Ambernic RG351P

[Cyberpunk]

Gues who's back.

Back again!

Cyb is back!

Tell a friend!

 

Hi guys. I'm back. I've been working from home since last June. I'm still currently dealing with depression, but also have bowel cancer to deal with as well. I't not too bad. I'm waiting on an operation which my doctor tells me should sort it right out. They're going to remove part of my large intestine, and follow up with chemo to blitz anything remaining.

 

Anyway, I thought I'd tell you how I've been spending my time in the interim since I last posted. First off, I had to get a new smart watch, as I fell, broke my arm, and broke my watch. The home insurance sent me out an Armani AX Connect watch, running Google Wear OS 2. In some ways it's better than my old Huawei Watch GT2, and in some ways it's not as good. It has a bigger screen, and more functions, but a slower processor, and no built in speaker. Anyway, what this is leading up to is I make and publish watch faces using the Facer app which runs on Wear OS, Samsung Tigen, and Apple Watch OS. Here's some of my watch faces. If you have a smart watch, and wish to check out Facer, find it in your app store. I publish unter the name C-P, as Cyberpunk was taken.

 

 

Also, I still game quite a lot. The two main games I'm currently playing are Cyberpunk 2077 on my Xbox One, and Farcry 5 on my PC.

 

The the meat of this post is my retro handheld console. The Ambernic RG351P. 

 

It's a handheld retro emulator console, which costs about £90. And I love it to bits. Now, I won't get into any debate about the legality of retro roms, and the like. Let's just say that the majority of the games on my personal system are copies of games I actually own in one form or another.

It has a 1.5ghz Rockchip quad-core cpu, a 3.5 inch IPS backlite display running at 480 by 320 resolution, a 3500mAh battery built in, 1gb of DDR3 ram, and a micro SD slot for storage, taking up to 256gb cards. It uses Nintendo Switch analogue sticks, and has R1/R2 and L1/L2 buttons on the top edge. It runs an Emulation Station front end, with a lite version of Linux in the background. Here's what it can emulate.

Playstaion Portable, although some games, such as God of War, run poorly.
Playstation 1
Nintendo DS, using a clever system to switch between screens.
Nintendo 64
Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicom

Nintendo Super Entertainment System

Nintendo Gameboy/Gameboy Colour

Nintendo Gameboy Advance

Sega Master System

Sega Game Gear

Sega Megadrive/Genesis

Sega Saturn

Sega Dreamcast

Capcom Play System 1, 2, and 3
NeoGeo

NeoGeo Pocket
Commodore Amiga

Commodore Amiga CD32

Commodore 16/64/128/Vic 20

Atari 2600/5600/7200

Atari ST

Mame

WonderSwan/WonderSwan Color

PC Engine

Game & Watch

Vectrex

MSX

And finally, It also runs ports of old PC games, such as Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem 3d, Outrun, Commander Keen, Diablo, Half Life, and loads more. You have to own these games, and copy the game files from your PC to the SD card to get them to run.

 

And for your viewing pleasure, here's a video of my system running the famous Amiga 500 tech demo, Jesus on E's

 

 

 

[mfnick]

Shit man sorry to hear the bullshit you’ve been through. Hope you’re ok and good luck.

 

Secondly, that does look pretty cool. What’s the Saturn emulation like on it? If you’ve tried it of course? 

[Cyberpunk]

2 minutes ago, mfnick said:

What’s the Saturn emulation like on it? If you’ve tried it of course? 

It takes a little messing around with the settings, frameskip and the like, but the results can be pretty good. And you can save a configuration file per game which will auto load every time you play.

[mfnick]

Sweet. Does it come loaded up or do you have to go installing the emulators and roms yourself? 

[Cyberpunk]

It comes with all the emulators already on it, and a selection of games from various systems. With the purchase of a USB-C WiFi dongle, it can be updated via your home internet. 

 

The new version, the RG351M is identical except it has a metal body, and WiFi built in.

[retroed]

Hey man, I hope you're ok. Good to see you back on here.

 

That RG351P looks cool.

 

[Cyberpunk]

You'd love it Ed. The Gameboy Advance emulation is top notch. And the screen is the same size and resolution as the old Gameboy Advance SP.

[DisturbedSwan]

Good to have you back @Cyberpunk and sorry to hear about your issues, fingers crossed the op you've got + chemo will destroy the fucker. 

 

As an Apple Watch user I will definitely check out the Facer app now as well haha.

[DANGERMAN]

welcome back @Cyberpunk  ?

