x55掌机和h55掌机对比

very rarely do i get a product for review that i don't want to review because it's so bad what's even more rare is when one of those products transforms into a decent product all within the span of a month and even though that's never happened before that's exactly where we are with the pal kitty x55 it's a product with a few flaws but it's one that i might be able to recommend if the price is right before we jump into the video i want to talk about some of the strange circumstances surrounding this device when the company originally sent out this unit for review it had a couple of glaring problems and it was ultimately in such a state that i didn't even want to do a review on it if we boil things down that device had two problems the first was the software was really bad in fact the software was much worse than the last pal kitty product that i reviewed that also has some of the same hardware that this one does on the hardware side of things the screen was very dark and while i don't have any footage it was even too dark to use indoors if i'm being honest this is kind of unheard of in this market where people keep things close to the chest the company ended up releasing the source code for this device before they even sold it and they sent out developer units to a team in the open source community and those guys were able to make the software that i'm using in this video it is way better than the old software on the hardware side of things the company was able to find a better screen than the old one and that's ultimately why this product is on screen right now， it is much better than it was even a month ago let's start with the design and controls of this device as you can see we have two analog sticks that are recessed into the shell and we also have a fairly big d pad and a set of abxy buttons on the bottom of this device we have select and start and towards the middle we have an placement for volume up and volume down i don't know if i'm the only one that has noticed this， but i'm starting to see a lot of devices that switch the placement of these buttons usually it's on the top where we have volume up as the left button and volume down as the right one as it would be on a phone， but that doesn't really make sense when your devices landscape like this so this is kind of awkward and i occasionally will find myself pressing the volume up button when i want the volume to go down and volume down when i want it to go up the bottom four buttons are not great i thought these would feel close to the home button on a joy con controller， but they use a harder and louder micro switch one of the bad things about pao kitty is they like to reinvent the wheel almost all of their devices use different d pad styles different membrane， material and different abxy buttons other companies have this kind of thing standardized so if you know you like one and they didn't change it in a new product you'll know what to expect that's not the case here i'll save you from some of the boring bits the abxy buttons past the smell check both in their feeling when pressed and their minimum height above the shell the deep ad also works well and it can pivot well my only criticism here is that i wish it were five to ten percent less stiff than it is on the top of the x55， we have a set of stack shoulder buttons we'll talk more about those in just a second， we also have a reset button， a power button， a headphone， jack， two usb type c ports and an hdmi out port quick note that i want to point out about this dc port， even though this is a type c port you not charge it with a type c to type c cable you need to use a usb type a to type c cable like the one that's included in the box as for the video out functionality i'll cover that later in this video when it comes to the shoulder buttons these are unfortunately both digital buttons there is no analog r2 or l2 in this console both of these buttons use tax switches， but they use different kinds and the ones that are used for r2 and l2 are a bit on the loud side when it comes to r1 and l1 you can get input across almost the entire range except for this top portion here and the button itself feels good to use r2 and l2 also use micro switches， but these ones are a bit harder and they make a lot more noise that leaves us with the bottom and we have a set of bottom firing speakers and two sd card slots the first slot is used for the operating system in roms and the second slot is used for only roms right now have the operating system and the roms on the first sd card the back is pretty standard， but we do have this odd misspelling of the word model here in the center， this backshell is also kind of a fingerprint magnet with the metallic finish that they went with my device was used by someone else before it came to me so it had some damage that you can see outside of that i do like this blue color before we switch over to talk about the software i do just want to make a quick point about the build quality on this device the build quality on the x55 is not excellent it's basically middle of the road the case does have some flex because the entire thing is plastic with no metal interior， but it doesn't make a rattling sound like the arcade 2023 is also important to point out that the device doesn't make any creaking sounds of any kind either i think as long as this thing doesn't have an absurd price of like well over 100 dollars then this build quality makes sense for the asking price of this thing let's now talk about the software as i already mentioned， i'm not using the stock operating system for this review the stock os at this ships with is emuelec and it's not great i am using the latest version of just enough linux which added support for the x55 a few days ago getting this operating system onto the device was pretty painless all i had to do is go over to the github page for this and download the