Is Gamey a Scam? (Yes, Here’s Why) - Krazy Ken’s Tech Talk
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- Опубліковано 28 тра 2024
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The Gamey console claims to offer 20,000 games for only $160? Something is not kosher here…
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00:00 Introduction
00:44 Video Ad Overview / Claims
02:00 Web Presence
03:56 Purchasing a Gamey!
05:58 What’s in the Box?!
06:45 Assemble the Team!
07:52 Gamey Hardware
10:30 First Boot / Gamey Emails Me
12:33 Gamey Software
15:53 Test: Product Quality
18:17 Test: Adding Games
19:08 Does Gamey Actually Have 20,000 Games?
20:46 PIRACY!
23:31 Sneak Peek: Next Episode
#KrazyKen #ComputerClan - Наука та технологія
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Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii :333333333
but i saw it's not fake from one youtube short!!!
6:22 i saw that sonic!
Food.
Piracy for old games might be illegal but it sure aint immoral.
Edit: I thought this comment would like most of mine would be 3 likes and that would be that. But 3 weeks later people are still commenting and liking. It’s crazy. 🤪
Better use a VPN or spectrum/charter will cancel your Internet
@@disastermaster1413I don't use a VPN and I've had internet my entire life
You got that right.. 👍🏻
Only thing keeping the vast majority of games available.
@@disastermaster1413Why?
The only scams are selling someone else's unit at a gigantic markup and the lie about the number of games. The unit being kinda crappy isn't really a scam.
Now in the industry we call that the soulja method
So in other words, Soulja Boy.
In one of their advertisements, a woman says that the quality of the Gamey is spectacular. However, when you play the thing, some games either run poorly to the point that they're unplayable, or they don't run at all. I'd say that's pretty scammy.
@@benjaminvlzthe games played in the commercials do run fine. A lot of these consoles come with “bonus content” that absolutely don’t belong on the system because it’s not powerful enough to run but since they aren’t dependent for the purchase, not a scam.
Worse yet, that many of the games don't even run!
Oh wow, how righteous of you to delete all those roms. You're literally saving lives here.
I think that's called virtue signalling.
Thats the joke@@user-zb9lv3gh8s
Yeah, it smells like BS.
@@javierortiz82 I don’t have a reason to doubt he did it, but it’s just so pointless to do and brag about.
The more immoral thing here, if you believe that piracy is bad, is that he paid the bootleggers _multiple times_ for products that _obviously_ were going to have pirated content on them - and basically advertising them in this video.
This is quite hypocritical imo. You shouldn’t financially support things you think are wrong, and you shouldn’t create publicity for them. Let them rot in the back catalog of Amazon, whoever was going to buy them would do so anyway.
Yeah I had a similar reaction
Considering that the overwhelming majority of those retro games are rarely (if ever) available for customers to buy in a convenient fashion, it's kinda hard to feel bad about companies not getting paid for something that they have no interest in providing. Piracy is more about failure of service than people wanting to get something for free.
If you make things available to people at a price they can afford, they'll pay for it. Piracy is never a problem on the pirate's end.
Yeah, the scam here is that this is not a "Gamey" or anything of the sort. It's a PowKiddy RGB20S, a solid budget performer in the emulation handheld scene, but even at time of release, the RK3326 CPU in it was a bit old, superseded by other models. Sure, they come with a whole bunch of illegally installed ROMs, and the emulators aren't optimized (the community has long-since taken care of that on this hardware though), but they aren't the scam of the "Gamey". Gamey's whole thing is making you pay twice what the thing is sold for.
Generally these emulator console companies avoid litigation by skipping first party Nintendo games on the SD card. Nintendo is the only company that is at all litigious about these things. Depending on which reseller you get it from the SD card may be loaded with first party Nintendo though, so your mileage may vary.
These don't usually come with ArkOS installed out of the box, I don't think. They come with a no-name Linux OS on there. ArkOS is one of those community operating systems for it that optimises the emulators, so I guess Gamey ARE doing a little bit of a value add by shipping these with ArkOS on them. It's a woefully outdated build though. Looks like 2021 from the version number you see on boot.
Edit: Apparently the RGB20S from PowKiddy _does_ actually come with ArkOS preinstalled.
This is very true
@@NoobixCube they're also throwing it in a different box and for some reason not including all the stickers it comes with.
Yep, was looking at some on Aliexpress while looking for a portable game system to play SNES games. Considerably lower priced then the Gamey version too. Ultimately got a Powkiddy Q90 though, pretty darn cheap and looked like it would fit in a pocket or cell phone holder without a problem (and it does). Neat little machine, even plays PS1 games decently which kinda blows my mind. Also as someone who had never played Resident Evil 1 before the voice acting is........ well its something else.
And doubling the price on an item that you found through an online ad, well that's just a markup to cover the advertising budget. That's not scammy either. So the only real scam is that they're selling pirated ROMs, but if you know they're pirated (and everybody does) you can't really claim any scam at all.
The piracy angle is about a big a nothing burger for the retro community as it can get. I'd love for the creators to profit but lets face it without piracy there would be crater in the world of vintage gaming the size of the size of the actual world
and it's not like the developers get the money if you buy an old game from a local game store
@@asherael the devs wouldn't get money even if the games were sold new directly by the publishers.
they worked for a salary and that has been paid, all the money would be going to the companies and their owners.
