 Welcome back everyone. Today we have a video review of the BitBoy. The BitBoy is a handheld gaming device that plays NES and Game Boy games as well as Game Boy color games and the company at BitBoy was kind of to send me a copy for review so we'll be taking a look at the BitBoy today. So immediately you could tell that this looks like a Game Boy. It looks like it has the Game Boy form factor. It looks like a Game Boy. It has the little ribs and vents of a Game Boy. It has the same color scheme but it's a lot smaller and it's more modern. This device operates using ROMs on an SD card. So it plays Game Boy games and NES games on this device and overall the form factor I think looks really great. It uses, let me show you right now, it uses SD cards. So if you pop this out this one came with my device and if you want to have ROMs for Game Boy and NES having it like a couple gigabytes at least is enough to have the entire library because these games are tiny back then. So let's put that back in. Clicks right in. And there's the BitBoy. And overall this form factor looks great because it looks like a mini Game Boy. It looks like a tiny little Game Boy with the same colors and everything. Here it is compared to a Game Boy pocket actually and as you can see it's a lot smaller and it's a lot thinner. It's probably half the size of the Game Boy pocket but it's still keeping the Game Boy form factor and it looks really great. It's something you would want to play on because when I want to play retro games I usually like the way the Game Boy looks. I think it's a good way to play games. So set that down and yeah BitBoy. It even has the buttons inverted which I think is actually a really good idea. Normally the B button is on the right and the A button is on the left but they change it so it would be easier for you to press both at the same time which I thought was a good idea. This would make playing games NES games at least much easier than before. So this is actually a good design I think. Some people might prefer the other way though and it just it just works very well I think. So you turn on by flipping the switch up top and it boots right into the operating system and you get this main menu screen which it has NES, Game Boy and Game Boy color ROMs all separated. They're all closed off from each other and overall it's kind of a weird looking menu but it gets the job done I guess. The games are all here. The games that you you know want to play and everything. There's a lot going on on the menu but it works. So you boot into ROMs are pressing the start button and it boots right in. As you can immediately tell we're playing Castlevania here the screen is really really bright at first. It's just a really bright screen. In a dark room you'd be able to see everything on the screen and I gotta say I'm pretty happy with the screen. It's a good looking screen and the NES games look pixel perfect on it. They look I have not seen a problem with the NES games. They look really great and you know what they play really great on the BitBoy. The BitBoy does NES really well. NES emulation has gone better over the years so it's not surprised that a device like this would do well on the NES but I was surprised how well it was doing. I had the Odroid as well. The Odroid go and this is a lot better than the Odroid go. I gotta say with in regards to NES games at least. So everything plays well. The frame rates seem about right as they should look. We're playing Blaster Master here which is a good game to test out and to change the brightness you hold select and you push the two black trigger buttons the T-buttons and it makes the brightness go up and down and for recording it with a camera recording the screen usually putting the brightness down is a better option because you can see more of the details. Blaster Master is a it's a good game to test out on the on any sort of Nintendo clone device because of how fast it is and how much reaction time you need to play the game. It's one of the earlier adventure type games open world sort of 2D exploration games. It's a bit of a classic Blaster Master so this is the beginning of Blaster Master and as you can see everything's fast. There's sometimes some slowdown but it's not the BitBoy's fault it's actually the game's fault itself. Sometimes there's a lot of things on screen and it causes some slowdown and that just expected with older games. You'll see that in a lot of NES action titles that have a lot of enemies. This game is also really difficult which is one of the draws to it. I like this game a lot. It's a fun fun little game Blaster Master and overall this is some good performance I'm getting out of Blaster Master on the BitBoy. Everything runs pretty smoothly. It's playable certainly playable and it looks very good. I can't really see anything wrong with it to be honest. So NES emulation is good on the BitBoy. It's really good. Now here we are with a more fast-paced action game just to show you how quick it is. This is Ninja Gaiden which doesn't have much of a slowdown that Blaster Master has and as you can see it runs really really well. This game requires a lot of precision and timing and I was able to play it really perfectly on the BitBoy. It works extremely well so this is a good way to test the BitBoy out is playing Ninja Gaiden if you're good at the game at least. It's a difficult game as well. I like this game a lot. This is one of my more favorite action games and it really tests your reaction speed a lot. Here's the first boss in Ninja Gaiden and overall everything looks good on Ninja Gaiden's part as well. You can usually do a test to see Ryu's outline on the outside of his outfit is brown. Sometimes it's a little bit darker on some emulators so this looks pretty accurate. So yeah just beat the boss and well you could tell just by watching that that beating boss is on a very difficult game is not too difficult. So next I'm going to show you a cool feature. If you go to the main menu you have three different options by pushing this button in the settings menu. So there's mode and display. This device can actually plug into a television which is pretty neat and there's also different modes for the images display. There's a full screen mode as well as normal and there are save states in the settings menu and the save feature works really well so you just save and you can read also. So I save right here. We move forward and you know attack. Now you push the button again and if you go back you can read the save you took and you go right back. So for a game like Ninja Gaiden which is really difficult and you know you die a lot in this game it could be very useful feature. It's kind of cheating though but it's for those who want it I guess it's good to have the save states. Overall the NES game is running on the BitBoy. It looks great and it sounds really great as well. I would definitely recommend playing NES games on the BitBoy as it runs well. The emulation is quite accurate and the colors work really good on