I made a emulation console, $20, not Chinese

[kupomogli]

While the emulation is not completely flawless, I wanted something that I could sit in front of my tv, turn on a box like a console and play games. Without the need to hook up the systems or emulate by having over a keyboard and mouse to do anything.

Now, I do want to say one thing first, it goes into why physical media is better than digital, but having access to all these games so quickly and easily kind of makes it hard to not just want to jump from game to game.

Additionally though, there's one thing great about modern gaming it's that the games I consider below average meh or 3/10 bad games are still atleast passable compared to the classic games bad games. Most games in the As and Bs on the Game Boy are 2/10-4/10, Final Fantasy Legend which I own but never finished is such an absurd grind that after level grinding to being able to progress two steps from the starting location, that you have to grind more just to survive more than one battle when you get to wher you need to actually go. I don't need to play it anymore, that abusrd grind reviewed the game for me, 2/10.

So this emulation box is an android box that you can actually get from Walmart for $20 called the Google TV Onn, all this provided that you don't want to increase the storage capacity and you can have a large library of anything not CD based. Nintendo 64 and GBA though are pretty large files, so including those you'll want to have a more curated collection. But 400 SNES games and didn't even exceed 1GB. So here's a price list below.

$20 - pretty much anything on any older console up to the SNES with some curated N64 and GBA games. Use something like File Explorer to transfer the games to the 4GB of storage available(the OS takes the rest.) You download file explorer+, use this to open a transfer connection, go to your PC file explorer and click on your current link and start typing ftp and fill the rest with what's listed as the ftp address, then fill the password and there you go.

If you do the above, you can get a newer version of RetroArch or an emulator since you'll be storing all the files on the internal storage itself.

Up to $62 or more. You won't need anything more than 512GB of space, so you can get a flash drive with 512GB of space if you want to play PS1 aand PSP. The box can also play Dreamcast but it really varies on game. For example, Code Veronica cutscenes drop frames and are really choppy, but during gameplay there's no frame drops at all. Phantasy Star Online can run full speed in the principal's office but it starts having trouble in the shopping district, but even at one frameskip it's still playable, until you go into a dungeon and that's that, unplayable. So I'm sure 2D games will run better or some lower quality games as Hydro Thunder runs without any issues, but also not really a great looking game. I didn't test anything else beause I didn't download anything else.

The system uses a mini USB power supply and has no other USB or availability for external storage, but you can buy a USB extender and a mini USB OTG cable extension cable to attach so that you can attach that to the device and then to the power outlet. This link below has both and is only $12. If you don't have a USB flash drive or an external hard drive, you'll need that, costing from $30-$40 for 512GB. Assuming everyone already has some form of bluetooth controller, this would make it $62-$72 before taxes.

Now these are the only consoles that I've tested because it's really all I care to play, but anything what a good emulator around these will likely be fully playable. With 512GB I have everything on all of these that I'm interested in except for Dosbox. I found it too much of a hassle to download games and I don't want to convert my own as that'd be even more of a hassle. On top of that there's a lot of games that I've played that I don't even remember that I've liked so I'm not sure of what's good or not on older PC hardware now days.

-DosBox Either fully playable or unplayable. Depends on two factors. What game you're playing and if you know what controls does what and if you can even bind them to make it playable, or B, this really ranges from Ultima to games far into the future, so it really just depends on how graphically intensive the game is.

-GB, GBC, NES, SNES, GBA, Sega Master System, Game Gear, Genesis, Sega CD, PC Engine, PC Engine CD are fully playable, PS1, and PSP. If you're only running the games off internal memory and can use the newest Retroarch or other emulators, then you shouldn't have any issues. However, due to this Google TV not wanting to allow you to use apps to direct to external storage, you have to actually use older versions of PPSSPP and RetroArch, so you might get slight stutter in some games that normally wouldn't have it, and this might effect one place in the game and the next time you try it, it doesn't. For the most part though it runs just fine, I feel like I'm mainly seeing(or hearing) issues when playing GBA using GBC or Super Game Boy color sets.

