Testing Handheld Emulators and Devices: A Comprehensive Review

When it comes to testing handheld emulators and devices, there are several options available that can provide an immersive gaming experience. One popular choice is Duck Station, which allows users to emulate various systems at full speed. However, I've opted for a different approach, using PC SX Rearmed with Retro Arch as my primary emulator. This system has proven to be reliable and efficient in emulating games from multiple consoles.

Another emulator worth mentioning is Moin 64 Plus FZ, which is specifically designed for the N64 console. Its performance has been impressive, allowing me to play a wide range of games without any significant issues. If I were to use retro Arch with Moin 64 Plus, I could enable some bezels to enhance the overall visual experience. However, I prefer the Android version of Moin 64 Plus FZ for its ease of use and compatibility.

The RG Cube is another popular handheld device that supports emulation. Its performance has been exceptional, allowing me to play various games at full speed. When it comes to emulators, Mopin through retro Arch offers a great experience with minimal bezels, making the screen look visually appealing. However, this setup requires more configuration and tweaking compared to other options.

PSP Emulation on Android

-------------------------

One of the most significant challenges in PSP emulation is the screen resolution issue. Using PPSSPP, I've found that the games appear stretched out due to the high screen resolution. To address this, I've adjusted the graphic settings to use autoscaling, which allows the emulator to scale the game properly without losing too much of the top and bottom of the screen. This setup may not look as pristine as others, but it provides an acceptable visual experience.

PSP emulation on this device has been excellent, with games running smoothly even at higher resolutions. I've tested Chains of Olympus, one of the harder games to run, and it performed admirably. Using the Vulcan backend, I was able to run the game at 4X resolution without any significant issues. This level of performance is impressive given the device's hardware capabilities.

Marvel vs. Capcom 2 Emulation

-----------------------------

For testing Dreamcast emulation, I've chosen Redream as my primary emulator. Its ability to upscale games and provide a smooth experience has been exceptional. The d-pad feels responsive, with decent travel and no issues with input lag. Special moves are also executed smoothly, making it an excellent choice for fans of the series.

The device's design and build quality have also received praise. While some units may exhibit screen bleed or light leakage, this is a manufacturing issue that not all devices will experience. The beige unit I've been using has minimal screen bleed, making it almost imperceptible to the naked eye. In contrast, the purple unit with similar settings exhibits more pronounced screen bleed, particularly in dark environments.

Conclusion

----------

In conclusion, testing handheld emulators and devices can be a complex task, but the results are well worth the effort. From PC SX Rearmed with Retro Arch to Moin 64 Plus FZ on Android, each emulator has its strengths and weaknesses. The RG Cube's performance has been impressive, while Redream's Dreamcast emulation has provided an exceptional experience.

