PiStation (RetroPie + Mini PlayStation) - Rerez

What I'm about to show you today isn't available publicly. You can't go out and buy these from someone but a fan of Rerez named Steve made one for us just because he thought I’d think it was really cool. This is the PiStation a miniature PlayStation that actually does play PlayStation games but the difference is it’s about the size of a deck of cards. The system itself is a 3D printed model which means that it's not actually mold injected plastic. You'll see some kind of lines and stuff from the 3D printing process but inside isn't a customized process or anything like that. Just a Raspberry Pi version 3 in fact and inside that Raspberry Pi is enough horsepower to run a whole bunch of games. Not just PlayStation but a bunch of other games. So here's what the system can run right now. To get everything to work this system is running RetroPie which is a collection of open-source software that allows you to emulate a whole bunch of systems. While setting up RetroPie Steven selected a group of consoles that could be emulated pretty easily from your couch. He didn't really want to choose video games that would run off DOS emulation or something because then you'd need a mouse and a keyboard. Every console he chose you can comfortably play with an Xbox One controller or the PlayStation 4 controller. The only time I ever found that I needed to use the keyboard was when I was changing some Wi-Fi settings or things like that. This entire setup is done specifically to emulate retro video game systems but the PiStation is loaded with a lot of other features. Now like I said at the core of this system there's a Raspberry Pi version 3 in here so it has Wi-Fi built-in, bluetooth, you have the ability to plug in a whole bunch of controllers and stuff to the four USB ports, you also have a LAN port which is really nice if you want to use wired internet instead of wireless and it has HDMI out and AV out. And it all is powered by a very small micro USB port. That's kind of awesome. The thing is so small but so powerful that you're going to be able to do a lot of other things and because essentially the core of this is just a Raspberry Pi well you can make a whole bunch of things happen if you have the programming knowledge to do so. Steven even made a customized cover for the system because it's 3D printing and you can really make anything you want. He gave us a little Rerez top so that we could switch between case tops.

As far as game emulation goes you're going to be able to run a lot of stuff on here but just keep in mind not everything is going to emulate properly and in some cases some emulators just don't work at all. But let's start off with the most basic of video game emulation the Atari 2600. Now of course there shouldn't be any shock and surprise this system can run Atari games. Unfortunately a couple of them just seemed to be a little bit off and some they didn't seem to load properly. And though that may be an issue with the roms that I had I do imagine that there are some issues on the software side. But when the games did run they ran perfect. They looked great, they felt great and they feel very much like an original 2600 experience. So if that's what you're looking for you're going to get that with this. Only with a far different controller.

Now next up is Game Gear. I'm very happy with the Game Gear performance because believe it or not playing on an original Game Gear is one of those things that didn't age very well. You see the screen had a lot of ghosting and although it was very bright and very colorful sometimes it was just very hard to see what you were looking at. But with this emulation the games are coming in so clean and crisp it's like I never seen them before. I know the Game Gear gets laughed at a lot but there's actually a lot of really good games on there. And if you ever have the chance to play one of these things you have to play Magical Puzzle Popples. It may be one of the best puzzle games you've never played.

Game Boy emulation is as equally impressive as the Game Gear. They even managed to copy the same kind of green color tone thing that you would've got off an original screen which was pretty cool. I guess I didn't run into any noticeable issues running any of the games on Game Boy so it gets a pass from me. We also have the ability to play Game Boy Color games and although many people think the Game Boy and Game Boy Color are the exact same system but one has a color screen and the other one doesn't they're actually a little bit different. The Game Boy Color is just a little bit beefier in its specs and it's capable of doing some pretty cool things which the original Game Boy wasn't capable of. And the emulation for this system is once again running pretty much spot on. I couldn't tell any differences between this and an original Game Boy Color and the really big benefit of this console is that you get to play these games on a screen that actually lights up.

Now let's talk about the Game Boy Advance because this system enters into the start of some challenging game emulation. Now of course many of us are familiar with games that run on the Game Boy Advance that are basically just 2D side scrollers but there are a number of games released on the Game Boy Advance that utilize some very specific graphics abilities like Banjo Pilot which is a game that feels like it should have been released on the Super Nintendo. And you also have games like Duke Nukem Advance which is a full 3D first-person shooter available on the GBA and it's really just a fun experience. Although probably not as good as the original Duke Nukem 3D. But for me the true test of the Game Boy Advance emulator is its ability to run Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam. Unlike many other Game Boy Advance games this one is using a full 3D engine. It almost looks like something you'd see on the Nintendo DS at least in its early days. This title can be pretty challenging for some Game Boy Advance emulators but as far as I could tell it ran with flying colors.