this kind of screen on this very bright screen. The cutscenes and Ninja Gaiden look really nice. The music and everything sounds proper. There's no inconsistencies at all and this is overall a very solid way to play NES games so I'm very happy with the way this turned out. Here's another game running on the NES emulator. Just to show off how good the action gameplay could be. Now I know what your biggest question is. Does this thing play Dragon Quest 3? Yes it does. So yeah it plays pretty much any of your favorite NES games you could think of. I've tested a lot of games. This thing played pretty much everything I threw at it. The Odroid couldn't play Dragon Quest 3 on the NES which is interesting. I don't know why it couldn't do that but the BitBoy can play Dragon Quest 3 and any other RPG. Some of these little handheld emulators have trouble with RPGs for some reason on the NES but this one works really well. So is this a really good option for NES emulation? Yeah it really is. I mean your other options are what? Getting an Odroid Go or getting one of those DIY kits. This goes for about $40 to $50 so it's not a bad price for what you're getting. The other devices are similarly priced and honestly the quality you're getting with this device it's just really great. So yeah Dragon Warrior 3 as it was originally called. There's something about the NES version that I really like. Just the simplicity of it. The fact that it was running on such an old console and as you can see it looks perfect on this little screen. So I mean yeah you can play one of the greatest games ever on the NES library whatever that is to you and have a good time playing on the BitBoy, the new BitBoy of course. And I think that's enough of that for now. Now the BitBoy plays NES games really really well. However I do have one issue with the BitBoy and it's that its Game Boy emulation is not quite... there's there's some problems with it and we'll take a look at it shortly. Now this screen is designed for NES games. It's obvious it's designed for NES games the way the aspect ratio works but on Game Boy games something is a little off. You can probably notice it right here on the title screen for Pokemon Red version. So when we go into the actual game for Pokemon it will become very obvious what the issue is. So when we zoom into the main character you can see the issue here. The pixels are not perfect. They're kind of squished in some parts. You can see look at his eye. His eye on one side is slim and the other side is all big. The pixels all around kind of weird or weirdly compressed. And this is because the screen is not perfect. It's not a perfect one by one screen for the Game Boy. The Game Boy has a very specific sized screen that makes the pixels look a certain way. So this has a lot of shimmering, a lot of weird effects. You can see like the pixels bumping in and out of different kinds of sizes. It does not look right. There's something really wrong with the Game Boy the way this looks. And it's really ironic because this BitBoy looks like a Game Boy and it looks like you think this would be a Game Boy device but this plays NES games better than plays Game Boy. You can see this all around and this is not like every character in this game will have a weird eye on the right side or on the left side whichever side is not right and it does not look good. It looks pretty bad to be honest. This is not something I would play and it's not a definitive way to be playing your Game Boy games if you're asking me. The BitBoy is great for it's great for NES games but for Game Boy games we have a huge issue here with the way the characters look and everything and the way the pixels are scaled. The scaling you just not, it just not meant for Game Boy games it looks like. We'll do a quick side by side comparison so you know what I'm talking about with the original cartridge for a Pokemon game. So here's Pokemon Gold and we're going to be putting it into the Game Boy pocket for comparison. All right here they are side by side and we'll be zooming into them so you can see the way the eyes supposed to look like. As you can see the screen for the pocket is bigger and we have a pixel perfect screen for the Game Boy pocket so as you can see it should be symmetrical as I should be the same size. Every pixel should be perfectly square not rectangular and here we have irregular pixels it does not look proper that's not how it's supposed to look like it's supposed to look like this. So honestly if you want to play Game Boy games I always just say get an original Game Boy because using an emulator device for a Game Boy it doesn't make sense I mean it makes sense for an NES because you're putting an entire console into a handheld device but for for Game Boy emulation I wouldn't really go with the BitBoy if you want it you know if you're purist and you want something really accurate really close to the original get a Game Boy. The BitBoy it's it's a it's a very good device but it's clear that the BitBoy was designed for NES. Here if we pull up the Game Boy version of Dragon Quest 3 because there was a really great Game Boy color version with a lot of great colors we had the exact same issue that we have here in Pokemon so wait till the hero jumps out of bed and I'll show you what's going on so all right here we go there's Erdrick and if you zoom in he's also got the one eye looking kind of weird so this pretty much affects every Game Boy color and regular Game Boy game on the entire system it's really unfortunate that we had this issue nothing in the settings have been able to fix this I've tried it just doesn't work so some people might not mind this I personally I can't I can't deal with this it's it's just not very good idea and I'm sure that there is a firmware update that might fix this this device does allow that but RPGs I wouldn't play on the BitBoy now side scrolling games such as Cat Trap as you can see here they look fine I mean it's mainly an issue with RPGs to be honest the the part the issue with the irregular pixels not being square you mostly see in the RPGs the side scrolling games look a little bit better they're not as noticeable and I would probably only play side scrolling games on the BitBoy in reverse of Game Boy games so that pretty much covers that part in conclusion this device is really it's really great device for NES games I think this device looks good it looks like a little Game Boy it has good picture quality it has good sound it's overall a great device but in regards to Game Boy games I wouldn't use it for for Game Boy games I would use this for NES games but some people they might not mind it I personally mind it I know a lot of people it's the idea that your Pokemon character might have one eye at smaller and why one eye that's bigger that might bug a lot of people it would bug me but you can make a decision for yourself I'll leave a link in the description below and how to buy the BitBoy if you're interested hope you guys enjoy the video and I'll see you next time