@@__Lento__ Well, in the off chance that the makers have a proper contract, they would get a cut if the publisher re-issues the game, a fair bit of main devs for games did have a sales cut in their contract but fairly often a capped one. But they would probably have to employ a lawyer to get the $$ which is unlikely to be worth it.
Lots of developers of 80's games have now passed away. Hell, even managers of companies that released them have died. Therefore, IP rights are completely moot point.
@@aleksazunjic9672 That's not how these things work typically, but you are welcome to proceed assuming so. I'd be wary of generalizing, considering that several of the big names of today already existed in the 80's, and many of the small publishers back then were bought up, including IP, and became some of the newer companies of today, or the financiers of them. I'd just be prepared for trouble just in case.
The crazy markup is essentially what they do with all dropshipping businesses. Even Sneakers cost a few dollars to produce in vietnam but once landed in the US storefronts, then boom, $200.....
If buying is not owning, then pirating is not stealing.
This video isn't regarding the ownership of something
Man, of course the roms are not licensed, I'd be surprised if even one person thought they were
Tell that to my daughter's grandparents. Most people don't know about licensing game rooms, they *assume* that if the game is on the machine, it's legal. After all, how could it not be? It's being sold that way.
@@BenjaminSchollnicktechnically it is legal. There's no other way for these companies to get the money from the games, and I think scalpers are illegal too
(I'm not paying $300 for a game when it was originally $30-60)
@@YOUR_NARRATOR975 no, it technically is illegal. I agree that it's not immoral at all, but it is definitely not legal. The only legal emulation is when you also do own a legitimate copy of the game, the courts have ruled that you are allowed to rip the rom from your own game and emulate it. That's been extended to not going after people who just download a rom online for a game they do own.
I play games I don't own because they're far too expensive, and the money doesn't even go to the developer anyways,
@@YOUR_NARRATOR975 No, it is not legal in any way.
many capcom and sega games are being sold on steam, i got a lot of neo geo games for free with prime gaming, it is mainly nintendo that don't want their games on pc in anyway@@YOUR_NARRATOR975
That is actually a solid machine for its "normal" price of around $60 to $80. It is not unexpected to have trouble with N64 or PS1 and above at that price point. But playing NES, SNES, GameBoy, DS, Genesis, and all other 8 and 16 bit systems, it is more than adequate.
the only problem is they're using a cheap SoC. for that price point it should use some newer and faster SoC available. otherwise i'd love to get my hands on this console for SNES gaming if it was lower than $60
@@araigumakirunoyou can get SNES gaming for less than $40
R36S is cheaper
@@yeshuayeeyee7430 Yea and the R36S is decent for retro games :)
@@araigumakiruno😊
Seriously, who the hell cares about pirating games that arent even produced anymore. The whole section is so stupid and unnecessary.
The only scam here is not researching beforehand and buying a marked up product.
18:50 that's because mame's rom files are "compiled" specifically for a specific version of mame. the mame version and the rom's version must match for the game to work.
arkos is not made by gamey or the original company that made the product so any of those thumbs up dont count
Damn
Literally ALL software running on this thing is likely community sourced. Even the bootloader.
And I'm pretty sure even PowKiddy don't actually have software engineers - they're likely sub-licensors that farm out hardware design to some unnamed electronics mfg and sell the end products of that.
The only quality PowKiddy may even have a rigid responsibility for is the hardware electronics design and manufacturing.
the console itself isn't made by 'Gamey' i guess they only did the box and jack the price
@@gluttonousmaximus9048it isn't illegal to sell hardware with open source components. As long as the price just covers the hardware and you supply the appropriate licenses and source.
By putting emulstation on cheap hardware they increased the reach of it, this is of some benefit to the community. They don't have to hack or design hardware, they just need to make community images for the device.
It would be nice if powkiddy supported some developers, but providing cheap hardware to all counts in my book.
it’s literally open source?????
The console (PowKiddy RGB20S) 128G version retails for ~$55 USD in China btw, so the biggest scam is definitely the asking $160 for it.
Otherwise it's not too bad as a little tinkerer's toy, since it lets you install your own OS the software side of things and optimization issues can somewhat be solved as well. The screen while low in resolution, is a full-laminated IPS. And using the joycon joystick means once they drifted or break, you can find replacements pretty easily.
true
Got mine for free for reviewing. Honestly for what it is it's pretty good. Leaps and bounds better than most bootleg consoles I've had.
*I'm really impressed that someone cares about if an old game is pirated or not*
poor nintendo and their 6 billion in profits in 2023. How are they going to feed their families if we pirate all these games they don't even sell anymore?
I know. Like explain to me what’ll happen if I pirate Mario Kart Super Circuit? Explain, go ahead.
Oh it’ll ruin the value? It has no value, it’s not being made or sold anymore. Its only value is fake inflated garbage due to collectors and scams.
Oh it’s immoral? Why? Who does it hurt? What money am I stealing?
Oh it’s illegal? Yeah. Oh no. I’m not adhering to my overlords by spending 50$ on a 20 year+ old game. Ahhh the horror. Oh no, I’m breaking the law. As if you never speed in your car. Oh no, I’ll get prosecuted for emulating and downloading Pokemon Emerald? No I won’t. Nobody in history has ever been prosecuted for just downloading and playing a rom. What a joke.
None of the other commenters seem to give a shit.