Now we come to the NES which as you could imagine runs pretty solid. Most people have been able to get NES games to run for years now and this system is no different. All the games I tried on it ran great with great audio emulation, controls and pretty much everything was exactly how you want it to be. I didn't really see anything on here that would give me any kind of indication that the emulation was running bad so as far as I can tell this is a pretty solid emulation. While many people tend to forget about the system the TurboGrafx-16 has a number of really good games on the console. And as far as the emulation goes for this system it seems to run fine. To nobodies surprise the Sega Genesis also runs really well running some of the more questionable games that I've seen other emulators kind of fail at like Comix Zone. You wouldn't think Comix Zone wouldn't run on many other emulators but I've always noticed that certain frames and animations just don't work properly. But on this console it's fine. All the emulations of all the games I played on the Sega Genesis were fantastic. If you put these emulations directly up against the original system playing them I wouldn't have been able to tell a difference.

Now we get into more questionable emulation. Now this system has MAME built-in so you can play a whole bunch of old arcade systems but you're probably going to struggle with playing games that are closer to the 2000s because they start to use a lot more hardware and technology that this little box just isn't capable of doing. What you will be able to play is a large collection of ‘90s and earlier arcade games that are really fun. Unfortunately though because the control schemes for all these arcade systems are so wildly different you're likely to run into some controller issues that aren't going to be that fun to work around. The moment you want to change any of the more complex settings of these emulators you're going to have to bring out a keyboard and the moment you have to do that it kind of breaks away from the fun of just having a plug-and-play system. The Super Nintendo was the first system being emulated on the system that I noticed a couple of issues with. Now the majority of the games I played were fine nothing was really out of the ordinary and everything was just going well but the moment I started up Star Fox I noticed that the game was running at a slightly faster emulation than it should have been running at. This made the game a little bit more intense and possibly more difficult than it needed to be. The game is still playable but for people that grew up playing Star Fox originally you might see this and find it very awkward. Now here is by far the worst emulation this system has to offer. Nintendo 64. This is completely hit or miss and honestly it was mostly misses. Goldeneye’s framerate was so bad that I couldn't even get the main menu to work properly. But there were a handful of games that seemed to run okay like Mario Kart 64 and Super Mario 64. But unfortunately you could tell that within the emulation there were certain things that were supposed to be happening that simply weren't there like special visual effects and stuff like that. In some cases the frame rates dip so low that it just really harmed the experience of playing these games. Overall I wouldn't recommend playing any Nintendo 64 game off the system because at the end of the day you can find something else that can run these games a lot better like a real Nintendo 64.

And finally we come to the PlayStation. The console that this whole thing was modeled after and believe it or not even though this isn't capable of running Nintendo 64 games it runs PlayStation games pretty well. Load times are quick, graphics are on point and it has the ability to emulate the DualShock rumble feature with a Xbox One or other capable controller. It's kind of nice actually and if you didn't know you weren’t playing this on an original PlayStation you might be mistaken into thinking so. In fact this is the time you're probably going to want to bring out that PlayStation 4 controller to get as close to an authentic experience as you possibly can. This is where the system really shines because these PlayStation games work really well. I know the emulation isn't exactly a hundred percent but it was so close that I was really struggling to find any differences at all. If I had to criticize I'd say that there was probably some small differences in frame rates between an original PlayStation running these games and this box right here but it's so minute that it really doesn't bother me.

The case on the system looks like an original PlayStation case but unfortunately the power and eject buttons don't actually do anything because they're just hard plastic. But what Steven did was he wrote a customized script with a unique button on the front here that powers down the whole system using a series of scripts that he wrote. Now this is important because if you were to just unplug the system when it's on it would actually cause a lot of bad problems with the file structure of the SD card. Essentially kind of clearing it and not making it usable the next time you start it up. This power button prevents that from being an issue though and it's welcome to see. Unfortunately though I will say this the USB ports are on the side here. I would have loved to see to you USB ports at the front here where the controllers would have been put in and maybe an SD card slot reader where the memory card used to be. I think that would have been nice but again a lot of hardware design for something that essentially still is just a Raspberry Pi. Unfortunately Steven can't sell these things because that would be very illegal but what he has done is he’s made a video online showcasing the methods he used to make the thing plus a list of all the open-source components that he utilized to actually get the whole thing to work. If you're interested in that and you have the technical know-how go ahead and give it a try.

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