As I continue to explore and test these devices, it's clear that there is a wealth of options available for handheld enthusiasts. Whether you're looking for a specific console or just want to try out various emulators, there's something out there for everyone. In my next review video, I'll be sharing more information and insights into the world of handheld emulation, so stay tuned!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again today we're going to be taking a look at the allnew am bernick RG Cube now I do think that this is one of their oddest handhelds but after using it for about 2 days so far I've actually grown to kind of like what they've done here now it's definitely not for everybody as you can see by the design and to tell you the truth when they first announced this and showed off the first images and video I kind of chuckled to myself thinking what is this thing they do offer a few different color variants I've got the purle version here and in images online I originally thought it was going to be more pink it's definitely more purple and I'm not sure how well it's coming across on camera but I've also got the beige White Version and over on their website they have two more colors you can go for black or the gray and that gray really does kind of give off a famicom Vibe given those red accents they added there so yeah I think the beige white does look pretty good it's a little off-white obviously with the beige name and uh having those colored buttons really does let it kind of stand out as you can see with both of these units we do get some RGB around those analog stigs and the first thing a lot of people will notice is the odd screen it's actually got a resolution of 720x 720 so we've got a perfectly Square screen here it's an IPS fully laminated round back we've got these analog triggers with some really nice travel a lot more than some of their other devices we've also got our power button and our volume rocker over here and this is an actively cooled unit which means it does have a fan and heat sink in it because we're working with a pretty powerful CP when you give compared to other devices they've released micro SD card support for Easy Storage expansion and we've got some grips around here on the back which make it really easy to kind of hang on to textured grips so this thing isn't going to be slipping out of your hand and it does kind of fit right in there very nicely up top we've got our USB type-c port micro SD card slot a 3.5 mm audio jack and our exhaust vent for that built-in cooling system over on the right hand side again power button volume rocker and moving around to the bottom not much going on but we do have dual stereo speakers these are downward facing this thing gets pretty loud there's not a lot of Base to it but I'm surprised that the sound output when it comes to the specs of the RG Cube for the CPU they opted to use the uniso t820 this is a 6 nanom 8 core arm s so and with this we get one a76 core up to 2.7 GHz 3 a76 cores up to 2.3 and four a55 cores up to 2 .1 we've also got a Mali g57 GPU at 850 MHz and you might recognize this chipset from another handheld they recently released known as the RG 556 we've also got 8 GB of lpddr4x RAM 128 GB of ufs 2.2 storage plus micro SD card support the screen is a 3.95 in IPS with a resolution of 720x 720 definitely an odd Choice here fully square but this works out pretty well when you want to use bezels with retro consoles it's got 5 GHz Wi-Fi bluo 5.0 dual stereo speakers a 5,200 mAh battery up to 7 hours of gameplay out of this thing and it's running Android 13 so first and foremost this is an Android device we do have that built-in Wi-Fi and access to Google Play didn't have to do anything it does support OTA updates so once we get some fixes for anything that's going on after the community gets their hands on them and Bernette can fix it pretty easily with one of those updates and with access to Google Play we don't have to side load anything unless you really want to now it's always possible to do so we've got Android 13 it is a touchcreen so for games that you need to use that touchcreen to access the menus not a problem here the RGB around the analog sticks can be controlled but it's not fully controllable so for instance we can't change one to Blue the other to red but uh from our menu here here we do have lighting settings so we can go with like a ripple single white Marquee is the one I like kind of gives us that rainbow effect personally I think they could have done without the RGB on this device but uh some people might like this and uh Marquee is definitely the one that I've been going with against that purple I do think it kind of sets it off it does look pretty decent like that of course you could run this handheld all day long with the stock Android Launcher you could also go through and install a front end if you want to but we do have game mode and this can be accessed from the menu or the R button on the device itself it'll bring us right in here that way we've got access to all of our emulators it's really easy to set up I've got everything on a Micro SD card in specific folders and all I told this thing to do was scan those folders and put everything in the correct location not a lot of customization that we can do with the uh game mode here simple enough for basically anybody to use and if you're not looking for super flare you could definitely get by with this we also have a few other device specific settings here so if we pull down from the top we can go to high performance mode and along with this we've also got fan modes that we can use stop auto cool strong obviously stop is going to be fan completely off here I'm usually at Auto doesn't get too hot especially with the games that I've been emulating and playing right now and it doesn't