 Welcome back folks! Today we have a special hardware review. We're going to be taking a look at what I believe is the best setup for the classic Nintendo games, the Retro USB AVS and the Everdrive N8. To start off, let me explain what they each are. The Retro USB AVS is a high quality NES clone console. It is known as an FPGA console, a field programmable gate array. What this means is it does not use any emulation of any kind. It contains a chip that perfectly replicates the logic found within an actual NES console, making it functionally identical with the major advantage that it works on modern HD televisions. The Retro USB AVS has four ports for original NES control pads which are sold separately and outputs 720p with 60 frames per second. It uses original NES cartridges and saves directly to them. Now you may be asking a question, why get an FPGA console when you can just download an NES emulator to your computer? Well the way I see it, this is a product for someone who takes retro gaming really seriously and wants the best possible experience with high compatibility. I think of it as the video game equivalent of buying a vinyl record player. Sure you could get a CD instead but some people would swear it sounds better the other way. We'll take a look at the quality soon but believe me it is far superior to emulation. There's many different graphical quirks that you would normally see in NES games that aren't present emulators that the AVS replicates perfectly and you'll see that soon. Now moving on to the EverDrive N8. The EverDrive N8 is a fantastic flash cartridge by Cricks. This review model is from Stone Age Gamer. They allow you to choose a different color and label combinations. It uses a standard SD card to store ROMs onto so you could have every single NES game that ever existed on one cartridge which is quite amazing. The EverDrive N8 even has some really great features including save states, cheat codes and more. There is no better flash card maker on the market than Cricks and I'm sure the EverDrive N8 will prove to be the best one out there. Together these two provide the best NES experience ever in my opinion. So here's the package for the Retro USB AVS and as you can see it's got everything on it. On the side it says AVS has the picture, Retro USB, that one same same deal on the other side and on the back there's a little diagram of the console itself. 720p it outputs in, it has the PAL output, NES, Famicom slots, so it has both of them. There's an expansion port, HDMI to the USB port also. So yeah it's got it's got everything built into it. Player NES carts an amazing HD. So let's open this up. Alright so slide this open now. Very carefully. Alright here we go and as you can see it you can already tell that it has the proper NES colors right out of the box. Look at that gray. So first we'll look at all the parts that come with it. It comes with an HDMI cable, looks good and it comes with a USB cable right here that will help power the console on. That's nice and this must be the plug, the adapter. Alright so it comes with this as well. So yeah it has everything you need just to get started. The AVS. Alright now let's take the AVS itself out of the box. Oops okay yeah pulling this out to take a closer look. It's very tightly packed. Okay there we go. Oh something down there also. So here's the AVS. As you can see we'll set that aside. I just want to take a look at this little booklet that comes with it real quick. And yeah as the diagram is kind of boring though. I'll just set that aside now. Not bad. So it really does look like an NES from around the corners and everything. They managed to get very close without you know infringing on any sort of copyright. It looks like an NES in a lot of ways but it still kind of has its own identity as a device and it has even the same kind of buttons they click. It's very nice looking and it feels very nice and sturdy. It feels like very very high quality plastic and everything. And it has a little flap right here which is where the NES cartridge would be going into. And that right there is the Famicom cartridge port because they're a little bit different. So this part is where you put a Famicom cartridge into and yeah that'd be nice if you had one. So if you have Japanese NES games and you could play those on here as well which is very nice. I have to say close that. And it doesn't really click it just kind of shuts you know. So moving on to the Everdrive N8. This is the package I got from Stone Age Gamer. It's a very nice deluxe package. This is the slightly more expensive option that comes with a nice case like a VHS case that protects the cartridge and everything and it's really nice I gotta say. This is a this is a very nice item the Everdrive. This is the best NES cartridge you can possibly get. It has a nice gold sticker on the back to show that it's a Crix certified product. Crix is the manufacturer who created the Everdrive. He's very talented at what he does. So developing Ukraine Deluxe Edition. This is the deluxe edition of the N8. So let's crack this thing open and take a look inside. The one I got is the peppermint color. This is the peppermint Everdrive N8. It looks really nice. I really like the way this looks. It has the green label on it and these are a bunch of little stickers and whatnot that came with the device. Now let's pull some of these out. So there's the Stone Age Gamer. It's a magnet it looks like. Fridge magnet. Looks like an NES controller. The deluxe edition comes with all these little goodies that comes with it. So gaming devolved. I really like this website a lot Stone Age Gamer. They've always provided good quality products and all that. Jackson. So that's his card. It looks like a little NES controller. This right here looks to be a troubleshooting guide. I don't think we'll have any much issue with that but there it is if you want to see it. If you want to see what you're getting into. All right well we'll set that