x55 image that was listed after i did that i just flashed it over to the sd card that came with my unit now there are a lot of differences between the emulelek version that comes with this device and the one that i have here， but the one that was the most important for me was nintendo 64 performance nintendo 64 performance with the stock operating system is not great it's much worse than the arcade 2023， even though these devices both use the exact same processor even though this system is a lot better than the stock one when it comes to nintendo 64 you still need to do a little work to be able to get the most out of this trip what that's gonna look like in practical terms is going to be something similar to this let's say i want to play the legend of zelda i will experience occasional lag and stutter in this game this does not happen in every nintendo 64 game using the default emulator， but it does happen in this one and this is a game that i really want to play on this device to remedy this all i need to do is press x on this game and then go down to advance game options and where it says emulator i need to find another one that doesn't have this issue just for the sake of this example this standalone emulator does not have that issue with this title and that's basically all there is to it you can get a lot more out of this chip if you're willing to put in that extra bit of work to find the best emulator for the game that you want to play when it comes to in nintendo 64 the next big benefit that we get with this is the custom control over the display i want to go over what that looks like right now， so as you can see i have the gamma on this set to 100 percent it's not actually active right now and that's hopefully a bug that can be fixed down the line， but i do want to show you what this device looks like without that being activated so we're gonna load up a game real quick and i'm gonna pick one that's a bit darker here's super metroid for the super nintendo and you can see that the entire picture is pretty dark this is on maximum brightness and i'm gonna increase the iso of my camera so that way you can really see the black levels on this screen okay i have my camera at 200500 iso and i think you can clearly see that this screen isn't that bright let's go back to how it was before and then we'll take a look at that gamma setting again so let's quickly close out of the game by pressing start and select 2 times and then we're going to a start to open up the menu and we're gonna go down to system settings in here i have gamma set to 100 percent and i have saturation set to 70 percent let's quickly change this to 99 percent to activate it and then bring it back to 100 percent now float up that save state again and just look at how much better that picture looks this is a huge improvement over the stock screen i can use this device now in a lot of different settings whereas before i could pretty much only use it at night or indoors the only big problem here is that it doesn't automatically apply when you reboot the device and sometimes it will disable itself after you put the device to sleep i hope those issues can be ironed out because this is a killer feature for this device there are two other issues that i want to talk about in this software as you can see from the fps reading in the left hand corner the ui for this device is rotated in a complete different orientation than the game itself now if you just plan on playing in four by three aspect ratio this is not really a problem except for the fact that you have to interact with all of the menus in this weird orientation so the big problem is gonna happen when you want to enable widescreen support for games that can run on this hardware this is the best version of the dreamcast emulator that you can use for this chipset but it doesn't work at this point in time if you want to enable widescreen support with the wonky setup that they have going on right now you just end up with a squeezed image in the center i hope this is something that can improve in the future because this is the only emulator version that can give you the best performance on this hardware the final thing is not really a deal breaker for me， but it's a bit unfortunate lot of the ports master ports are sol on this device i installed a bunch here and i correctly installed all of them and only one of them works i took the log data for these and they all seem to have a different problem with them the only one that i got to work is cave story and like i said all of these are installed the right way so yeah that's where the software is at this point there are a couple of things that i want to point out about hdmi support the first is that this device does not support hdmi hot plug even though this device is native 16 by 9 usually you need to reboot because the screen and the hdmi signal use different aspect ratios so i'm surprised that we still have this issue with both being 16 by 9 on this device outside of that hdmi out does not work on just enough linux if i use the stock os for a moment we can see that hdmi out does work so this is something that will hopefully be fixed in later versions of just enough linux now we're going to take a brief look at what the x55 can do when it comes to emulation the x55 is a great system for retro games you can apply filters on a case by case basis and you also have the ability to upscale older systems like n64 dreamcast in playstation 1 let's take a brief look now at the performance of this device we haven't gone over the specs yet， but the hardware that we have here is perfectly capable of playing most of the retro systems in fact throughout this video i already had a lot of retro systems that i filmed that i didn't want to say for the end of this video besides all of those systems we have links sega master system nes and genesis all of those systems run great on this hardware