Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “I don’t regret my purchase – Analogue DUO”.
There has never been a better time to be a gamer, and a big part of that is all these amazing retro devices that are coming out that make playing old games better than ever, and today we have the analog Duo. This is the first PC engine turbo graphic 16 Focus fpga console, which is pretty cool. You might not have ever played the turbo Graphics 16, if you’re in the west, but the PC engine, the Japanese counterpart was actually a better seller than the Mega Drive, which is the Genesis in Japan, and it has probably one of the most underappreciated libraries of any Console ever it has the best classic vany. In my opinion, it’s got the Bon and arzon games, it has the start of the ease franchise and, finally, it’s easy to play it getting a turbo graphic 16 is pretty expensive. You can get PC engines for cheap, but they look like a smoker ate them and spat them out. Just like this, this uh white console is kind of pre- smoker colored, and I think I kind of dig it. The console itself is very reminiscent of a turbo Duo, which is the combo device that they released uh, that was both the PC engine and the CD add-on built in because the CD add-on actually came later and with it brought some of the console’s absolute best games.
So this is a pretty small package. It’S a lot wider than other analog consoles uh, but it’s not deeper, which is nice, so that’ll fit very well and because there’s no cartridge going on top. You could fit this in quite a small little space on your retro shelf on the front. We have our power, our Hue card slot and our CD slot with the eject button on the back. We have our SD card slot. Ours came pre-loaded with an SD card that has some cover art on it, but yours will not.
We have an HDMI slot that can do up to 1080 p60. You have your two USBS, where you can use any wired controller, which is really nice and this one’s actually type c, which is sort of new for the full-fledged analog consoles. The N Noir the super NT and the me SG are all micro USB, which is not a huge deal. Cuz, I’m not unplugging replugging all the time, but it’s nice that they’ve uh entered the 21st century on the bottom.
We have this cool little analog pattern. I think it’s quite attractive and it’ll help prevent it from slipping and sliding it’s quite grippy uh and the neat little wavy pattern, just like the turbo Duo had back in the day on the top. We have this transparent bit that looks like you should be able to see the CD spinning, but there’s actually another smoker beige piece of plastic underneath. So you cannot on the side. We have the PC engine controller Port, it’s cool that you can use an original controller, but if you want to use a turbo Graphics controller, you actually need a little adapter they’re cheap, but it would have been nice for them to include it in the Box. The compromise is that they’ve built 2.4g as well as Bluetooth right into the console, so you can use the 8bit D Wireless ones without a dongle. We also have our headphone jack, just like the original console had, as well as our volume rocker and the pairing Button. As well as what I believe are controller Port indicators, all right, let’s see what else is in the box, we have a little analog sticker, fpga and a quick start guide.
We have the full manual PDF, as well as the most recent firmware uh, which is nice, but even better is the jailbroken firmware. That’S just been released, which we will try also included, is a is that what 3 ft C to C cable, which works with the included block uh analog, really recommends that you use this block. There’S been some reports of voltage issues with other ones. It’S a bit of a shame. I like to have four six Port USB things, so I can power a bunch of devices at once, so having to use an entire block. Just for this to be safe is a bit of an issue and honestly, I probably would risk it we’re going to be using the white analog today, but it also comes in Black. So it’s just a preference thing. One thing of note is that analog has finally caught up to their demand.
For many years it took years to get stuff that you ordered. What isn’t awesome is that there’s actually no controllers included with the device. I understand you’re trying to keep cost down, but it’s kind of frustrating. If you don’t know that and you get this beautiful device and you can’t play it and most stores aren’t carrying these. So you have to wait another week or so to get your controller. Just something of notes make sure you get a controller when you buy this, but before we can get to that. Let me tell you about our sponsor vessie, thanks to vessie for sponsoring today’s video vessie claims. Their shoes are extremely waterproof and keep your feet cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Their storm burst. High toop shoes combine the comfort of a sneaker with the grip and coverage of an outdoor boot. Vessie has even added extra layering for added warmth, as well as extra grip to prevent you from slipping and sliding in unfavorable weather conditions. The storm bursts are feature packed and make great gifts with the unpredictable Spring weather, coming up check out the vessie stormur and other styles at vessie shortcircuit, and get 15 % off your first purchase today, all right, let’s turn it on in terms of games.