aside. I'm just gonna pull this out. The Everdrive N8. Oh look at that. That's cool. Little stickers for the NES controller. That's cool. If you have an NES controller you can slap that around on your controller. That's really neat. I didn't realize I was gonna come with that. Well I happen to have an NES controller. Maybe we'll put that on later on. See that's a nice little bonus they gave us. Moving on. This is all stuff that comes with the Deluxe package and that's another sticker it looks like. Could slap that around on your AVS. Show that you're rocking an Everdrive. So the basic controls and everything it's all laid out here. B, A. Because there's a system menu actually. It doesn't just boot into the cartridge. There actually is a little menu and we'll take a look at that closer. So it's nice that there's um that there's a little guide that goes with the Everdrive. Everdrive 64, SD2SNES. I need to get that stuff. I need to get that SD2SNES. I really want that badly. So yeah that's a nice little pamphlet. A little booklet. Set that aside and pull this out. Looks like an sticker. I only get it out of the box. It looks like their caveman mascot. Well I'll just show it to you like this. Looks like a sticker of him. Stone Age Gamer of course. I'll just slide all that stuff back in now. Toss all the little stickers back in. Troubleshooting guide. It's a nice box too. It's a nice protective case and it fits the cartridge perfectly. I might want to get a couple of these from my other NES games to be honest because these are really nice. Alright slide that in there and pop this Everdrive out and take a closer look at it. The Everdrive NH. Just gonna close that and set it aside. Now the peppermint color looks really nice. It looks really... this is the best color in my opinion. I could have gotten any kind of color I wanted. You can choose in like mix and match. And the contacts of course look clean. It is a brand new cartridge after all. Everything looks nice. Everdrive NH. It says that in the corner if you look through it at the board. And got Crick's sticker on the back. This very much it feels good. It feels sturdy. It's like a very high-end product. You're not... they're not messing around with Crick's in these guys. They're making very high-quality NES products for you. So I have to say I'm very pleased with what I've got so far. Set that right there. That's a great little... great little device. Great little piece for the collection. So the Everdrive NH. I just want to show you on the side. They have an... this thing runs on an SD card. So all the ROMs you actually load onto an SD card for the Everdrive NH. That's how it works essentially. Now mine didn't really come with one but you can ask for one to come with the case as well. And you have to kind of pick and choose the right kind of card because to make sure it works properly. So anyway, inserting the Everdrive NH into the ABS it goes in just like that. You have to let it click in. And it just closes right over. It fits perfectly. There's not really much more to be said. So yeah, this has to be the best... the best sort of setup I can think of. There is what would be your NES controller. This is a real NES controller from the 90s and 80s that you would actually use on a real NES. And it works perfectly. And as you can see the SD card I've inserted has a bunch of ROMs built into it. And you got to kind of pick a small SD card. Don't pick something too big. Otherwise it won't work. I went through a bunch of cards that weren't working. And as we'd power it on we can take a look at how it runs and everything. So let's turn this power this on and let's jump right in and play the Retro USB ABS. Here we are at the Retro USB ABS's menu. And as you can see this is the menu that pops up the first time you boot up the console and there's several different things to choose from. The first thing we'll take a look at it here is cheat codes. There's different kinds of game genie codes you can input here. Of course we wouldn't be using this with the EverDrive because EverDrive actually has its own cheat codes built in. So we'll exit from there. Input options. So you can actually assign menu buttons here. You can assign different kinds of hotkeys. There's a turbo option, auto play. It's very cool stuff. You can check that out as well. It's interesting that they added that as well. They didn't just stop making this emulation console. So when we go to picture settings there's different video modes. We're going to choose NTSC obviously because we're here in America. Pixel aspect ratio is one I would recommend checking out. You want to get a 4-3 aspect ratio to get the original NES experience which would be somewhere in between this setting and this one right here. So between these two would be kind of ideal for 4-3 aspect ratio. To be honest though the best ways to put it all the way out and to go into your TV settings to actually change it down to a 4-3 aspect ratio. This will give you a perfect NES screen. This is the way it is meant to be played the NES experience. This is perfect 4-3 aspect ratio taking a fully wide screen picture and compressing it downwards which I would recommend doing if you can with your TV. So we'll just set it down to, we'll set it down to where we had it before. So like around here and you can also change the vertical borders. This gets rid of, this gets rid of a little text garbage on the screen. If that pops up there's a lot of customization in this console which is really nice because you can kind of tailor it to the way your TV is and the way you want to play NES games. So I'll give it a little bit of a vertical border to get rid of some of the text garbage that you know the graphical garbage that pops up on the top and bottom when you're scrolling in RPGs. There's also a scan line option and this scan line really just gives you a bunch of vertical lines and going left and right changes how dark and how light they are, how noticeable it is. And the