Anbernic released a competitor, the RG35XX

10.03.2023 0 By admin

My favorite emulation device of last year was the Miyoo Mini.

It’s a perfect little pocketable emulator that plays everything up until GameBoy Advance and even PlayStation One on a budget.

It’s a fantastic emulation device for beginners and seasoned emulation enthusiasts.

Its biggest flaw was the stock.

Miyoo has been terrible at keeping up with demand.

A few months later, Anbernic released a competitor, the RG35XX.

It’s significantly bigger, which isn’t saying much, but it does all of the same things as the Miyoo Mini just as well, and it’s actually in stock and available.

Now, Miyoo is back.

They’ve released their bigger bro, the Miyoo Mini Plus.

It’s exactly the same as the original Miyoo Mini in every way, except it’s slightly bigger, has a slightly bigger screen, and wifi.

The bigness is actually a massive help.

I love my original Miyoo Mini for its portability, but playing it for long play sessions can get uncomfortable.

These shoulder buttons are so small, they’re basically useless, which means you can forget about playing PlayStation One games.

They’re really only good for pressing every so often.

And in PlayStation One games, you gotta use them all the time, so you can forget that.

This is the reason I came to love the Anbernic RG35XX, although you do lose a little bit of that pocket ability and you get a way worse name, and you lose a little bit of the charm of this little guy.

So now, we have a middleman, not too big, not too small.

It’s kinda just right, which begs the question, with all these options now, which one of these budget tiny guys is the one to get? (gentle ambient music) This video is sponsored by Factor.

Hmm, yeah, yeah, I think that’s good.

(stomach growls) – [Stomach] Hey.

– Was that you? – [Stomach] Yeah, bro, I’m hungry.

– Oh, I’m sorry man.

I haven’t been thinking about food.

I’ve been in grind mode all day.

– [Stomach] Grind mode? You don’t even work.

You play video games for a living.

– What are you, my mom? – [Stomach] (growls) Please, I’m hungry.

– Okay, let me think, let me think.

(stomach growling) I know I got those Factor meals in the fridge.

– [Stomach] Factor? What’s that? – Well, let me tell you.

(object thuds) Ow! Hey, man.

Hey, I know what it is already.

You don’t gotta hit me.

Oh, I love (indistinct).

Get Factor and enjoy clean eating without the hassle.

Simply choose your meals and enjoy fresh flavor-packed meals delivered to your door.

With Factor, skip the trip to the grocery store and skip the chopping, prepping, and cleaning up too.

Factor’s fresh, never frozen meals are ready to eat in just two minutes, so all you have to do is eat and enjoy.

My favorite part about Factor is that I have just a bunch of meals in my fridge ready to go whenever I want.

I don’t even have to think about food time.

I like putting them in the oven where it takes just seven minutes to make them.

And you could try it for yourself over at Factor75.

com or just click the link in the description below and use code “YAHUNGRY50” for a whole 50% off your first Factor box.

– [Stomach] Ah, that was good man.

Thank you.

I’ll be quiet now.

– Thank you.

(fart sound) – [Stomach] Hey, that wasn’t me.

– [High Voice] Sorry.

– So word on the street is that Miyoo or whatever the hell the name of the company is, ran into manufacturing issues on the original Miyoo Mini.

So they made the Miyoo Mini Plus to fix those issues, the biggest of which was the screen.

It was hard for them to source this little tiny IPS screen.

And it’s much easier to source this 3.

5 inch IPS screen that you see on all different types of retro emulation devices, including the RG35XX.

It’s the same screen.

This means that the whole device has to be bigger to accommodate that screen.

This also means we’re probably never gonna see the original Miyoo Mini again, which is a shame because I love that thing.

I didn’t throw it, it’s right here.

I can’t, I can’t get rid of you.

It also seems like their efforts were completely in vain because they had the exact same sort of stock issues that they had before.

READ  How to beat The TOXIC MIST in a breath away

I was sitting there on the day of their supposed official launch on their AliExpress page with my trigger finger ready only for it to be sold out within less than a minute and immediately bought up by scalpers and thrown up on eBay for over 300% markup.

I got this particular unit from keepretro.

com provided free of charge.

Thank you very much, KeepRetro.

I don’t know when the hell this review ever would’ve happened otherwise because guess what? It’s also sold out on keepretro.

com.

The new size does feel a lot nicer to play.

The slight bump on the L2 and R2 buttons does help a bit.

The tiny chin still isn’t as comfortable as the giant chin on the Anbernic, but it’s a compromise for portability.

It is still overall more comfortable to play than the original.

My thumbs aren’t as smashed together.

But they’re all great devices, I’m just nitpicking here.

Pretty much everything else internally about the Miyoo Mini Plus is the same as the original.