We have the super rare Keith courage That You Don’t See at every game, store ever power golf uh, which I’ve never played. Although I’ve been told it’s extremely difficult, as well as my favorite Shrek 3D we’re playing on a 1440p display, which is an ideal. The analogs cap out currently at 1080P and so there’ll, be some scaling happening in the monitor. That’S fine for today it gives us an idea of what we’re working with okay, we load right into a little tutorial.
Pairing is surprisingly easy. Once you read the manual you hit the pairing button on the console, then the 8bit D button on the controller and then hold select for it to flash quickly and then it paired in just a second and way we go. That’S that’s not bad. Truly not a big deal.
I wish the pairing button on the console was not so flush with it. I’M not sure if I’m touching an LED or the button uh for the best experience Duo requires a dedic dedicated SD card uh. It’S good that I got one in there from you: memories, L, save States, capture, screenshot Library, reference level database to catalog your game collection games. You play this is kind of neat in your library.
Every time you play a game, it’ll, add it and it’ll show the time played and theoretically could have the art. So you’ll have a nice little database of all the games. You’Ve played it’s not ripping the game seemingly to the device like a poly Mega wood. The whole point of this over a mister is that you want to put your real games in if you’re buying this to rip games to this, and you play other consoles.
Just get a mister display modes original display modes, Rec the appearance of the original hard display, such as the PC engine, LT and PC engine GT. I’M not super familiar with the specific display modes that they’re talking about that are console based um, but I do play a lot on a CRT and that’s one thing I really like about analog consoles on Modern displays is that they do a good job appr. Approximating what a CRT would do to the very primitive Sprites here we are at Main men.
We got insert game, we don’t have a game in right. Now, that’s fine! We have our library, which shows all the games that have been played on this console. If you’re not familiar with the PC engine, /t turbo, Graphics, it’s kind of hybrid 8bit 16bit, so it’s more primitive than the Mega Drive and the Super Nintendo. But it’s much more advanced than the NES or the Master System. And you can see right away with the amount of colors, as well as the Sprite detail, we’re going to go to settings Duo system and then we can mess around with my favorite part of the settings. So we have our display mode so, based on the different consoles, they all have slightly different color profiles, so we have our display modes. We have our mode settings where you can adjust sharpness inside the size menu.
We can set a custom scale with our resolution here or make sure that we’re at integer scales of 3 4 5. If you’re on a 1080p display. I don’t think, there’s a reason to not do 5x. We have an option to show or unshow over scan. We can choose between RGB and composite color in terms of audio.
We have the Huard audio as well as our volume selector, it’s nice. This can actually play every PC engine game ever, including the super Graphics games. There was like 16 of them that were made, and so it’s very nice that it’s just included here. We have Cedar options. We can choose the cedar format if we’re trying to like lock it into one specific one, we’ll leave that on autod detect. We have our controller options uh again, autod detect I’m going to trust that it works. That’S one of the strengths of the analog systems. When I play on my Mis at home, I often have to Tinker with things and mess around with things. If I want just to plug something in and it works exactly as intended, I generally choose an analog console for that. This is apparently os7, but if you have an analog pocket, it’s going to look very familiar, although it doesn’t have open fpga, and so I’m a little bit disappointed that you don’t get access to the multitude of cores that are designed for open, fpga use and I Think that’s especially disappointing, considering that the card adapters for the analog pocket have come out and you can actually put Cube Cards into an analog pocket using the adapters now and there’s a lot more options available through the pocket if you’re, you’re, playing handheld and they’re. Even updating it to be more versatile through the dock at the end of the day, the thing that matters is: does it look good and does it play well and because this is an fpga system, it’s probably going to be fraking awesome, there’s imperceptible lag, they claim. It’S not emulation, but fpga is still emulation. It’S just way better Hardware design specifically for this one task, and so I could play this game, but I want to play a game that I I actually know much better and that is Castle Rondo of Blood. The fact that I want to just play this game and stop talking tells me that this is a very accurate experience. Even wirelessly. I don’t feel any lag, it’s immediate response. It looks good. I wish I had other filters. I could play with to get a preferred. Look but in terms of play experience this feels awesome as much as I want to sit here and play through this entire game right now, I’m going to call in Tanner who has a whole new perspective on retro games.