 

that handheld looks pretty good. I feel like we're probably 2 years away from them being powerful enough to do all the retro stuff you'd want flawlessly. Might look at one myself in a couple of months

[Cyberpunk]

I thought I'd add to my post here as I was a little rushed when I wrote it originally. Hence the spelling mistakes and the like. However, I wanted to add to what I described earlier in the post, and tell you of other features and emulators this console has. I want to do it justice, as it's quite simply the best £90 I've spent on gaming equipment in a very long time. I'll give each game system it emulates a score out of five with a brief description of it running games as well. If it's popular enough, I'll do a video review as some later date, upload it to my YouTube channel, and share it here.

 

First off , the Ambernic RG351P is not the only retro handheld console available.  But it is one of the highest rated in the last 12 months. And since I bought mine, Anbernic brought out the RG351M, which does the same thing, but has a metal body, and WiFi built in. I would recommend watching some video's on the YouTube channel "Retro Dodo", as this guy reviews retro emulator consoles, and gives an honest unbiased opinion.

 

The RG351P is about the physical size of a smart phone, such as a Galaxy S9, but about 3/4 inch thick. On the bottom, there's a micro SD card slot and the reset button, as well as stereo speakers. On the left side is the power button. On the right, there's a volume wheel. On the top edge, you have the L1/L2 and R1/R2 buttons, and two USB-C sockets, as well as a 3.5mm headphone jack. Of course you can see from the picture above, the front face has two Nintendo Switch analogue sticks, a D-Pad, four action buttons, labelled X Box style, and the Start and Select buttons. The analogue sticks can be depressed for L3 and R3. The screen is scratch resistant glass fronted. I've listed it's specs above. It comes out of the box loaded with a selection of games, and ready to go, but there are also three different firmware options you can use instead of what comes with the console. These unlock other features, such as over the air updates. These are called Bactocera, 351Elec, and ArkOs. ArkOs is the one I personally use.

 

The user interface is fully theme-able with loads of themes available online. The screen has a brightness option, and I usually leave mine at 50%. The power light shows green for good battery, orange at 25%, and flashes red when low.

 

All the game emulators built in have the usual things you'd expect in their settings, such as save states, frame skip, and loads of other options to get you games running as well as you can. Mostly, I don't mess with these as most run fine without tinkering. The exceptions are the more powerful consoles, such as PSP, N64, Dreamcast, etc. I should add that the emulator list I put above is not comprehensive, as if your SD card does not have games from a certain system on it, the console won't show that system. For example, it'll run ZX Spectrum games, and I currently have none installed. Also, more consoles are added often. The current rumour is Gamecube and PS2 will be added soon.

 

 

On to the games and how they run...

I look to get an FPS of at least 30. You can go into the options and turn on an FPS readout overlaying your games to see how well they run.

 