get that loud on strong you can hear it without any sound going with your game but once you've got sound up past 30% you're really not even going to notice that fan I like setting it up in high performance mode just to get the best out of this but keep in mind I mean when you're playing lower in emulators you're really not going to need to go up into that mode you can leave it right there stock setting and basically all it's really going to do is change that Governor to high performance and another thing we have here is a key mapper so this comes in really handy for games that don't support controllers on Android IE gench and impact there are a few others from here we can rearrange these icons put them on screen they're going to correspond with physical buttons built into the controller so yeah setting those onscreen touch points for your gam pad is really simple with this unit the overall feel of this handheld isn't bad at all and we've got these grips around back uh it's just a nice little texture there to kind of put your fingers in it's not going to slip out of your hand after playing for a long period of time uh one thing that I'm a little concerned about is the d-pad in my opinion am bernick does make some of the best d-pads for these arm-based imulation handhelds but they really kind of swapped it out here it feels a little harder than most of their other handhelds but we will need to run some test by the end of the video the button travel for the face buttons is great and we've got those conductive pads so it really does kind of feel retro here and of course we've got those analog triggers otherwise known as linear triggers I like these for racing games that way we can just give it a little gas when we need to for drifting or coming around the corner overall it's a pretty solid little handheld and it is way more able than it looks it kind of sits right in the hand now if you've got much larger hands then this might seem pretty tiny to you we do have close to a 4in display here but it's really compact when it comes to Game Mode this is going to use a combination of retro Arch and Stalone emulators depending on what game you want to play we're going to get right into some Game Boy and I've already started this game up so I can actually start directly from where I left off or I can start a new game and I did use the colorization option here so from within retro Arch it's pretty easy to set up tons of different palletes that we can use here and one of my favorites that I've been using with certain games recently is kind of what I call the pit boy palette and it's here somewhere but yeah I mean there's just a ton to choose from not everybody's going to want to play games like this but I think it's pretty cool just to mess around with it really does give off that pit boy Vibe but I'm usually going with that game boy P Green and you might notice we've got a really nice bezel around the screen there this is going to set it up for the correct aspect ratio of the original Game Boy the DMG that's what I'm playing here and it does look really nice on this IPS it's not an AMOLED or anything like that but we've got a higher resolution than most of their other handhelds on the market 720x 720 and I did mention this has those downward facing stereo speakers they sound pretty good I mean for what we've got here the volume gets super loud not a ton of Base it is a bit tinny but I mean I'm really surprised by how loud this thing can really get moving over to some GBA this is one of my favorite systems to play on this device and we've got another bezel personally I'd love to see the community come up with specific bezels for this device this one is a little offset but I mean it definitely gives you that Game Boy Advance feel and it really does allow us to kind of get that correct aspect ratio checking out some Genesis otherwise known as Mega Drive in other parts of the world and I know it's a bit hard to see but the best bezel with this does look pretty decent uh again it would be nice when the community gets their hands on these to kind of create device specific bezels for the screen here but I got to say one of the most impressive systems to play on this is SNES and I say impressive we've got more than enough power even with lower end devices to play these games at full speed but just having that real aspect ratio with the bezel it does feels super nice with some SNES games rocking out with some PlayStation 1 emulation here we've got more than enough power to emulate these games at full speed and you can really pick and choose which emulator you want to use you could go with duck station but I'm using PC SX rearmed with retro Arch another system I've would playing quite a bit on the RG cube is N64 right now I'm using moin 64 plus FZ I'm not using retro Arch so we don't have a bezel or anything like that if you wanted to go with mopin through retro Arch you could definitely enable some bezels to make it look really nice but I think that this emulator on Android is kind of the way to go and I've tested quite a few games here7 all of them run really well but of course we're going to run into a few little weird issues here and there given this screen resolution and Screen aspect ratio for instance here's PSP using PPSSPP you can see it's really stretched out now there are ways to fix this but we are going to lose a lot of that screen we're just going to go to our graphic settings and instead of using stretch we're going to use autoscaling so it will scale these games properly but we're going to lose a lot of the top and the bottom of this screen so once I get back into it you'll see everything does look normal but we've got a lot of room that we could definitely utilize with different emulators now PSP emulation on this device is really great I'm running this at 2x