left side also gets more of the more graphical garbage. Now extra sprites is interesting. Generally on NES when you use extra sprites there's a little bit of flickering. By turning it off you actually get rid of that flickering effect which is nice and we'll take a look at that in a second as well. So going in, this is the EverDrive menu. This is the menu for the EverDrive cartridge, the green one that I just showed you. We're going to go into the N8 PowerPack. This is a ROM pack I got from the internet and as you can see I have everything sorted neatly into folders. On this you actually press B to select and A to go back which is a little bit confusing at first. It's going to be a little strange doing that because usually A is selecting and all that. So we'll go to some US games in the first folder of course. The first folder is or we'll do the third one. I want to show you a game actually. It begins with the letter R. It's called River City Ransom. Alright so we're starting this game, River City Ransom. It's a game by Techno Japan and it's pretty good. So it's a beat-em-up game. Press start and I'm going to show you how good this game looks on the ABS. So fast of course as a speed. So let's see. I've held your city captive and Ryan's girlfriend hostage with my gangs of students and evil bosses. So a student is holding the entire city captive. How's that? Where are the police? What are they doing? So the evil bosses meet my demands, all that stuff. Alex and Ryan if you interfere you'll be in for a fight of your lives. Wait a minute, that's Slick. So Slick has Alex, Ryan's girlfriend or whatever. I don't even know. Anyway so this is like a game about like gang wars between high school students. It's kind of cool and you just beat the shit out of people. Like come on, come on. Just beat the crap. Like grab this. Smack the crap out of him. Get money. Alright it got the crap. Okay beat him. Barf. Oh crap. So these guys just keep coming out of nowhere and of course they're so smart they can pick up items and they can actually use it to hit you with. And they all kind of look different and they all have different names. You see they bar, Terry and Perry. They all like names that rhyme. So these guys, what are their names? Carrie. They all like rhyming names, you notice that? Anyway it looks good so far. I gotta say it's so it's very smooth. This is 60 frames per second right now. It is really responsive. I'm using a real NES controller. It is instantly responsive. As soon as I hit the button the input works. It just, there's no lag whatsoever. It just, it's a very good experience. And that's not bad. So crap, bumped into a wall. So I want to show you one feature the Everdrive N8 has. So it has a quick save feature. And it is a, you can assign the buttons on the main menu. So essentially what I do is, I made it to, if you press A and B it saves. A quick save. So I'm going to press A and B right now together. There, that's a quick save. It's really, really easy. So I leave, right? And to load the quick save I made it so that if you press start and select that loads the quick save. So let's say I get into a fight with these guys and I don't know they beat me up and I get hurt or something like that. And I press start and select it pushes me back here. So you can, you can just keep starting, you can keep on reloading over and over again. And you can make a new save somewhere else and it'll work like that again. It's a really, really neat feature. It's kind of like cheating if you ask me, you know, doing a save, save feature, but if you're playing something really difficult like Ninja Gaiden or something like that, I'm picking this guy up. And you can use it, you can use people as weapons in this game. Is that crazy? So yeah, this is a great game. It runs really well in the AVS. Couldn't be happier with the way this looks. Let's try some other games out. So to go back to the main menu, all you actually do is just tap the reset button. So just tap the reset button and there I am back at the main menu. What are good games there? Let's try Ninja Gaiden out. So I'm gonna go to Ninja Gaiden. Of course, Ninja Gaiden 1 obviously. You start and select. You just press B and it works so well. The AVS is so cool because it first of all plays these games in HD and then you have the EverDrive that goes with it. And the EverDrive lets you load all your NES games onto one cartridge. Which is really nice. So as you can see, this is the smoothest Ninja Gaiden experience I've ever had. This is so nice because this game requires so much precision and timing that you basically need to have something like this. Like you see this right here? And of course the... look how smooth it is. This is exactly what I've always wanted to play in Ninja Gaiden. 6GFPS is completely responsive controls and it just runs so well. And like, yeah, I could not have asked for a better experience. So there's Ninja Gaiden first level. Of course you're gonna have to have a little bit of skill to play this. Check out that cool weapon I got. You have to keep jumping over in order for it to work. That guy, I already knew that guy was coming and keep moving. I don't think I got hit even once. Alright, here's the first boss. Alright, nice, beat him. And there's a little bit of flickering because I didn't turn on the extra sprites so it's gonna look like that a little bit. So yeah, that's Ninja Gaiden. That's not too bad. Not too shabby. And of course here's the cutscene for Ninja Gaiden. Who are they? Who's there? I really like the sprite work of these cutscenes. Just a woman or just a girl. Get out of here. Oh no, she has a gun! She has a gun! Did she shoot him? Alright, we'll find out next time. Can I reset? Pop back to the main menu? I don't know. I get sucked into that kind of game. So because I went back to the main menu because I want to show you one last thing before we leave. So the AVS, as you're aware, the AVS has a cheat code option. I let you put in cheat codes