I’ve been trying to get my hands on an NES Classic for the last 6 months, but I’ve
refused to pay the hundreds of dollars that they are selling for on ebay by scalpers.
So, I figured I would just wait until Nintendo got the supply caught up with the demand.
But, now I’m being told that they’ve actually cancelled the NES classic, and that there
will be no more production of it. So, I thought it was time to look into, you know, maybe
some of the alternatives. Now, of course, you could go with the original NES, like this
one. They’re not hard to find. There’s plenty of them out there. But they do tend
to actually cost quite a bit these days and they do have some maintenance issues, plus
you have to collect the actual physical hardware cartridges. Ebay and amazon are just littered
with aftermarket consoles, so I decided to pick up a few of them to look at. The first
one I’m going to show you here is called the 8-Bit Video Game System. This was the
cheapest unit I bought, which cost only $18 on Amazon. The box has some very good advice
on the back here. it talks about the need to clean the old games. It actually suggests
NOT blowing into them, and instead cleaning them. It mentions HDTV causing delays, and
to set your TV to game mode and 4:3 aspect ratio. So let’s take a look inside the box
and see what it comes with. OK, so here’s the console itself. It’s quite small. In
fact, compare it’s size to the original Nintendo here. it does have the same color
scheme, though. This console is pretty basic. Just audio and video ports on the back, and
controller ports on the front that are compatible with the original NES controllers. And although
you can use you original NES controllers, it does come with two of its own. And to be
honest, while these do feel kind of cheap, they don’t really feel any cheaper than
the original controllers from the 80s. They shape is a little more comfortable in the
hand, but the button layout is the same. Also the cables are almost as long as the original
NES cables. And, I know that has been a sore point on the new NES classic. So, let’s
try a game on it. First I’ll connect it up to my television. I tried turning it on
with no cartridge in it, and it gives this weird pattern on the screen. So, I’m going
to try Super Mario Brothers 2. Wow, look at that. The cartridge actually looks kind of
huge sticking out of this little guy. But, it does work. To be honest, it feels perfectly
natural playing this game, even with these controllers. And, I think if nobody told me
I was playing an aftermarket machine, I would have never known the difference. However,
I decided to hook this up to my video capture card and have a look at the video output in
a little more detail. And again.. even here it looks perfectly fine to me. However, when
I took some still frames and zoomed in, so the colors seem pretty close, but there’s
some difference in the brightness level of some of the darker colors. Also the real NES
seems to have a little bit more background noise than the clone. But there is another
difference that I kept noticing, but it took me a while to figure out exactly what it is.
If you compare these images from this angle, you’ll see there are black areas on the
left and right of the aftermarket. At first I thought the aspect ratio was just wrong,
but when I compared different things on the screen, they were the same. Eventually I realized
the aftermarket consoles were not showing the screen border correctly. However, as you
can see this was not even visible on a real TV because it is outside of the viewable area
anyway. So, you might ask, how could I compare this to the NES Classic, because you still
have to buy, or find, or whatever, all of the original cartridges and the NES Classic
has like 30 built in games and you get the whole thing for like $60, assuming you could
find one without paying the scalpers on ebay. So, you might say, “how is that a comparable
deal?” Well, I can actually match that. I bought this guy on Amazon and it has 143
games built in. And it only cost me $50. So, as you can see, when I put this thing in the
console, it just comes up with a menu and tons and tons of games. Now, honestly, I’m
not sure if this is legal. I have a suspicion these are not legitimately licensed games.
So, I often have a saying. If a company does not want to actively make their product available
for sale, then I don’t shed too many tears when people pirate the material. And since
Nintendo apparently has no further interest in selling their own 8-Bit console on the
market, then what can I say? Legal or not, these appear to be scattered all over ebay
and amazon. For those that are interested, I wrote down all of the games that come on
this and put them in the description field because none of the advertisements for this
cartridge actually show what games are on it. I was sort of curious myself until I got
it in the mail so I could plug it in. Also, this cartridge is sort of infuriating as a
collector. You see, I keep wanting to expand my collection of original cartridge titles.
But if I have all of them on one cartridge, where’s the fun in that? Out of curiosity,
I wondered if this would work in the original console with the lockout chip and everything.
And sure enough, it works fine. Although I did notice one difference, which probably
has nothing to do with the cartridge. If you take a listen to the background, you’ll
hear a faint humming noise, which is common for analog signals like this. But if we go
back to the aftermarket console, I noticed it has a much louder hum. I can’t hear this
when the games are playing, but because this cartridge stays quiet on the menu, I noticed.
Moving along, heres’s the next console I want to show you. It’s called the Retro-Bit.