resolution chains of Olympus one of the harder games to run and it'll go right through every once in a while there's a little bit of a hiccup I'm using the Vulcan back in but from game to game you can up or lower that resolution for the most part A lot of the easier stuff is going to run it up to 4X and with that we're a little over the 720p resolution of the screen but it does look really great like that this is just at 2x right now and I really haven't run into many issues the last thing I wanted to test here was this dad with a fighting game we're going with Marvel versus Capcom 2 by the way I'm using the reddream emulator and this thing really emulate Dreamcast games even upscaled pretty high we've got more than enough power for that now the d-pad doesn't feel horrible it's just a bit firmer than I'm used to and I'd love to have a little more pivot or a little more roll to it face buttons are awesome we've got those conductive pads underneath them and we've got some really nice travel getting into this it's pretty simple to pull off these special moves I didn't miss many of them and this is the first time I'm trying it out so far I think it's a pretty interesting little handheld but I did run into a couple little things here and there now on this beige unit if you take a look I've got a totally black PNG right now light bleed or screen bleeding is super minimal I mean it's really not noticeable and by the way I've got both of these set up the exact same way 100% screen brightness when you take a look at the purple unit that I have here you can definitely notice that screen bleed or that light bleed same exact image that I'm using here and just moving the device a bit you can kind of get rid of it in certain spots it'll be more pronounced than others so yeah this is uh definitely a manufacturing issue and not every single unit is like this because you know taking a look at the beige unit that I have here with the same settings same image it's super minimal I mean it's not noticeable at all to the naked eye but this purple one you can really really tell especially going into like a dark menu you can really see that light coming through on the edges there so yeah it's definitely a really Oddball handheld but after using it for a few days I've gotten used to it and kind of enjoy the whole form factor here I've got a lot more testing that I want to do with this I definitely want to get some GameCube up and running and I did test it with the stock Dolphin Emulator at the lowest resolution either openg GL or Vulcan with some harder to run games it is a bit stuttery but I think we can get a bunch of games up and running on this at full speed it's not the most powerful chip set but it's very capable given what kind of handhelds that Amber neck has released in the past but that's going to wrap it up for this first look video if there's anything else you want to see running in my full review video let me know in the comments below and if you're interested in learning a little more I'll leave some links in the description but that's it for this one like always thanks for watchingwhat's going on everybody it's ETA Prime back here again today we're going to be taking a look at the allnew am bernick RG Cube now I do think that this is one of their oddest handhelds but after using it for about 2 days so far I've actually grown to kind of like what they've done here now it's definitely not for everybody as you can see by the design and to tell you the truth when they first announced this and showed off the first images and video I kind of chuckled to myself thinking what is this thing they do offer a few different color variants I've got the purle version here and in images online I originally thought it was going to be more pink it's definitely more purple and I'm not sure how well it's coming across on camera but I've also got the beige White Version and over on their website they have two more colors you can go for black or the gray and that gray really does kind of give off a famicom Vibe given those red accents they added there so yeah I think the beige white does look pretty good it's a little off-white obviously with the beige name and uh having those colored buttons really does let it kind of stand out as you can see with both of these units we do get some RGB around those analog stigs and the first thing a lot of people will notice is the odd screen it's actually got a resolution of 720x 720 so we've got a perfectly Square screen here it's an IPS fully laminated round back we've got these analog triggers with some really nice travel a lot more than some of their other devices we've also got our power button and our volume rocker over here and this is an actively cooled unit which means it does have a fan and heat sink in it because we're working with a pretty powerful CP when you give compared to other devices they've released micro SD card support for Easy Storage expansion and we've got some grips around here on the back which make it really easy to kind of hang on to textured grips so this thing isn't going to be slipping out of your hand and it does kind of fit right in there very nicely up top we've got our USB type-c port micro SD card slot a 3.5 mm audio jack and our exhaust vent for that built-in cooling system over on the right hand side again power button volume rocker and moving around to the bottom not much going on but we do have dual stereo speakers these are downward facing this thing gets pretty loud there's not a lot of Base to it but I'm surprised that the sound output when it comes to the specs of the RG Cube for the CPU they opted to use the uniso t820 this is a 6 nanom 8 core arm s so and with this we get one a76 core up to 2.7 GHz 3 a76 cores up to 2.3 and four a55 cores up to 2 .1 we've also got a Mali g57 GPU at 850 MHz and you might