@@chuckschillingvideos yeah bc it’s completely inconsequential if you pirate a 30 year old game
Hey Ken! CORE here. Was just checking out an old KCoS episode that we did & thought I'd see how you were doing & WOW! Last time we were in touch you had about 50k subscribers. You've climbed to 434k+ subs & you've got a Patreon now. Sponsors on your videos, etc. You've done well for yourself! Proud of you, bro! It's really good to see you doing so well. Or at least it seems like you're doing well lol. I really enjoyed this video. I can see why you're doing so good. Funny & informative. Great stuff, man! Take it light, duder.✌️
I own an Anbernic RG405V, RG35XX, and RG353V. Love them all. These little handheld emulators are awesome. The one you got is waayy overpriced though. The RG405V is the same price and has a 4 inch screen, 8 core Unisoc T618 Tiger cpu and 4gb of ram. It can even play ps2 games
I've got an RG405v too. Impressive bit of kit for the money. Plays pretty much everything.
Not gonna lie, Ken, this one's a miss. (The title in particular)
Are they resellers? Sure.
Pirates? Sure.
Scammers? Honestly, no. (Even saying they're scamming the game publishers is a stretch since no money exchanged hands here)
Yeah I feel like Ken should've leaned more into the actual scam of the heavy markup rather than piracy.
@@myyoutubeaccountgotsuspend8666 Yup, agreed. This was the first video from Ken that I downvoted because he was way off the mark on what the scam actually is. That massive markup is retarded high. Ken focusing on the piracy aspect is quite stupid in the worst ways possible. The dude is trying to go for an angle that "piracy is bad" when the *_VAST MAJORITY OF GAMERS_* not only disagree with that, but that if we didn't pirate, none of these games would even exist anymore. Hell, there are even examples of publishers using pirated copies of games because of their own god damn incompetence. Ken's moral angle of piracy is completely wrong. The rest of the video was pretty decent, though.
No money exchanged hands? I can't even. The buyer of the unit is passing money to the seller of the unit, money that should have gone to the game developers. Understand??? Christ.
@@myyoutubeaccountgotsuspend8666 Then you feel quite the opposite way from me. I feel that there's a lot more to talk about regarding the piracy. People aren't buying Gamey to oogle at the hardware, they buy it to play 20k games. Games they can download FOR FREE and play on their computer or phone. Are you beginning to understand now?
@@Nebol Scamming is the act of tricking someone into giving you money. As you correctly identified, the only person giving money here is the buyer.
It follows that the only person that could be scammed is *the buyer* .
Note that "the buyer" is not "the game publisher / developer".
What you describe is piracy.
Damn, this was a great ad for the device. Bought one from the manufacturer to use on trips.
Hey they, I’m pretty new to your channel, but I’m really enjoying your content! I just had a quick thought i wanted to share about your scam videos since they have saved me from making a few bad purchases. If at the end of the video you could start including 1 or 2 similar products that actually function well, and that have most of the features that the bunk junk promises, that would a nice little bonus for the viewers. That’s all i got. Hope this finds you well, and keep up the great work!
The only THING that's a scam here is selling the device at a mark-up price. But the console itself is solid to say the least. The good thing about the "Retro" Handheld Market is that we have MANY choices than ever before.
how many of them allow multiplayer like android emulators ?
The problem though is the capabilities of most of these handheld emulators. The manufacturers always put on emulators for systems the device is in no way capable of running acceptably, rather than sticking to emulating systems that work flawlessly. Which leads to a subpar experience, and a lot of disappointment. This becomes a lot worse with these "hundreds of games in one device" to the ridiculous "20.000 games on one device" like on this one. Nobody at Powkiddy went over the entire list to make sure they all run well, and to tweak the settings of the emulator for the somewhat problematic titles, in order to make them run smoothly.
I'd rather have a handheld that e.g. claims to be able to emulate everything up to and including the 16-bit era, and does that flawlessly, over a device that inexplicably includes N64 emulation, but fails to run a single game acceptably, and also has trouble with some demanding PS2 games. But that would imply attention to detail, putting in the work to offer a great out of the box experience, and a true love for retro gaming. Not just a willingness to jump on a popular trend and trying to cash in on it, which is what most of these companies are doing.
@@EvenTheDogAgreesI think you're being too harsh, a bit of research is expected from a retro buyer. Just look up the reviews of the machine you intend to buy and you'll see what it can do. There is a model for every performance tier and one for every pocket.
The kind of "plug and play" experience you're expecting would add to the cost.
@@DioBrando-qr6ye These things are bought by technically illiterate parents and grandparents. A little care to ensure you limit the preinstalled emulators and games to things that run well is not that much extra effort, and wouldn't add much to the cost. But it would make a world of difference to the out of the box experience of the person receiving the device.
And even technically literate people have no way of knowing what the machine can or can't emulate well. If it comes with an N64 emulator, it's reasonable to assume it can run the games well. It's certainly not unreasonable to assume it can run _at least one N64 game_ well. If it can't, the N64 emulator has no business being preinstalled on the device. It's false advertising.
NO you're wrong. People aren't buying Gamey to oogle at the hardware, they buy it to play 20k games. Games they can download FOR FREE and play on their computer or phone. That's a scam. They are talking money that are not allowed to take, for games they are not allowed to sell. Are you beginning to understand now?
I feel so sorry for Ken. He gets scammed every two weeks or so. 😥
Not that bad. At least once a month.
He does it so we don't have to!
he does so you won't
He's doing us a favor so we don't have to.
