does still feel, like, a bit mushy to me, but it feels responsive enough to play a game like this. So, basically, what I'm gonna do here is I wanna test the D-pad more thoroughly, So I'm gonna go with Pac-Man where I need to go up down right and left and see if it still feels decent to me So to go back to the main menu you just gonna hit and hold select for a couple seconds it bring you back to the main menu Okay let give Pac a shot What I really interested here is to see is this D because it is so mushy can it be responsive in a game like this where I can feel like I can make precise movements without it affecting my gameplay?
4:08
It seems decent. I'll say the one thing I am doing, you know, sort of intentionally is I'm sort of giving it a little bit more pressure when I push it into a certain direction, and I think that's kind of helping because it's so mushy. I notice if I'm a little bit light on the d-pad, it may not register that input the way I want it to, so it's not perfect, believe me, but it's playable, so kind of cool. Anyway, so I think what we'll do now is rather than go through every game, let's see, can I actually add games to this device. All right, so the question you've all been asking is how do you add games? So first off, you need to find a micro SD card. There isn't one included, so go get one. And then what you can do is format that, either ExtendedFAT or FAT32, and then you go and create a game directory. In that game directory is where you'll put your ROMs. Now, I think it's easier to organize them by the system. So I have NES, Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo. This does not play arcade to Neo Geo from what I can tell. It does play Game Boy Advance and Atari 2600. However, I didn't have any ROMs handy to do that. Now, really quick, as far as the formatting goes, it seems to like .nes extensions for NES ROMs. As far as Sega Genesis, .bin seems to be your best bet. And on Super Nintendo, .sfc or .smc will work just fine. So let's put the micro SD card into the device and see what happens and see how do we play these games. All right, so we got our micro SD card. We're going to insert it into the card slot here and see what happens.
5:38
As soon as we insert it, it says, do we want local storage or micro SD storage? So at this point, we're just going to take our controller and we're going to say we want micro SD storage and press A. Or sorry, start. And now we've got our menu system here. So from here, we can just navigate the menu. So if we want Sega Genesis, we can hit A and then it'll show us our Sega Genesis titles. If we want to go back a menu, we can hit B. want to go to nes again hit b to go back so i'm going to go into sega genesis and we'll try out streets of rage of course now you'll notice when i'm in the game it seems to map the buttons somewhat correctly so i've got my special, I've got my jump, and I've got my punch and kick. So that seems to be working okay. Now, the question is, if I were to replace this controller with, let's say, something else, would it actually map correctly, or would it just be kind of like a hodgepodge of controls? We've yet to check that out, so we will in a minute. But I want to show you how you get back to check out other games. So you just hit and hold select, just like you would in the included games.
6:55
and it's going to bring you back to that game selection menu. So from here, let's try out one more Sega Genesis game. We'll go with Sonic the Hedgehog.
7:06
All right, let's check out Sonic the Hedgehog and see how it runs. So, you know, I'm actually surprised in general that this device allows you to add your own games. But for, you know, the price, and if you were sort of someone that just wanted to casually experience this kind of stuff, It not bad but I definitely you know someone that tries to encourage people to if they getting back into retro gaming to do it on devices that would help them recreate the experiences as they remember them There a bit of input lag here in this device and it not perfect that for sure And you know the controller isn you know a common feel to the original controller It not terrible but it also not you know not very good, or it's definitely not comparable to, you know, the original controller. So yeah, so let's plug in a different controller. Let's see if we can get another controller to work in this device, because I think it could be a little bit more interesting if you could use a controller that you really prefer. Okay, so the first controller I'm going to try is this Retro-Bit licensed Sega Saturn controller. Now, I love this controller, and I wish this is what the console looked like in the first place, but, you know, they changed it around. So let's try it and see if it works. All right, so it doesn't appear that the D-pad is working, so that's a bummer. And the buttons don't seem to be functioning either, so that sucks. Okay, so I tried this Hyperkin controller, which is compatible with Xbox. I tried the 8-bit DOH. M30, which is awesome by the way, if you have a Sega Genesis Mini, definitely pick this up. And one from the Retro-Bit Super Retrocade, and none of them worked. So they all exhibited the same kind of behavior, or they just didn't work at all. So I have one more I'm going to try, and hopefully we can get that one to work. Okay, so the last one I'm going to try is a generic Xbox controller. It's a wired one. It's called Power A. It's a completely generic brand, but it does seem to have compatibility with a lot of things when I try it. So let's give it a shot. We'll plug it in here, fire up the interface and see if this this is going to be a go for us. OK, so we're back in the main interface and let's see if indeed it works. OK, so the analog stick does not and the D-pad does. So that's really cool. Let's fire up Rolling Thunder, one of the included games. Start seems to be mapped to start, which is good. We'll see. We'll see how this thing goes. All right. Coins go in OK. Okay, after this we'll, uh, nice. Well, that's cool. This controller tends to work with a lot of things for some reason. It's a super generic controller, but I always have luck with this one for whatever reason. So, I'm totally not having luck in the game. Alright, we're going to exit the game, and then I'm going to try one of the, let's try playing it with this controller with one of, like, let's say the Super Nintendo games and see how that goes. Alright, we're trying Super Mario All-Stars here, and it seems like everything's mapping okay. but this game from an emulation perspective is having some audio issues. There's a little bit of, it almost looks like screen tearing. So it's definitely not playing this game amazingly well, but yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty glitchy, but it is working with the controls. Let's try, let's try an NES title really quick before we sort of wrap this up. Okay, we're going to go with one of my all-time favorite NES games, which would be Punch-Out!! and we'll see how it works. but I gotta admit, like, the only thing you have to really keep in mind is it's obviously a lot better with a better controller, but also there's no way to remap keys here. So if for some reason something isn't mapped properly, and I have had instances where it's not mapped properly, you can't really fix it. So just keep that in mind. This isn't like the ultimate emulation device or anything like that. It's a pretty run-of-the-mill emulation device, and you can't really, you know, you can't really customize it in any way. I do like that the screen is in 4x3, though. It's forced in that aspect ratio, so that's pretty cool.