recognize this chipset from another handheld they recently released known as the RG 556 we've also got 8 GB of lpddr4x RAM 128 GB of ufs 2.2 storage plus micro SD card support the screen is a 3.95 in IPS with a resolution of 720x 720 definitely an odd Choice here fully square but this works out pretty well when you want to use bezels with retro consoles it's got 5 GHz Wi-Fi bluo 5.0 dual stereo speakers a 5,200 mAh battery up to 7 hours of gameplay out of this thing and it's running Android 13 so first and foremost this is an Android device we do have that built-in Wi-Fi and access to Google Play didn't have to do anything it does support OTA updates so once we get some fixes for anything that's going on after the community gets their hands on them and Bernette can fix it pretty easily with one of those updates and with access to Google Play we don't have to side load anything unless you really want to now it's always possible to do so we've got Android 13 it is a touchcreen so for games that you need to use that touchcreen to access the menus not a problem here the RGB around the analog sticks can be controlled but it's not fully controllable so for instance we can't change one to Blue the other to red but uh from our menu here here we do have lighting settings so we can go with like a ripple single white Marquee is the one I like kind of gives us that rainbow effect personally I think they could have done without the RGB on this device but uh some people might like this and uh Marquee is definitely the one that I've been going with against that purple I do think it kind of sets it off it does look pretty decent like that of course you could run this handheld all day long with the stock Android Launcher you could also go through and install a front end if you want to but we do have game mode and this can be accessed from the menu or the R button on the device itself it'll bring us right in here that way we've got access to all of our emulators it's really easy to set up I've got everything on a Micro SD card in specific folders and all I told this thing to do was scan those folders and put everything in the correct location not a lot of customization that we can do with the uh game mode here simple enough for basically anybody to use and if you're not looking for super flare you could definitely get by with this we also have a few other device specific settings here so if we pull down from the top we can go to high performance mode and along with this we've also got fan modes that we can use stop auto cool strong obviously stop is going to be fan completely off here I'm usually at Auto doesn't get too hot especially with the games that I've been emulating and playing right now and it doesn't get that loud on strong you can hear it without any sound going with your game but once you've got sound up past 30% you're really not even going to notice that fan I like setting it up in high performance mode just to get the best out of this but keep in mind I mean when you're playing lower in emulators you're really not going to need to go up into that mode you can leave it right there stock setting and basically all it's really going to do is change that Governor to high performance and another thing we have here is a key mapper so this comes in really handy for games that don't support controllers on Android IE gench and impact there are a few others from here we can rearrange these icons put them on screen they're going to correspond with physical buttons built into the controller so yeah setting those onscreen touch points for your gam pad is really simple with this unit the overall feel of this handheld isn't bad at all and we've got these grips around back uh it's just a nice little texture there to kind of put your fingers in it's not going to slip out of your hand after playing for a long period of time uh one thing that I'm a little concerned about is the d-pad in my opinion am bernick does make some of the best d-pads for these arm-based imulation handhelds but they really kind of swapped it out here it feels a little harder than most of their other handhelds but we will need to run some test by the end of the video the button travel for the face buttons is great and we've got those conductive pads so it really does kind of feel retro here and of course we've got those analog triggers otherwise known as linear triggers I like these for racing games that way we can just give it a little gas when we need to for drifting or coming around the corner overall it's a pretty solid little handheld and it is way more able than it looks it kind of sits right in the hand now if you've got much larger hands then this might seem pretty tiny to you we do have close to a 4in display here but it's really compact when it comes to Game Mode this is going to use a combination of retro Arch and Stalone emulators depending on what game you want to play we're going to get right into some Game Boy and I've already started this game up so I can actually start directly from where I left off or I can start a new game and I did use the colorization option here so from within retro Arch it's pretty easy to set up tons of different palletes that we can use here and one of my favorites that I've been using with certain games recently is kind of what I call the pit boy palette and it's here somewhere but yeah I mean there's just a ton to choose from not everybody's going to want to play games like this but I think it's pretty cool just to mess around with it really does give off that pit boy Vibe but I'm usually going with that game boy P Green and you might notice we've got a really nice bezel around the screen there this is going to set it up for the correct aspect ratio of the original Game Boy the DMG that's what I'm playing here and it does look really nice on this IPS it's not an AMOLED