This product by itself isn't a scam, it's not high quality no, but it does exactly as advertised. The scam part is selling a 50 dollar emulation handheld for over 3 times the price and marketing it as your own.
No, it's not legal to bundle these roms, but I also don't know anyone who cares about 30 year old games being bundled on a crappy emulation handheld
Idk how i missed this 12 days ago! Thought i would check in, since i haven't seen anything from your channel on my feed or notifications.
MAME is a very nice emulator but it has some issues. The primary issue is that MAME has multiple versions and ROMs aren't always compatible with different versions, so if a MAME ROM is created to work with, for instance, version 0.186, it may not work with version 0.194.
Yup, exactly. That derping by Ken was a *PRIME* example of a normie not knowing what he's doing at all. Or a guy in the hobby whose way more ignorant than he lets on.
@@malice5121 Which is weird because he has friends who _should be_ knowledgeable about it! Why wouldn't he just ask them?
@@TheZoenGamingclicks
To be fair Conker's Bad Fur Day is one of the trickiests N64 games to emulate in less powerful devices, by the time it released Rare knew how to squeeze that console's hardware even better than Nintendo, that game is quite demanding and it's pretty common for it to need some messing around with the configurations to reach an acceptable framerate. I'm talking from experience from attempting to play it on mid to low tier Android phones and back in the day on older PCs, anything modern with a dedicated GPU or good iGPU is gonna have no issues tho, but it tends to be a pain to emulate it at a reasonable speed with anything lower than that.
Funny I was going to say that just about all N64 emulation is garbage even on high spec PCs when compared to other popular emulators. In between Nintendo's lawsuit-happy nutcases and the wonky architecture of the N64, it's going to suffer. Even PS2 and PS3 emulation works better than the N64 emulators I've tried in terms of both performance and UI/UX of the programs.
Semi-related; it's funny that you have a better chance of having a great experience playing a game on PCSX2/Dolphin than trying to run the PC version of the same game due to terrible aging of the PC version's hardware/driver compatibility and lack of support for peripherals. Add in the fact the emulator will have more graphical options and enhancements, built-in cheat system, and an achievement/leaderboard system; you just get that sense of what gaming felt like before everything became a non-stop megacorp fiasco. People who don't get paid for their work get more done than those in a multi-billion dollar corporation who constantly drop the ball on preserving their own IPs
@CharlieFoxtrot The biggest reason N64 emulation so lacking is mostly because of how the emulators are designed. For whatever reason, after UltraHLE nearly every N64 emulator to follow decided to use a plugin system, where each of the N64's hardware components is emulated using separate emulator plugins. This caused developers to splinter off into making their own plugins and then having to port them between multiple different emulators rather than just contributing to the emulators as a whole. The effects of this are still felt to this day as even newer emulators still rely on using different plugins for graphics emulation.
Even more tricky to emulate? Sega Saturn. just all of it. The console was notoriously hard to emulate
@@ChaseMC215 oh yes, the Saturn and its legendary "f*ck you for attempting to program me" hardware architecture.
@@CharlieFoxtrot I'd dispute "Even PS2 and PS3 emulation works better than the N64 emulators I've tried in terms of both performance and UI/UX of the programs. " as a generalizable statement.
My dedicated gaming machine (a hand-me-down 10+-year-old HP prebuilt stuck at 8GiB of RAM that I installed a hand-me-down Radeon HD 5870 into) has no problem with any of the N64 games I've tried so far (my own, dumped with my Retrode) but, Batocera Linux on a USB drive or HP Restore Partition'd Windows 7 on the SSD I added, I'm still trying to tune PCSX2 to get a consistently playable framerate with PS2 games like my childhood copy of SSX.
My regular daily driver Linux machine (an equally ancient but slighly slower Athlon II X2 270 with 32GiB of RAM and a GeForce GTX750) also plays N64 games just fine in Mupen64plus or Wine+Project64 if I kill or suspend Firefox, but it's even less able to play PS2 games.
Hell, even my 600MHz OpenPandora palmtop PC from 2008 could at least manage to overclock far enough to make Super Mario 64 playable, while PS2 was COMPLETELY out of reach.
I re-bought Disgaea on PSP, bought my brother's PSP 1000 off him for $50, and soft-modded it into a UMD dumper because I couldn't emulate the damn thing on PS2.
Whether Dolphin gives a better experience than the PC version depends on what platform. (I can do Gamecube but I'm having similar "apparently straddling the edge of what I can emulate" problems for Wii with the Radeon and definitely can't do it on the GeForce) and yes, I soft-modded our Wii and installed Homebrew Channel to dump our childhood Gamecube and Wii games. I can't remember whether I dumped to USB flash drive or SD card, but I know support for one of them was quite flaky so I used the other.)
Does anyone know what is that phone/terminal device in the background shelf to the left of the Mac Cube?
I have a question, hope you will check this post. I have an Anbernic RG35XX, this one most games work fine, but after 2 months screen started to jump which made it useless. At the end, this console had a micro HDMI input so I bought this type of cable, connected to the TV and Surprise it works like a mini Nintendo/ Sega / mame etc mini console for tv. Is not longer a retro Gameboy but a retro game console. Now, the one that you show it looks like my anbernic device, so gamey bought it from anbernic also?
It is from Powkiddy. PowKiddy RGB20S to be exact. I have an rg353v, rg351p and a miyoo mini plus.