even though there are probably better options that are dedicated to running most of those older games however， this is your only handheld or to your first handheld the net stuff doesn't matter this handheld is great for those systems nintendo ds performance is actually pretty impressive on the x55 i'm not upscaling these or using improved 3d rendering， but they run really great with auto frame skip enabled the only bad part is the performance doesn't seem as good as it is on android and we obviously don't have a touch screen on this device ps1 is a good system for this device because it can use the entire screen right now， i'm playing spyro and i have the game set to 2x native resolution with widescreen hacks enabled this game can run really fast with occasional slowdowns here and there， but you won't be able to play most ps1 games at 2x native resolution if i go to crash bandicoot for example， i get big slowdowns here that ultimately made me switch down to native resolution i still think that native resolution looks great and widescreen and you can carry this performance over to the most demanding games on this platform without issue nintendo 64 performance is really good as long as you follow the same advice that i gave earlier in this video about finding the correct emulator for the game that you want to play you can make this easier by just changing the default option to the one that i used in my zelda section， but even that one will cause you problems in some games and you have to switch it out so it's just a matter of accepting that that's going to be your reality with this device what i can say is really demanding n64 games run well in this system when they are used with the correct emulator i was really surprised at how well f zero ran for example and this bodes well for other demanding titles psp is the pinnacle of what this chip can do and it's also another system that uses 16x9 when it comes to these games you're really gonna want to stick with one x native resolution unless you're playing some very light 2d based games and at that point it it's not really worth up scaling right now i have all of these set to one x native resolution， but that doesn't mean you're gonna be able to play the entire library on this in fact， you're gonna have to enable frame skip for a lot of the heavier 3d ones to get something that's even remotely playable there are better handhelds for psp that can do a better job than this， but this is a decent budget option if you don't have anything else before we go over the pros and cons we need to take a look at the inside of this device there are a few weird things that i'm seeing now that i have this open the first one is the fact that the processor isn't on this side of the pcb usually what we see in these devices is the processor is here with maybe a heat shield or not a heat shield if they're trying to save money and the battery is the heat sink， but that's not the case here and this is really non standard the battery itself is a bit on the small side for how much space they actually have in this back shell there are two standoffs over here that would block us from adding a bigger battery， but they probably did have enough room here for a five thousand or six thousand million power battery， i never really understand these kinds of short changes in gaming handhelds because batteries are one of the lowest cost in your entire device with the pcb out， i'm happy to see that we do have a heat shield over this processor and if i take that out， we can see a thermal pad on top of the processor we also have a wi fi chip that's soldered to the board， but i'm not sure if they're gonna sell an option that doesn't have wi fi as i suspected the bottom of the pcb uses hard switches for start and select the company also cut out a pocket for the processor and there should be a decent gap between the heat shield and the back of the lcd let's conservatively say that it's at least two and a half millimeters away from the screen and maybe that's enough area there to handle the heat because i'm not noticing any issues while i'm holding this in my hands now it's time for the pros and cons on the proside i like that this is a real open source device it was open source from day 0 which is not common at all we need more companies that are willing to do what pal kitty did in this instance because it's better for the entire market it aside from that i like the ergonomics of this thing the back grips could have been a bit bigger than this， but there are big improvement over the flat slab designs like some of the other pal kitty products for cons i just have two points i don't like that some of the buttons are overly loud like the bottom four buttons or r2 and l2 i think they could have picked better switch components that are better for a product like this i also don't like that the back of this is a fingerprint magnet i wish we could get this blue color that i have here with a matte paint job finish instead of this metallic one metallic paint is usually a hit or a miss and it was a miss in this instance and as a first on youtube we're gonna have a pal kitty review from a kid do you like the buttons？ yes， what what's your review of the buttons？ do you like them？ yes， they can work？ they can work and they work well？ yes what do you feel about the d pad？ do you like it？ yes they can work？ do you like these ones？ no why under loud？ oh too loud right？ yes， not loud it's not loud right that one's good right it's quiet don't quiet do you like the color？ yes， it's blue it has some words on the back it has some words but they spelled this word wrong that's gonna wrap up things on this one really appreciate you taking the time to watch this video if you enjoyed this video consider watching my arcade 2023 review that's another hand held from this company with the same processor and a four by three screen happy gaming everyone talkie out。