or anything like that but we've got a higher resolution than most of their other handhelds on the market 720x 720 and I did mention this has those downward facing stereo speakers they sound pretty good I mean for what we've got here the volume gets super loud not a ton of Base it is a bit tinny but I mean I'm really surprised by how loud this thing can really get moving over to some GBA this is one of my favorite systems to play on this device and we've got another bezel personally I'd love to see the community come up with specific bezels for this device this one is a little offset but I mean it definitely gives you that Game Boy Advance feel and it really does allow us to kind of get that correct aspect ratio checking out some Genesis otherwise known as Mega Drive in other parts of the world and I know it's a bit hard to see but the best bezel with this does look pretty decent uh again it would be nice when the community gets their hands on these to kind of create device specific bezels for the screen here but I got to say one of the most impressive systems to play on this is SNES and I say impressive we've got more than enough power even with lower end devices to play these games at full speed but just having that real aspect ratio with the bezel it does feels super nice with some SNES games rocking out with some PlayStation 1 emulation here we've got more than enough power to emulate these games at full speed and you can really pick and choose which emulator you want to use you could go with duck station but I'm using PC SX rearmed with retro Arch another system I've would playing quite a bit on the RG cube is N64 right now I'm using moin 64 plus FZ I'm not using retro Arch so we don't have a bezel or anything like that if you wanted to go with mopin through retro Arch you could definitely enable some bezels to make it look really nice but I think that this emulator on Android is kind of the way to go and I've tested quite a few games here7 all of them run really well but of course we're going to run into a few little weird issues here and there given this screen resolution and Screen aspect ratio for instance here's PSP using PPSSPP you can see it's really stretched out now there are ways to fix this but we are going to lose a lot of that screen we're just going to go to our graphic settings and instead of using stretch we're going to use autoscaling so it will scale these games properly but we're going to lose a lot of the top and the bottom of this screen so once I get back into it you'll see everything does look normal but we've got a lot of room that we could definitely utilize with different emulators now PSP emulation on this device is really great I'm running this at 2x resolution chains of Olympus one of the harder games to run and it'll go right through every once in a while there's a little bit of a hiccup I'm using the Vulcan back in but from game to game you can up or lower that resolution for the most part A lot of the easier stuff is going to run it up to 4X and with that we're a little over the 720p resolution of the screen but it does look really great like that this is just at 2x right now and I really haven't run into many issues the last thing I wanted to test here was this dad with a fighting game we're going with Marvel versus Capcom 2 by the way I'm using the reddream emulator and this thing really emulate Dreamcast games even upscaled pretty high we've got more than enough power for that now the d-pad doesn't feel horrible it's just a bit firmer than I'm used to and I'd love to have a little more pivot or a little more roll to it face buttons are awesome we've got those conductive pads underneath them and we've got some really nice travel getting into this it's pretty simple to pull off these special moves I didn't miss many of them and this is the first time I'm trying it out so far I think it's a pretty interesting little handheld but I did run into a couple little things here and there now on this beige unit if you take a look I've got a totally black PNG right now light bleed or screen bleeding is super minimal I mean it's really not noticeable and by the way I've got both of these set up the exact same way 100% screen brightness when you take a look at the purple unit that I have here you can definitely notice that screen bleed or that light bleed same exact image that I'm using here and just moving the device a bit you can kind of get rid of it in certain spots it'll be more pronounced than others so yeah this is uh definitely a manufacturing issue and not every single unit is like this because you know taking a look at the beige unit that I have here with the same settings same image it's super minimal I mean it's not noticeable at all to the naked eye but this purple one you can really really tell especially going into like a dark menu you can really see that light coming through on the edges there so yeah it's definitely a really Oddball handheld but after using it for a few days I've gotten used to it and kind of enjoy the whole form factor here I've got a lot more testing that I want to do with this I definitely want to get some GameCube up and running and I did test it with the stock Dolphin Emulator at the lowest resolution either openg GL or Vulcan with some harder to run games it is a bit stuttery but I think we can get a bunch of games up and running on this at full speed it's not the most powerful chip set but it's very capable given what kind of handhelds that Amber neck has released in the past but that's going to wrap it up for this first look video if there's anything else you want to see running in my full review video let me know in the comments below and if you're interested in learning a little more I'll leave some links in the description but that's it for this one like always thanks for watching\n"