As an emulator and a pirate since the ‘90s, I really only care about the performance of the device. Oh, and the screen size. I prefer my 17” screen to play games on.
17", wow. Thats a pretty big handheld.
@@helmutstransky3761 I have accepted that I am old and blind. Whatever device I can see is what I use; which mostly means my laptop.
What kind of console are you using? I'm looking to get another one after my Retroid Pocket 3+ got swiped.
I'm considering going with an Odyn but I'm still shopping around.
And anyone who has an issue with piracy in this day and age of ultra greedy corporations clearly is a corporate thrall.
@@glenngriffon8032Odin 2 looks amazing to me and The original Odin was on sale last I looked.
you can use android phones or even a pc on a beamer ;)@@glenngriffon8032
As someone who's recently dove into the retro handheld community, it's great and there are so many great options (I have a Retroid Pocket 3). It's probably a good sign for the hobby that there are already so many scams. It means there's actual interest in the market. Now we just need to warn people about these scams and dropshippers so they won't overpay
Retroid Pocket 3 is great. I got mine a few months ago and love it.
I have a Retroid Pocket Flip myself and I love it! Fortunately, mine hasn't been plagued with hinge issues so far, and it's been surprisingly a very capable GameCube handheld! Well, for my needs, at least, which is mostly Fire Emblem
Never realized there are so much restro handheld owners here! I have a 3+ and works great for me, just needs a bit of setting up since it runs android.
@@helentran204same. And funny enough my phone broke so I'm using my retroid flip (it's the next best thing right now)
lol. you want to warn people that companies make profits? if you think that is a good use of your time?
“Don’t pirate old games! Just buy the original hardware for $7,000!”
Droppshipping is the real scam here
Would it be possible to download working copies of the games onto a sd card and use that instead of the one supplied with the device?
Just cause it is illegal doesn't mean it is a scam. I respect these a ton.
yeah i was about to say the only "scam" is the rom doubles. Its not a half bad emulation device for the price
@iamthemurray16 price is a bit high, but that is the fault of the idiots buying it. There is an argument that you wouldn't want to search for roms yourself so you are purchasing convince but still. It isn't a scam.
@@mrjh637the scam is the fact that all they did is take a product, put on a big markup, and rebrand it
The original product is okay, what they're doing is not
Isn't it like, 50 dollars markup or so? That's ridiculous!
People buying it thinking it's legit ... Tis a scam for them. Also doubling the price is definitely scammy. Scams don't need to be illegal, they just need to be dishonest schemes -- this is by definition a scam to shoppers just going off their advertisement.
It is if the buyer's don't know they are running pirate software.
These retro handhelds are a dime a dozen. Most like Powkiddy, Miyoo and Anbernic use cheap rockchip ARMs with either a RetroPIE or an ArkOS-like image running from eMMC/SD.
But there are also a few that run heavier stuff. Like the Retroid Pocket 3+, The snapdragon based Ayn Odin and lets not even get started on the Steam Deck which can do retro-gaming as an extra next to many PC games. Most of these are Bring-your-own-rom types for obvious reasons.
Yeah that's a PowKiddy I wouldn't be getting IT advice from this guy :/ oh wait I watched a little more it's a whole team of people I wouldn't get IT advice from :/
those more powerful one are more expensive and required at least decent computing skills to get emulation running.
@@ihatecabbage7270 this is one of those systems it's a Powkiddy RGB20S and kind of over priced. These things use to be for tinkerers but they have gotten better and are good strait out of the box now.
@@ihatecabbage7270 Can't have everything.
You either do a dice-roll on if a game even works on your dinky device, Wrestle with the system if you go slightly more powerfull OR spend significantly more for a system like the Deck / ROG Ally that shouldn't be a headache..
Regardless i wouldn't advise retro gaming to people with no computer skills. Emulation always requires some tweaking at least to get right
MAME is one of those things where you NEED to make sure your BIOS and core files are PRECISELY version matched for the version of the ROM you have... otherwise it just wont run. There's a bunch of hoops you can jump through (sometimes) to match an older/newer ROM dump to run on newer/older versions of MAME, but ymmv - personally never had much luck with this route.
you still got the gamey on you? I was looking into getting one and wiping the ROM. i dont care for the games, i want the hardware and OS to build some automation that is controlled by that device. Are you able to install some debian flavour on it?
I like that the select, start and function buttons make the console look happy.
And then with the tiger stickers? !
@@sonofabobo2 ua-cam.com/video/yROF6hGEVa8/v-deo.html The "smiley mouth" is actually the tiger's nose.
piracy is the only thing that keep og games alive
That's patently false. You can buy or access a reasonable number of these games through legitimate channels.
@@zoeherriot"a reasonable" that's not all, so yeah, piracy maintain alive old games
@@ximenasarinana4181 didn’t say it didn’t.
@@zoeherriot fair enough good sir/ma'am, have a nice day
The only scam I see is a PowKiddy being ripped off. I'm an Anbernic fan however. And I don't think piracy is a concern of a single buyer. If anything people replace the stock roms on them because some are broken and shock of all shocks - I don't think anybody using one of these is actually uploading these roms from their own backups. The piracy angle is very click baity.
I have a ''Sup'' console, and when i play Circus Charlie, instead of saying Nintendo, it says, BBGBBG. Ahh yes, PIRACY.
I wish you talked about some of the important issues like: battery life, how saving in games works, any options for 2 player games?