For me all right. What game do you want to play? What what do we have? We have, I think our best games are legally backed up in this beautiful Shrek Double Dragon. We have garu d tetsu special, which I don’t know, and Bong 3, which is another great single player game. Huh really oh multiplayer game. One of the issues I’m seeing now that we’re connecting two controllers is that there’s no indicator on the controllers, which Port they’re plugged into there’s the indicator on the side of here.
That tells you how many are plugged in that’s not necessarily the fault of analog, but that’s a little bit of an oversight for this controller. Maybe they’ll make a V2 that has like more LEDs to indicate what we’re doing power golf Bonk 3, what we doing B, 3 Bonk 3, two player, two player – it’s probably like Mario, where it takes turns. Oh, it’s like Sonic, where we can play. At the same time, so yeah you can’t when you jump on step, you have to use your forehead to to see.
Oh no, I was so excited to be giant for a second honestly. This picture looks good the sound we’re using a monitor. So I don’t have very high expectations for the sound. I assume the sound is probably pretty good yeah. That’S one of the things I like about analog consoles is that the sound works pretty well from my Mis there’s some consoles that just in certain situations sound off, and I never really feel that with my analog consoles, I always am pretty darn certain that I’m getting The right experience, people that are a little more familiar with this Library games, have noted that there are some audio inconsistencies uh compared to original Hardware, but it seems like it’s nothing so serious that if this is your first time playing TCN games, you would notice. Let’S change the game, we’re going to eject this one: that’s not bad! Apparently some people have been complaining about how far it spits this out and it seems like a reasonable spot where I can just kind of pull it out.
There are reports of discs becoming scratched in the console. These are old discs, so these are not a good indicator hold on before you do that before you do that, let’s take a look at what the bottom looks like. Oh you’re, smart, oh there’s, some chunks, yeah the these are not well cared for discs to begin with. So Mak a bunch of differentes all right.
Double drag double drag Dragon. Let’S go punch the mother flers! I think that the PC engine is such an interesting piece of Hardware hold on what’s happening with the Sprites here. Are you seeing what’s happening, yeah that flickering, I’m not sure if that’s accurate to the original experience or not, but it’s definitely noticeable.
I find it interesting how neatly between 8th and 16 bit the PC engine sits like it looks better than NES games, but not quite as good as Genesis games. I was just playing Streets of Rage 2 on the Genesis and it looks so much better than this, but this is so much better than Double Dragon on the NES. Oh, I forgot about price.
It’S $ 250 seems like a lot, but for the polished experience that you’re getting, I think it’s pretty fair, you’ll know if that’s worth it to you overall, if you’re the audience for this, you probably already know it. If you want a very easy out of the box experience, that’s very accurate, very simple to use the analog consoles are great. If you’re someone that’s trying to maximize your dollar and get every system and you’re not that concerned with plugging in real cartridges or CDs. This probably isn’t the best move, even with the jailbreak.
It makes a lot more sense to save the money on this and your next analog console and combine that and get a Mis. The Mis experience is just as accurate takes a little more work to get running properly, but then you have access to pretty much everything all the way up to PS1. Do you regret your playing this now? I do not regret my pre-or. I got exactly what I thought I was going to get out of the box and the fact that it’s already jailbroken means that all of my legally backed up ROMs are easily playable. I don’t have to burn a bunch of discs to make that happen and I’m a big fan of easy and consistent, like short circuit, if you like this video, why don’t you check out the video where Emily unboxes the analog pocket the device, I think, is the Better option for most people, .