• First off, the games that originally ran on home computers, Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, etc I find are the trickiest to set up. This is because you have to map the game controls to your "gamepad" and the games are expecting a keyboard, or usually a single button joystick. But once this is all mapped, they run very well. 5 for performance, 3 for setting up.
• PlayStation Portable runs 2D type games very well indeed. Castlevania - Symphony of the Night is excellent on the RG351P. However extreme 3D games such as God of War run poorly. This may be fixed in the future. 2 for big 3D games, 4 for 2D games.
• PlayStation 1 has no issues to speak of, except maybe some frame stuttering on a few fast action games. set a frameskip of 1 or 2, and this sorts it right out. 4
• Nintendo DS uses a clever system to switch between screens. It works very well, but you have to bear in mind there's no touch screen. Instead, the emulator uses the right analogue stick kind of like a mouse pointer for touch controls, and this isn't good. Play a game with very little touch input, such as New Super Mario Bros, or Mario Kart, and it's fine. Any touch based game like Actionloop isn't worth the hassle. 3 to 4 based on the touch controls, and screen switching with the L2 button when needed. All games run at full speed.
• Nintendo 64 runs quite well, doesn't lag, but gives graphical glitches and anomalies at times on certain games. Nothing game breaking usually, but I've found Road Rash 64 to be unplayable because the upper part of the screen glitches out. I've have fun with Mario 64 and Goldeneye though. 4
• Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicom work exceptionally well. 5
• Nintendo Super Entertainment System/Super Famicom also work exceptionally well. 5
• Nintendo Gameboy/Gameboy Colour again, really good. For original Gameboy games, you can change the colour palette to whatever you like. I prefer monchrome black and white, but some might like the old olive green. 5
• Nintendo Gameboy Advance again, exceptionally well, and the RG351P screen does these games justice, being the same size and resolution as a Gameboy Advance SP, but with a better back-light. 5 
• Sega Master System 5
• Sega Game Gear 5
• Sega Megadrive/Genesis 5, and I must also mention that the console also runs Sega 32X and Sega CD as well.
• Sega Saturn is a little tricky to get going at full speed, but play with the settings a little, and you get good results. I played though Panzer Dragoon for the first time with this system. 4
• Sega Dreamcast is like the Sony PSP, in that 2D games work very well, but 3D games may slow down. Sonic Adventure is an example of this. The game is perfectly playable, but might stutter during certain sequences. 3
• Capcom Play System 1, 2, and 3 all play very well. 5
• NeoGeo. I love this console, but could never afford the original equipment and games. The RG351P is an excellent way to try these games, and they run much better than the "official" NeoGeo handheld released a couple of years ago. 5
• NeoGeo Pocket runs very well. You could say that 8 bit and 16 bit consoles run with no faults, and leave it at that. 5
• Atari 2600/5600/7200, again its 8 bit and 16 bit. 5
• Mame. Anyone who's tried to emulate Mame before knows it's trial and error. It depends on the game. If the game runs, it usually runs well. But sometimes they don't run, and I think it's to do with the original rom dump. 3 to 4
• WonderSwan/WonderSwan Color. No problems to speak of, but I've not really tried these so much. the games I've tried work well. 4
• PC Engine is also known as TurboGraphix, and run really well. 5
• Game & Watch. Now these are a little strange. These games are being preserved for posterity. However, it's not a simple rom dump. I've read they have to read the chips, and decide how they work, and sometimes guess. These games are not just the Nintendo games, but also other 80's LCD and LED games, such as those made by Tiger and Grandstand. Also, the guys programming them include the the physical cases on the screen. You can zoom in to see the LCD/LED part, but if you were playing, for example, Nintendo Game and Watch Donkey Kong, you see the full double screen console, buttons and all, squished onto your 3.5 inch screen. Kinda like the picture below. I'd give it a 2 to 3.

• Vectrex works. It has no speed issues, but I've found the D-Pad controls to be very over sensitive. Which is a pity to me, as I own a non working Vectrex, and have five games for it. I'll have to get around to fixing it, and finding the colour masks on Ebay. 3
• PC Games are known as ports on this system. The port executable's are already on the console out of the box, but won't show up until you copy the games software from your PC to the console. This can be easy, e.g. Doom is just copy Doom.wad into the right folder. Or a little more tricky e.g. Half Life has to be installed on your PC, then the whole folder has to be copied to the console.  The Steam/GOG/etc versions are fine, so you don't need to find the old discs. Also, some of the ports have different names to the games they run. AN example is in order to play Out Run, once you've installed it, you need to select Cannonball on the console. They're not all like this. Doom is Doom, Quake is Quake. However, once installed the PC games run very well indeed, and are usually already set up for your consoles controls. I'd give 3 for installing, and 5 for how they run. 

A few final things before I finish. The RG351P uses many different emulators, but because of the very well built front end, you will not usually tell this. You simply select your console of choice, then select the game, and play. The RG351P has inbuilt key combinations that override game controls. Here are some examples. Select + Y will bring up the emulator settings, to change settings, or use save states. R3 + Power turns off the console. Pushing Power on its own simply puts it to sleep. And finally, to add games there are two ways. The first is to eject the Micro SD card, plug it into your PC, and drag and drop. The second way, if you have a WiFi dongle is to hook it up to your home WiFi, and use FTP software to transfer the files. This way is slower, but doesn't stress the SD card slot on your console.

 

Any questions, feel free to ask. And I hope you find this helpful and/or interesting.

 

[Jimboxy]

That's an awesome write up @Cyberpunk
i do wish I'd picked one of these up instead of my Gpi boy case that's powered by a pi zero. It's looks the business (it's the same-ish form factor as the og game boy) but the pi zero is very under powered so it really only runs GB and GBC reliably, which is fun, but I was hoping for GBA emulaton as well. With any of these types of things I always spend more time tinkering about with stuff on them instead of actually playing anything.

 

Where did you order yours from dude?

[Cyberpunk]

After watching the Retro Dodo review, I just found it on Amazon mate. Before this one, I had a Bittboy Pocket Go, but it was underpowered, and only had a 2.5 inch screen. Too small for my elderly eyes lol.