But this video wasn't about reviewing the item, but if the item was a scam or not. If you want a more intensive review of the device, just watch another video...Just google Powkiddy RGB20S review and you'll get a ton.
This isn't a review
That's cause he's being an idiot
@@GreyLightning Which means it's a pointless video.
Deleting files from the Micro SD card will result in the inability to start the console.
Actually you can empty the Games MicroSD Card by deleting the folders inside and it'll still boot. A different story will be told if he Formats the SD card, because it's GUID will be changed and since the Linux Kernel expects an specific GUID to be mounted upon startup, the thing will go unbootable. I say that by experience as I have that console (RGB20S)
@@DingirAnu Did you read what I wrote.
@@galy0 my bad XD I thought you referred to the TF2 SD, not the TF1
I dont think anyone is going to be discouraged by the fact that these are unlicensed ROMs. If I can't easily, and affordably, legally buy a game I already paid for in 1987, I'm not losing any sleep over the legal or moral ambiguities.
It’ a cause to change copyright law itself! Especially the duration of copyright is bullquack. Why does one need 70-95 years of copyright on software when the technology develops way faster than that?
What give you the right to appropriate someone else's intellectual property like that? Let's say I have an old car I never use in my backyard. Do you have the right to just come and take it because I'm no longer apparently using it? Your paltry attempt to rationalize theft is disgusting.
@@chuckschillingvideos cry about it some more. I’m almost there. 💦
@@chuckschillingvideos see you might have had a point here if it wasn't for more and more game companies out there deciding that players no longer had a right to own their games and now opt for "licensing" them to you. When the developer decides they reserve the right to revoke your ownership of a piece of software you paid for whenever they want it makes it hard to sympathize with them.
EDIT: Also just to point out, nobody gives a crap about what you think about it. Most people are willing to pay for a game even if it costs far more than it did 30-40 some years ago if they're given a chance to. Provide a means and people who actually want to support the company will buy it to show there's interest in having more of these games ported over to more modern platforms they can enjoy them on. The Virtual Console games on Nintendo's e-Shop are absolute proof of this. But many game companies prefer to sit on the IPs they've obtained over the years leaving the only options to being piracy, or paying an overinflated amount to some random person where a cent won't ever be seen by the developers anyway.
Of course they can just NOT play the game which seems to be what you're suggesting, but that doesn't work for everyone so I suppose just sit up there on your high horse and enjoy the view while the rest of us relive our childhood memories that game companies seem content letting sit in their library to rot.
@@chuckschillingvideos Person compares copying code to stealing a car. Thinks it's a smart argument.
Aside from the piracy topic, i find it fascinating if "20,000+ games" is actually a selling point for people. It's like getting 500 channels on cable: you're most likely going to ignore 490 of the nonsense ones and the remaining 10 you flip through to sometimes find something worth watching for a little bit.
now i'm gonna have "don't copy that floppy" stuck in my head all day lmao
Sure, it's a scam with the mark up... but frankly, it could be PowKiddy actually doing it themselves to get more profit out of their bad hardware while avoiding their name being used in advertisements. Plus plausible deniability.
Really should have looked into Gamey being a shell company, rather than harping on about MuH pIrAcY.
this
That doesn't make any sense on multiple levels.
Smart. Always research and assume companies will deploy these tactics to gain profits
@@kandigloss6438 Simple, company greed easily explains selling under another name for profit
@@kandigloss6438But, it does. Powkiddy is going towards the only hardware without games avenue, like retroid. Instead of anbernic. I own several of these things, and they are all great. The Chinese however don’t care about piracy nor should we, but once a small company starts to gain traction and bran recognition it wants to distance itself from “illegal” things, hence why they use gamey as a shell company and sell through TikTok. All of these companies are owned by the same guys, except for the shadow makers of the R35/R36, those boys are mavericks and are only interested in undercutting the other hardware guys and watching the world burn. And I’m here for it.
Great channel...solid research and humorous delivery, thx
Your t-shirt perfectly exemplified my day today. I couldn't locate a thunderbolt cable, but I *DID* have a [USB-C Thunderbolt to MDSP Thunderbolt adapter] connected to [MDSP Thunderbolt to Firewire 800 adapter] connected to [Firewire 800 cable] connected to [MDSP Thunderbolt to Firewire 800 adapter] connected to [USB-C Thunderbolt to MDSP Thunderbolt adapter] to complete my makeshift thunderbolt cable. :D
To help with game count vs rom count, there are likely multiple roms of the same game with different version numbers or possibly region.
Conkers Bad Fur Day is about as difficult a game to run as is one can expect. It is literally the game used to test new emulators, as most can't run it.
That game was hard to beat though too
Was thinking of mr. Wonderful when he said royalty, then a shark tank clip/reference popped up in the vid. Nice to know I’m not the only one who watches too much shark tank and immediately thinks of it when I hear the word royalty 😂😂
"Download my wallpaper, link in description"
Description: Buy my wallpapers....
SCAM!
powkiddy might have to reach out to a lawyer about legality of gamey up-selling their own product
Since when piracy is a scam?
When it could land you a 250k fine and up to 15 years in prison if caught
The seller does not mention that the games are "counterfeit products" - illegal copies of the original games, some of which have even been bootlegged/modified. Some games display a warning that it's illegal to play these outside of Japan when you start them. However, at least the website does not show any protected trademark, character or logo (as far as I can tell).