It’s a little more expensive, at $59 it costs over three times what the previous console
cost. But it does have some interesting advantages. The most obvious feature is that it has 3
cartridge ports and you can quite literally insert an NES cartridge, Super Nintendo, and
a Sega Genesis cartridge all at the same time. This selector switch here will determine which
one you are playing. It has multiple connectors for all 3 styles of the original controllers,
but It also comes with its own controllers as well, that appear to use the super Nintendo
style ports. On the back it does have the standard audio video ports, but also an S-Video
port as well. And it comes with it’s own S-Video cable bundled with the regular ones.
As for playing the console, I couldn’t see any noticeable difference from it over the
last console I showed you. However, the controller proved to be irritating. You see on the original
NES controllers, your A & B buttons are here, but on this controller, they are here and
they are even backwards from how you would expect. So, now I’m sure you can adapt to
this, but I did find it initially irritating. So, as for video comparison, thing I was most
interested in was how it looked between composite and S-Video. Now, to the naked eye it is hard
to sell a huge difference. But take a look at this closeup. So the S-Video has a color
rendition more similar to the original Nintendo. But the image does seem to be a little soft,
for some reason compared to the composite. I would have normally expected it to be the
other way around. So, next I tried playing a Super Nintnedo game, Super Mario Kart. What’s
interesting is that when looking at the difference between composite and S-Video, you can see
a fairly significant clarity difference here. I also tried a Gensis game in it, and it seemed
to work about the same. I also tried flicking this NTSC switch over to PAL but it doesn’t
seem to do anything at all. In fact, my capture card insisted that it was outputting NTSC
video the whole time. When I forced my capture card to PAL mode, the video image looked like
this. So I think it is correct. I have no idea what the switch is for unless it is simply
to tell the games themselves what format they are supposed to be on. All right, so the next
console I want to show you is the Generation Nex. Now, unfortunately, they don’t actually
make this console anymore, but you can still find them on places like ebay and Amazon.
I picked this one up recently for$50. Notice it has a front-loading cartridge slot, much
like the original NES, but also has a top loading slot for the Japanese Famicom games.
Notice it does have stereo audio outputs. I’m told that it does support stereo, but
only for newer games that take advantage of it. I haven’t been able to find any examples
of games that do. The power button and reset are on the top and a little hard to see. If
you compare it to an NES, you’ll see it is much smaller and because it has front loading
games, it is a much lower profile than the 8-Bit console, once a cartridge is installed,
which is good if you are sticking this in an entertainment center or something. Now
the controllers are interesting because it has these turbo and slow buttons and I’m
quite curious how they work. I’m also curious what these rear buttons do. So I decided it
was time to open this adorable owners manual that looks like a game cartridge. It says
the buttons work just like a touch screen. And slow motion will slow a game down to a
snail’s pace. I don’t really get how that’s possible, but I guess I’ll just have to
plug it in and try it out. So when playing Super Mario Brothers 2, I tried repeatedly
touching the slow and turbo buttons and nothing seemed to ever happen. I did discover that
the buttons on the rear work identical to the A & B buttons, so that mystery is solved.
I thought maybe I should try the turbo and slow on a different game, maybe a shooter
style game. Well, at first they still didn’t seem to do anything, but then I realized the
manual was wrong, you don’t treat them like a touch screen, rather you have to really
press them moderately hard like a real button. So yeah, so the slow motion just acts like
it is pushing pause a million times. And while this is rather annoying, I can see how it
might still give you an advantage on some games where quick decision making is the key
to winning. I also got the turbo fire button to work, and you can see even on this game
it makes a difference.. See, this is the regular firing speed, and this is with turbo on. So
let’s take a look at some closeup screenshots as compared to the original NES. This has
about the same appearance as the other aftermarket consoles I’ve shown. The last console I
want to show you is not an NES clone, however, I thought it went really well with this video.
It’s actually a Gameboy Color clone. It’s called the GB Boy. It’s called the GB Boy
Color. It’s too bad they couldn’t have picked a more creative name. You can see it
comes in 3 different colors, mine is blue of course. And on the back they have some
questionable English. The thing that stood out the most is that it claims to have a front
light, but I’m pretty sure this is actually a backlight. Anyway, lets open the box and
have a look. It was literally packaged just like this. There appears to be a manual of
some sort crammed down here… For all the good it does, all of the instructions are
in Chinese. Ahh, I love that feeling of peeling off factory screen protection. So, let’s
compare it with the original GameBoy Color from 1998. Looks pretty similar. Volume and
data cable on the left. Headphone and power port on the bottom. Yep same. Power switch
on the right. Yep! Same again. And at last, cartridge port and infrared on the rear. Yep,
all exactly the same. So, I’m going to start by showing you the most important difference.