10:54
You can't actually change the aspect ratio or anything like that. But it's nice to see it's actually in the proper aspect ratio and not stretched.
11:13
Yeah, I'm actually pleasantly surprised. It plays a lot better with this, obviously. Oh, man. I got that off really slow. Alright well you know so we tried different controllers We you know saw the emulation capabilities The included games seemed to play fairly well I think my biggest gripe is probably that controller's just really not a very good controller. You know, there's no way around that.
11:42
But at the same token, you know, if you're serious about emulation and gaming like this, you're probably not going to be looking at a device like this. But I do have a suggestion if you are serious about it. Okay, so the device I was talking about is the Retro-Bit Super Retro-Cade. So I figure if you're going to spend $39.99 on this arcade one-up device, you might want to take a look at this for a couple reasons. It's got 90 classic games that are all licensed. They've got Capcom, Data East, and a whole bunch of other ones. And if you scroll down here in a second, you'll see the games list. It's pretty damn good. So they got Final Fight, Final Fight 2, Final Fight 3. There's arcade ROMs on here. It's pretty awesome. And this thing can support a whole bunch of really great controllers too. So the controllers that come with it are half are OK. They're not great, but you can you can put the retro bit Sega officially licensed controllers on it. So it's pretty awesome. And this thing can actually play Neo Geo. It can play arcade ROMs. It can play Super Nintendo NES Genesis doesn't play anything past like it doesn't do PlayStation one or anything like that. But this is a pretty cool device and it's still around and they still sell it. And I was looking at it. I bought it November 11th of 2018 and I've really enjoyed it. I had never did an official review on it. But this is really cool and something to consider if you're going to spend $40 on this. You might want to take a look at this as well. All right, guys, it's final thoughts time. So what do I think about this Arcade 1-Up HDMI console? Guys, it's $39.99, right? It's $40. What do you expect for $40? It's, you know, it's one of those devices. It's definitely not for the retro gaming enthusiast. It's for kind of the fly-by-night casual guy. And I don't think, you know, it should be really considered anything more than that. So if you just enjoy tinkering with things and you have to have every single device that Arcade 1UP makes or any retro gaming device, then by all means, go for it. You'll probably have fun tinkering with it, side loading games and having fun with it that way. but yeah i just i can't stress enough how it's not junk but it's it fits a category that more likely than not if you're really into retro gaming you're you're not gonna consider a device like this anyway it was fun to play with and i gotta commend them for you know doing something a little bit different and outside of the box you know maybe we'll see more of things like this and they'll sort of build on this concept but uh but we'll see i guess it's to be determined it was the first time they did it and I think it'll probably sell well for the holidays being priced at what it's priced at and it's in all the right places so we'll see we'll see but yeah if you enjoyed this content definitely give me a thumbs up consider subscribing to the channel and definitely put your comments below I want to know what you think of this thing is this something you're interested in or you know not really and then also consider hitting the notification bell so you can be informed of other videos like this one. Now, I will say, being this is $39.99, definitely if you're into something like this, like you want to have an emulation device and you want something simple and easy to use like this one, consider checking out the Retro-Bit Super Retro-Cade. I think you'll really enjoy it. It is one of my favorites. It's two years old and it's still going strong. And I don't know why it didn't get as much attention as it should have. I think it was a really cool device. So that's it for now, guys. We will see you on the next one. Outro Music