Regardless, the uninformed buyer might assume that the product is legit. Which can mean that legal trouble is on the horizon when try to re-sell the (used) product on ebay or on a flea market.
I'm giving this a thumbs up just because you added "what I've all been waiting for" to my lexicon.
if theres a micro sd card for the os, doesnt that mean you can boot retro pi?
I paid $40 for my PowKiddy RGB20S (which that is). That’s all they’re doing. Buying a bunch at a cheap price, repackaging and marking up
"Vague", " subsequent ", " intensive purposes" can we start a drinking game, folks? 🙂
The purposes in question, were quite intense.
RG353V : good job
computer clan : thanks master.
"The cake is not a lie" was probably done on purpose. In the game you are offered cake that wasn't going to come. And they are offering a product and is promising to follow through.
Yeah, I was just going to point out how reluctant advertisers would be to put “is a lie” anywhere near their product, regardless of context.
PowKiddy is a pretty great brand to be fair, at their retail value! Love their v90 just for its form factor. Fun little devices
This is a reseller, keep in mind.
My dude is over here paying almost double for a rebranded RGB20S to protect consumers.
I respect it 💯
can it run any Linux distro that works on ARM CPUs?
I think I'll get one for Xmas. Piracy doesn't bother me in the slightest.
If you own all of the games that you play, it is not piracy.
The bigger concern is that the ROMs are being SOLD illegally, not just installed illegally.
Furthermore, the trademarks are being used in the process.
This makes the act counterfeiting, which is far worse than simple piracy for personal use.
Honestly, I think the government needs to focus more on this sort of thing and less on people who exchange ROMs online.
One of the things i didnt like is the placement of the reset button, if accidentally pushed you loose all progress. And some of the buttons would stick so i had to open the game up and remove some of the buttons i didnt use and remove the reset button. Other than that i loved going back to the NES days
I'm going to guess that the MAME ROMs included are the wrong set for the emulator. You have to match the ROM set precisely to the emulator version in order to get MAME to work correctly. MAME kind of sucks like that.
Or at least use a newer one like 2010. It is not as extreme as you say. Most roms work with different Versions of Mame.
This. MAME is a real PITA to get working correctly.
You missed the best possible ending: Entering the Konami code on the Gamey!
I mean, this is just a resold and marked-up retro handheld with some illegal pre-installed roms. Nothing about it is a scam, it's just overpriced
I got here from YT suggestions. Very impressed for the great work. Suscribed
Nintendon't would rather take down youtube channels over let's plays than to go after ACTUAL copyright infringement on a commercial scale...
Priorities 😒
Don't forget the community tournaments. xD
Lack there of more like it
I did some research, downloaded a couple of emulators, picked up the ROM's of the games I wanted and ow run it on my laptop. No expense involved because the community has done all the work. I modded psp's back in the day for my kids, run CFW and download the ROM's, learning is fun alongside tech🤣🤣
After Sonys recent move.
If buying isnt owning, piracy isnt theft.
Nah that ad/sponsor placement is too good ahahaha
Cheers to the delivery man under your table
The fault with playing on this unit itself is multi-faceted and may not really be "faults" but rather just limitations of the community-made emulation packages and the RK chip (e.g. lacking N64 emulation).
The product itself lacks polish (like my Anbernic RG350) in terms of product design and parts, but at least PowKiddy is a brand that's registered by a company, not just a generic "Gamey" term liberally applied by resellers.
Pre-loading ROMs is shady but I'm a little sick of the "legit purchase" crowd when old ROMs are being stingily culled by official licensors.
So really, this is a PowKiddy, and user evaluations on the PowKiddy product itself are more or less clear, at least in terms of new units, and they are fishy but still actually making products. "Gamey" is a scammy reseller that lives on markup, no doubt.
Buying this as a 60 buck PowKiddy is not really a bad deal! Even if it struggles with the most demanding emulated systems (N64 and Dreamcast) If I can play the rest no problem I think I could be reasonably entertained by this device.
The fun part is that they are reselling a chinese retro console from powkiddy. More or less half their asking price. They are getting a ridiculous cut for something not competitive at that point. You can get something from Anbernic or the Retrood pocket for that price, and it will run laps around that device. Which makes sense considering the original Powkiddy asking price of 80-90 bucks.
Krazy Ken, I love your videos! You're presentation and humor is slicker than an oil patch! I bow to your prowess.
If you're looking for a machine that acts like an emubox but don't want 1000's of illegal roms, i would suggest the Retroid Pocket. The 3+ has been my go-to machine for over a year now and it can even emulate up to some PS2 and GC games.
Thanks Ken! It was fun digging into this thing with everyone. 😀
Omg it's the real LowestLogan!!!! Logangnation assemble!!!!
Fan since Day -1!!
subscribed
As a forty-something, I appreciate the use of an actual telephone for the back-and-forth. 😆
yoooo!
The *Smiley* face buttons look like they were smiling at *Gun Point* 😂
It's not unbelievable that a company would license a large batch of 30-year-old games for super cheap, but Nintendo for one NEVER does this. It would interfere with their ability to go on selling smaller numbers of them in things like the NES Mini and now as part of what you get when you subscribe to Nintendo Switch Online.
Not busted, unless you count that you can get the same hardware cheaper elsewhere. The piracy argument is a non-starter and I don't think at this point any sane individual on the consumer side of things really gives a shit.