-N64 is 99% playable. On this device since you can't direct to storage and RetroArch, atleast for me can't seem to play N64 at all, you will need to add all N64 games to the internal storage. I added 40 games because N64 doesn't have a lot of good games and I'm definitely being generous with these 40. Out of everything I've played, the only three that had any real problems were Ogre Battle 64, Goldeneye(means probably Perfect Dark as well but I didn't test it,) and Gauntlet Legends. You can probably play Gauntlet Legends on the Dreamcast at full speed if you wanted to play this one, on the N64 in the hub area the game lags, but in the first area it actually played pretty well without any noticeable lag atleast the amount of it that I played. Maybe call this one unplayable. Goldeneye played well enough when getting into a mission, there were some slowdown here and there but a lot of the time it ran at full speed, so I'm not sure if these are normal game related drops or if it was the box, but first some reason on the main screen when selecting the files, the game seems to run at a much lower framerate. Ogre Battle 64 runs mostly at full speed with drops here and there, this wouldn't be a bad game to do auto frameskip on as the game is so slow as it is and there's very few animations done.

However, games that I tried that play full speed are WWE No Mercy, Mario 64, Zelda 64(tested up to Hyurule Fields and the castle, no issues,)

F Zero X(outside of car selection where it lags, the game runs full speed,) Wave Race 64, and Castlevania 64.

Oh yeah, Rush 2079(?) was unplayable, and I don't remember if Cruis 'N USA or World were playable but I deleted them to free up space regardless.

-Dreamcast partially playable, depends on the game whether it's 100% playable or not, and then some games may atleast be somewhat playable with issues like Resident Evil Code Veronica where it plays 100% flawless outside of cutscenes.

-Sega Saturn, DS unplayable.

https://www.amazon.com/TV-xStream-Et...8DSL4LKH&psc=1

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I'll give some extra details on PS1 and PSP. You can increase PS1 texture resolution and the games are still fully playable. It seems to run just as slow as on the PS1, maybe because it's hard programmed into the files for the loading time to take a certain amount of time before transitioning to the data.

PSP can run full speed on most games at 1x esolution. While I did say above it was 100%, there are games that aren't fully playable. Test Drive Unlimited is unplayable, being open world and one of the better looking PSP games, but something like Dissidia Final Fantasy is playable with some frame drops at 2x PSP resolution. Crisis Core is playable with no framedrops at 3x resolution, and when these games run 30fps it's not much of an issue to run them at auto frame drop.

[Spartacus]

there's one thing great about modern gaming it's that the games I consider below average meh or 3/10 bad games are still at least passable compared to the classic games bad games.
Now, I do want to say one thing first, it goes into why physical media is better than digital, but having access to all these games so quickly and easily kind of makes it hard to not just want to jump from game to game.

I completely agree with this.
Is there someplace that owns all the IP's for this device that we could get the ROM' and ISO's from? Or is that something impolite to talk about?

Now if someone could show us how to have sex without the need to talk to someone, life would grand indeed.

[kupomogli]

No, I had to download them all. I first found CDRomance which then had no roms on the site but linked me to their gaming forum which I had to sign up for to download them called Retro Game Talk. The games here are not laid out alphabetically but I was able to find everything from every publisher including patched Japanese games. So in the search bar for instance, type SNES, then put it in NTSC U region and should only show US versions, or put NTSC J and then put English and it should show all the english translated games.

There's another place I found that does have everything alphabetically and also pretty much everything, but you will want a great virus protection program you trust as well as an adblocker if you can. And even then exe files were still able to make their way into my downloads so I decided on not using that site any longer because I just didn't want to risk it. The one above though, I didn't have any issues and atleast for myself didn't have any pop ups and nothing came up from my virus scanner it just took a lot longer as there are no lists that I could find so had to do a search and scroll through pages. And when I mean pages I don't mean forum pages, it was still the games themselves, but no "all of each system list" of pages, just pages of whatever I searched for and my selection brought up.