if you really, really are sucking at a game and you want to cheat at it. And we're using an Everdrive N8, which is its own Flash cartridge that has its own games in it. So that's kind of things not going to work. But luckily the N8 has its own cheat function built in. So we're going to take a look at that. To do this you have to press B, right? You press select only. You want to press select only. And then you press select and you go to Cheats. So here is the cheat menu for the Everdrive N8. And the way it works is you need to go on Google and find out what the cheat code is and what the cheat code does. So the first line is going to be its own cheat. What I do is I got this one from Google. This is a Dragon Warrior 3, Dragon Quest 3 cheat code that allows you to have unlimited HP, which would come in very handy and make the game very, very not fun but very fun at the same time. I don't know how to explain it. So this is the cheat code if you want to know. SZ's last one there. And cheats are enabled as you can see and we just press A and we're out. So then in order to select this with the cheat codes you want to press start. And pressing start will bring us to the game. Here's Dragon Warrior 3. All its gloriousness, the intro. And as you can see it looks great, it looks awesome. Dragon Warrior 3 pressing start. So the sound I have to say about the AVS is that the sound in AVS sounds so good. It's not piercing, it just it is so warm on your ears. It sounds so nice you know. Like listen to this, this sounds really nice. And there's the mom of course. It's a very big day for the hero. He has to get up and go unsupervised around the world. Before we should check out the cheat code we gotta go talk to the king because they force you to do that. Well after we talk to the king we're gonna run outside the city and see if the enemies can hurt us. I'll show you how the cheats work in action. You don't have to do anything to act for the cheats, they just they just work like that. All right here I'll go straight to the castle. Thanks mom. All right I'm going to the castle. And as you can see everything looks really nice. It looks nice, the graphics are great, it sounds great. This is the best way to play NES games if you ask me. This is, there's no other way. Or here's the king. Yep this is uh all right so the Baramos is the enemy. I know all this stuff. This is one of, this is probably my favorite NES game ever. This game holds up so well. It looks good, sounds good. Everything about it is fantastic and it's scrolling well. There's no screen tearing. Everything about it is so perfect. This device you know it captured the NES the way it's meant to be played. This is how probably how people played it back in the 80s. Amicom. So anyway we now have left that old guy. We're gonna head off into the world and see how much damage we take from enemies. All right there we go the overworld. Great music. There's seven slimes that appeared. Ready to attack me. Let's try our best. Oh I killed one. Now he hit me and you see that my HP is not going down. That means that the cheat code worked. So I can basically just, I can beat all these guys and it'll be super easy. They're already attacking me and it's not doing anything. Boom. Attack them one more time. So it's not doing any damage whatsoever. It's saying I'm unhurt. Let's see. I did one damage but it actually did no damage. So yeah the cheat option in the ABS is, not in the ABS but in the N8. Works perfectly. It works just as well as I want to. If you want to speedrun an NES game, you don't want to spend too much time, you can use all these crazy cheats like HP cheats, XP cheats, especially for Dragon Quest. And if you ask me, so far this is probably the best way to play the original Dragon Quest trilogy. Possibly. Like this, if you want to go the extra mile, you could obviously play the other Switch versions, I just came out with. If you want to go the extra mile, no way beats this, this, this way. So let's just finish these guys off. Just why not? It just takes how long these fights, if you're doing it alone. I'd probably just stop out of boredom. Alright, one more guy left. And as you can see I'm completely unhurt. I defeated Slime. I leveled up. Nice. That's not bad. Neespell. Well, hit the reset button now just to go back. You saw how the cheat codes work. So basically this is honestly the best way to play NES games. This is hands down. Obviously you could get an NES classic, you could get a Super Nintendo classic, something like that. But it's not going to be FPGA as accurate as this with all the little graphical glitches, all the little quirks that an NES is supposed to have. This is as close to a real NES experience as you can get. And look at all, and the, of course, it's not just the ABS, that's the good part here. It's also the EverDrive. The EverDrive has all these crazy games. I'm telling you this right now, this is every single NES game that exists. I've not, you could fit every single NES game that exists on one little SD card. This is all of them. It's crazy. I can like just go through all of them. These are, this is all of them. It's insane. I could, uh, what are NES games? I mean, it's just, there's everything here. Look at this. Just play that, right? So yeah, the EverDrive, N-Age, and the Retro USB ABS, it's the best combination for the best way to play NES games. I mean, what else could I say? So yeah, I hope you enjoyed this little review of the Retro USB ABS and the EverDrive N8. I want to thank Stone Age Gamer for hooking me up with the, with the N8. It's a very nice of them to discount it for me, for this review, and it was, it's just a great device, and I'm very happy with both of them. I think it was well worth the money. I think it was a great device overall, and I will be playing this, I will be covering most NES games with this for now on. It's going to be a very important part of my collection. So yeah, thanks for watching, and I'll see you guys next time.