I think the biggest scam is most of the games just don’t work…
I think they work. He should have used a different mame core. There are 6 in retroarch. But he probably does not know that.
@@helmutstransky3761 he did say he isn't an expert
Thankfully more and more countries are adopting the if you can't buy it legitimately then it's not illegal to pirate it, which is a great boost to retro gaming preservation and all preservation in general
$160??????????????? brother this is a budget 60 dollar device, ain't no way you paid that much!
It should have had a mini or micro HDMI port to allow you to connect it to a full size monitor (on second thought i don't think that would have been a particularly good idea, because at only 640 by 480 resolution, it's not going to look particularly good on a bigger LCD display!)
Theres another models with hdmi output, bt and wifi to play with other console, and ad bt controllers, chinese are taking retro gaming to other levels😂
A complete set of 1 Game, 1 ROM (1G1R) is relatively small for console games up to the N64 (not counting CD games, so no SEGA CD, PS1, Saturn, TurboGrafx-16 CD etc), falling around 40GB last I remember when compressed - that includes some less commonly included systems too, like the Emerson Arcadia, RCA Studio II, and Atari Jaguar, not that those three collectively contain many games (or large ROM sizes period). If the lists are literally just the redump sets untrimmed, it would show up basically 1:1 with the redump databases in RomCenter (or your manager of choice) which vastly increases the games list with games most users aren't going to use, both with revisions of the same game, and other regions - you'll need only one localization for a given game, but you'd still ship all the regions given you don't know which one the end-user wants. It's misleading to count each revision and localization as a different game, even if one may have more content.
To be honest this is pretty much normal practice with these sketchy chinese preloaded "retro" consoles/handhelds. The real issue here, at least to me, isn't that or the just frankly silly (in my view) "OH NO PIRACIES" *GASP*, it's the trying to scam unsuspecting people that don't know much about this sort of stuff with markup and claiming it's their own product.
@@kandigloss6438 Badge engineering of standard manufactured-in-china products tends to happen more often than you might think among many products, albeit a number of sellers do just label it as "third party," "generic" or the much more pleasant sounding title of "import." A few companies do literally just put generic products in branded boxes though. It happens a lot with AV and AC cables for retro consoles especially, and even some controllers. Hyperkin's Tomee line is very much the "generic aliexpress special product but in a nicer looking package that can hang on a wall" division for instance, while Kool Brands, the parent company for TTXTech, Retro-Bit, RetroGen, and KMD (Komodo) also have a number of products which are _identical_ to the stuff Hyperkin sells through Tomee, because they are literally the same product just with a retail package that has their name and registered UPC on it.
As for the ROMs, it's at least better than what happens on the cheap multicarts that have been around for at least 30 years, because a game that's in a different language at least technically has different functionality to the end user (in that they may choose to play it in a specific language, but all are included) compared to "literally the same game again with the exact same title just on page 12 now" or ex. "Super Mario Bros. again, but I start you in World 3 instead of World 1"
@@kandigloss6438 Have you ever shopped at Walmart?
You know.. I was alive in the 80's. I remember commercials for Microwave meals being very similar to your Factor meals commercial. Healthy! Great meals for the family! No cooking for the busy mother and father! Tastes fresh! lol
Copyright should be 10 years, 15 tops. If the game is older than that, pirate away.
These devices are great for what they are - cheap Android systems that are preloaded with ROM dumps. I had no idea people were just buying them in bulk and reselling them at a huge markup though... yuck.
people have been doing that for literally years
...Not Android, mind you. Some use Android, but this thing doesn't. RK3326 CAN run Android, but it's likely for very basic multimedia/Wi-Fi tasks.
@@sweetypuss Decades... centuries... millennia... eons.
Some companies circumvent the roms problem by selling the hardware only with the base system and you have to copy the roms (that are backups of your real physical games you bought... ;-D of course). And some sell very good hardware, so in that case you don't have almost any thumbs down to give, really.
Remember all ....that piracy is taking the caviar off Nintendo's executive boards table. So don't do it OK .
I am so mad, right now.
How has UA-cam not shown me your channel Till now???? You my friend are gold. Great content and awesome in depth detail about the products (if you can call them that). Keep up the good work. 👍 you have a subscribe from me.
Wicked Gamer is apparently on a mission to buy and review ALL of these handheld game devices from China. A common theme with them is they are rarely able to properly run the highest spec / latest console games they ship with. For example one that has PlayStation 3 games on it likely will suck at the PS3 games but will be OK with PS2 and Dreamcast.
What's extra odd is that no matter how good the hardware on these, they almost all cannot run PlayStation Portable games very well. Apparently there just isn't (yet) a really good and optimized cross-platform PSP emulator. I'd think the PSP would have lower hardware requirements to emulate it.
Poor emulators that are accurate but slow can be 'brute forced' into full speed with higher host CPU speed. Remember the Quick BASIC (not QBASIC) NES emulator? When it was released, PC CPUs were in the 300Mhz and slower range. It took the release of 1Ghz+ CPUs to be able to run that one at full speed.
You know it didn't really go deep with the disc based games because that's when game file sizes started to get big.
I just wanna say that your sponsor's portion looks like it's straight out of a dystopian movie. Great production anyhow
These have been all over UA-cam shorts under different names, like Pocket Station, or Game Station. Threy are all illegal pirated games and dropshipping scams that keep coming up and are very annoying. Don't buy from dropshippers! Ken, you make scam reviewing so entertaining! Love it!