The battery is 1,000 milli amp hour more than the original, but they’re not claiming better battery life.

The battery life is exactly the same because the screen is bigger and the screen sucks up more juice, so it evens out.

This new device does come with wifi, where the original did not.

This could become useful for like scraping box art for your ROMs or even just transferring your ROMs onto this thing wirelessly.

But it has a perfectly functional micro SD card slot and I’d much rather just use that to transfer ROMs.

This version from KeepRetro.

com came with a 64 gigabyte micro SD card and a butt ton of games.

I don’t know how they get away with that, but I’m not gonna ask questions.

Usually the ROMs on these things are terrible quality and there’s so many, it’s impossible to sort through.

And the naming conventions are horrible, but these are actually pretty decent.

As far as I can tell, there are no duplicates and they don’t arbitrarily put numbers in front of the file name.

The alphabetical order is intact and it’s easy to navigate through.

Which should be a given, but I’ve tested enough of these devices to very much appreciate the organization here.

So it’s honestly a pretty fantastic right out of the box experience.

Emulation quality is very good too, but it’s not perfect.

GameBoy Advance runs great, no complaints there.

PS One runs great too.

Some frame skips in like “Resident Evil 3” but I’d consider it playable.

It even passes the “Yoshi’s Island” test.

I think it’s been long enough since I’ve explained this and I do still get questions about it, so I’ll explain why I even do the “Yoshi’s Island” test.

“Yoshi’s Island” is one of the more graphically intensive Super Nintendo games.

You might know that like “Starfox” famously uses the SuperFX chip to achieve its, like graphical fidelity in the complex 3D world of the ’90s.

But “Yoshi’s Island” uses the SuperFX2 chip.

So a lot of the like earlier emulation consoles buckle under the sheer power of Yoshi, but that hasn’t really happened lately in any of the emulation devices I’ve tested.

They’ve all been pretty great.

I did, however, notice some pretty bad over scan flickering at the top and bottom of the screen, which is a little sad to see.

I cannot for the life of me find the aspect ratio settings.

The full screen is four by three, so I guess it’s fine.

I did also notice the device does have a sleep mode, which is great, but it just seems like the device is still on, the screen is just off.

It’s kind of a bad sleep mode.

If you turn the device off completely, your game is no more.

But I guess I’m happy the sleep mode is there at all.

This will most likely all be fixed with Onion OS.

If you’ve seen basically any video on the original Miyoo Mini, you’ve probably heard of Onion OS before.

On the Anbernic RG35XX, it was called Garlic OS.

These are all custom firmwares made by the community that will optimize all of the emulators.

They will allow you to switch the aspect ratio a little bit easier.

READ  Tears of the Kingdom - glorified DLC, vs the most groundbreaking game ever?

It will also unlock multitasking so you can switch between different games on the fly and it will save your spot in that that previous game.

It will also give you a much better sleep mode.

It’s an all-around much better experience, but it’s not available yet on the brand new Miyoo Mini Plus.

It’s probably just too new.

But I got good news.

I got a preview build.

Let’s go put it on this little (ding) guy.

This was just as easy to put on as the previous one was, so no worries there.

I feel like I shouldn’t say who gave me this build, just in case they could get in trouble, but I think it might be pretty obvious.

You just have to format the micro SD card to FAT32, drag and drop all the files that they give you, and turn it on and that’s it, you’re ready to go.

I’m using the analog theme because I think it looks the cleanest and the best.

This is still in beta, so things still look a little wonky.

You’ll see if I change the theme to anything else, the text looks weird, like it’s placeholder or something.

This is very much a beta build.

There are still bugs.

When I first booted this thing up, it immediately made the Super Nintendo aspect ratio pixel perfect.

Now it’s still showing stretched and it just reversed the theme on me.

That was weird.

Menu button and start is to change the aspect ratios.

Jesus, this thing should have came with a manual.

Apparently, the developers are French, so this is a French version of “Sonic Advance 2”.

And it looks like the multitasking isn’t working in the same way that it did on the original Miyoo Mini.

So maybe this isn’t as far along as I thought it was, but it does resume gameplay right away.

So even if you’re not multitasking, if you leave the game, play something else and then come back, it saves your spot.

So at least there’s that.

That’s still way better than the stock experience.

Hopefully, you’ll have this sort of multitasking where you just press the middle button once and you can switch between all of the recent games that you played.

And then holding it will leave and go back to the main menu, I think.

Yep.

The sleep mode still does look like it leaves the system on, which I don’t like.

But luckily, if you turn the system off completely, it will still save your spot in the game that you’re at.

So that’s still way better than the stock experience.

I have faith that when this launches, this will be a super powerful device.