Looking at the original gameboy, I’m going to insert a game and power it on. As you can
see, the screen is not backlit. It’s really hard to find an angle that gives you the best
lighting of the screen, but also doesn’t cause a glare. And if you turn the light off,
it’s darned near impossible to play. But not the GB Boy Color! It’s backlit screen
makes a HUGE difference and can be played equally well in both a well lit room, or in
total darkness. This is a feature I would have certainly paid extra for back in the
90s and is baffling to me why Nintendo didn’t offer it at the time. It isn’t like other
systems weren’t already using backlights during that time. Here’s another interesting
thing. If you power it on with no game in the slot, it comes up to this screen claiming
to have 188 built in games. So, I’ll pick one, like Super Mario Land. Yep, it’s the
original game, and I question the legality of this as well. However, I can assure you
that there aren’t 188 games on here. I noticed a lot of duplicates scattered throughout the
list. So, I wrote them all down and determined that there were really only 66 unique games,
with most of the games being on the list two or three times. I couldn’t see any difference
between the multiple copies. However, a lot of the games on here are just garbage games.
And some of them aren’t even in English. I don’t know if this is Chinese or Japanese
because I can’t read either one. But, I know I certainly can’t play these games
like this. So, there are really only about maybe 10 actually good, playable games on
here. And these aren’t even Gameboy Color games. I mean, sure the games have color,
but even the original black and white gameboy games usually had very basic colors programmed
into them for future use, such as the Super Gameboy and the Gameboy color. But none of
the games that are built in are actually real Gameboy Color games that make use of larger
color palettes. Of course, if you insert your own gameboy color games, it seems to play
them all perfectly in full color. Another thing I should probably mention, is that I
think they just used an off-the-shelf LCD screen on this thing, probably something from
a digital camera. And it the sub-pixel rendering organization is not really optimum for gameboy
games. If you take a look at this closeup of the screen, you can see that the mountains
look at little broken in places. So, what’s going on here is that the original gameboy
had a grayscale screen with more or less square pixels. When the gameboy color came out, they
moved to a color screen that still kept the same basic shape of the pixels, but now had
red. green, and blue subpixels. And so, the games translated really well. This screen,
however, uses a totally different sub-pixel technique that is fine for photographs and
things, but not great for games. Still, I can’t complain too much about this because,
honestly, I was playing it for 30 minutes before I even noticed. Plus, when things are
in motion, it’s impossible to even tell. So, if you do enjoy playing the old gameboy
games and you actually like having tactile controls, you know, things you can actually
feel with your fingers when you play them, then I actually recommend this unit. And despite
some of the shortcomings that it has, I think it’s a superior experience to playing the
original Gameboy Color. And it has really nothing to do with the pirated games that
it has built into it, because, like I said, there’s only like maybe 10 of them in there
worth playing. The main thing is just the backlit screen. That really makes all the
difference in the world. I am also putting the list of 66 games included in the ROM down
in the description field, because much like the other cartridge I showed, there’s actually
not a listing anywhere on the box or in the advertisement for this product. Probably because
they’re not legal copies so they probably don’t want to throw the names out of all
the different things they’re pirating, but anyway for those that are interested you can
take a look. You know, this is really what the Gameboy Color should have been from the
very beginning when it was produced back in 1998. And it’s not like there weren’t
other portable consoles using a backlit color screen, so I don’t really know why it wasn’t
included. But, the only thing they could do to really make this better, in my opinion,
is to put a larger screen on it. I mean, I know it’s roughly the same size as the original
gameboy screen, so I can’t complain too much about that, but there is actually space
here. You know, they could make that screen another inch or two bigger. And that would
actually be really cool. I’d pay extra for that! OK, so I should mention one more thing
about all of the Nintendo clones. That, they were all basically on the same “Nintendo
on a Chip” architecture. Which means they all suffer from the same problems and incompatibilities.
In fact, there’s a short list out there of a very small number of games that will
not work, most likely on any of the aftermarket consoles. I don’t actually own any of those
games, so it doesn’t really affect me. But, I will point out one thing, and this affects
all of these systems, even the original Nintendo in comparison with the NES classic. The Classic
does have one thing going for it in that it does have HDMI video output. Now, none of
the games are going to be high definition even when running on HDMI, because they just
simply weren’t designed for it. But, the image will be sharper and clearer as a result
of being on HDMI. Not only that, it probably makes it somewhat easier to connect to some
of the more modern televisions. I should point out that there is at least one other console
out there, called the RetroUSB AVS which actually uses its own custom chips and thus is in a
different league than these clones, it also has HDMI output. But it costs $185 and it
was out of stock at the time I was trying to make this video, so I wasn’t able to
show it. It also has 4 controller ports, but I’m not sure which games would use that.
So, out of all of these consoles, which one is my favorite? Well, I’m probably still
going to go with the original NES as my favorite, but admittedly, like I said, these sometimes
can have reliability and maintenance issues because they’re getting very old. So, my
next favorite console probably is the Generation Nex. Even though these are a few years old
now, they do seem to hold up pretty well and I like the front loading on it. Not only that,
but after I finally noticed the buzzing sound on this guy, it actually kind of started to
drive me nuts! And this has actually a very quiet audio on it. So, I also like that about
it. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this episode and leave me some comments and tell me what
you think.