I still think that even this beta build is still better than whatever the hell this thing comes with stock.

I think by the time you guys get your hands on one of these things, if ever, things will be ironed out.

One thing that I noticed on here that I didn’t notice before in other Garlic and Onion products is this feature to play a random game.

That doesn’t work.

Wouldn’t that be fun if it worked though? Now we have three devices that are all marginally different.

I think we can just straight up rule out the original Miyoo Mini because of its availability.

I don’t think you’re ever gonna see this thing again, which is a shame because it might be my favorite, sheerly because of its size.

It’s just so cute.

No, it’s ’cause it’s pocketable.

I can take it anywhere, it’s awesome.

It’s pocket ability outweighs it’s cumbersome grip for long play sessions because I don’t need it for long play sessions.

I need it for short bursts when I’m on the train or something, and don’t have anything else with me.

So if you have one of these already, I absolutely do not think it’s worth upgrading to the new one now unless you absolutely need wifi for some reason.

So I guess I’ll just be comparing the new Miyoo Mini Plus to the Anbernic RG35XX.

The Anbernic is $56 from the official Anbernic website or $65 from keepretro.

com.

The Miyoo Mini Plus is $67 from their official AliExpress store and $70 from keepretro.

com.

But good luck finding it on any of those.

The Anbernic is still available right now and it’s, I guess, slightly cheaper.

READ  The biggest mysteries behind God of War Ragnarok

So points in favor of Anbernic.

With Garlic OS and Onion OS, they’re both fantastic devices with pretty much the same features and fantastic emulation quality.

The stock experience is slightly better on the Miyoo Mini Plus because the included ROMs are better and there’s a sleep mode, even if it is a little primitive.

The Anbernic doesn’t have sleep mode at all until you put Garlic OS on it.

But these custom firmwares are so easy to put on, I’d much rather compare these two after that slight modification.

And that makes them, more or less, the same.

I do like the slightly smaller form factor of the Miyoo Mini Plus and the shoulder buttons are way nicer, but the slightly longer chin on the Anbernic is not a deal breaker at all.

It’s still plenty pocketable and it has a better grip because of it.

The Anbernic does have an HDMI out, but you can only really use wired USB controllers with a USBC adapter or the device itself with the HDMI cable hanging off the top like it’s some sort of weird ’90s hacker thing.

Too big, too stretched.

I do think it’s a very interesting inclusion.

I just don’t think it’s a very useful inclusion.

But hey, I guess it’s an entire feature that the Miyoo Mini Plus is missing.

I will say the biggest downside to the Anbernic is the Dpad.

I love the way it feels, but it has a massive misinput problem.

It favors left and right inputs way too much.

This device does not have the same sort of Dpad issue that the Anbernic has.

You can see I can have full rotation of the Dpad, which is fantastic.

But at the end of the day, the Anbernic RG35XX is slightly cheaper, but, most importantly, available.

Unless Miyoo can get outta these stock issues, Anbernic wins.

Which is unfortunate because Miyoo had the design first.

I think Anbernic might have ripped them all.

Is that really that big of a deal? They’re all bootleg GameBoys anyway.

This (ding) came with a bunch of different versions of “Pokemon” on it.

You think they paid for those? I don’t love the black version they gave me with the colored buttons.

I think this is the weakest of all of the designs that it comes in, but luckily, there’s a great community of DIY or retro handheld enthusiasts out there.

It’s very easy to customize your Miyoo Mini or Anbernic RG35XX or even your Retroid Pocket.

I hope to have a video very soon where I customize all of these different devices.

I just bought a bunch of stuff.

They take a while to ship.

Make sure you subscribe if you wanna see that.

This will look way cooler soon.

So what do you guys think about the Anbernic, no, f, the Miyoo Mini Plus.

God, they’re all the same.

Is this gonna get you into retro emulation or were you into it before? Are you gonna get this one even though you have a million other (ding) things like I do? Leave it in the comics below.

Add me on Twitter, any and all of this other social media garbage, I hope Miyoo fixes their stock issues because I would love to recommend theirs.

I want theirs to get into more hands.

I want more competition for Anbernic, but I mean, they’re crushing it now because they just have the sheer numbers.

Anyway, thanks for being here.

I stream on twitch.

tv/wulffden every once in a while.

You can come over there and hang out with me.

I’ve been streaming fricken New Super Mario Brothers Rom hacks.

I usually stream at night every day that I upload on YouTube.

So if you’re seeing this right when I upload it, come to Twitch tonight.

Of course, the most important thing that you could do to help support this channel is just subscribe right here, thank you very much.

And share this video with a friend.

A friend who maybe you want to get into devices like this.

Thank you very much.

Have yourself a very good week.