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that I had received two commercial freebies that I had agreed to do reviews on. Now, Ive already done one of those, which
was the Divoom Timebox. Now, this is the other one. Ive been waiting on this for quite a while
and it finally arrived.
This is, arguably, the most interesting of
the two items. Lets open the box and see what it is. It says GPD gamepad digital. And here we are.
It is a little palmtop computer with gamepads
build into it. So lets see what else it came with. So heres the power supply, its just
a USB charger like you would expect for a phone or tablet. Heres the USB cable and some headphones.
Over here is the instruction manual. One interesting note about the USB cable is
that it is the USB C-type connector. On the back, it has a power port. This is that USB C-type connector, but Im
pretty sure this is only used for power.
Next we have a mini HDMI connector for video
output. Then a Micro SD card slot, presumably for
more storage, or transferring data from a camera or phone. Then a single USB 3.0 Port. And last is the headphone port.
And while it has no network port, it does
support wireless networking. I dont know if the battery is charged,
so Im going to plug it in first. OK, well, it appears to be 99% charged already. OK, so lets power this little guy on..
OK, I guess you have to hold it down for a
second or two. There we go. It appears to be booting up to Windows 10. Now, I had asked the representative if I could
install Windows 7 on this machine since I.
Absolutely hate Windows 10. He said no, because it doesnt have a compatible
processor. So Im assuming this thing is running an
ARM processor, which I understand Windows 10 is supporting now. OK, so I can immediately see that one of the
analog gamepad controls will double as a mouse, which is clever.
Of course, it is a touch screen too, just
like a tablet. Speaking of tablet. One problem I ran into right away was that
it wanted to treat the screen like a tablet and keep the screen oriented vertically like
a tablet. I could get it to flip one way or the other,
but not go horizontal.
I decided to try the well-known keyboard combination
for changing screen orientation on windows, which is control, alt, and arrow keys.. And
that worked. So, I opened up the system specifications
and low and behold it is an Intel Atom running at 1.6 Ghz, with 4 Gigs of RAM. Also I noticed the internal storage appears
to be around 60 gigabytes of solid-state storage.
I installed Geekbench 4 so that those of you
who care can get an idea of its system performance. Heres the overall score for Open CL. I dont know if that is good or not. And here are the scores for the CPU tested
both as a single and multi-core CPU.
I realize the Atom isnt exactly known for
its performance, so I dont think these scores are anything terribly impressive in
the gaming world. So it appears that had I bothered to check
the manual, it actually explains on the first first page how to permanently lock the screen
orientation to horizontal. Gee And it lists a variety of other optimizations
in here as well, so maybe I should take a moment to do all of these things. There are actually quite a few optimizations
here, I wont show them all, as it would take some time.
But suffice it to say, these will all make
the system run leaner. So one that thing was NOT mentioned in the
manual was this fan control switch on the bottom. It has 3 settings, high speed, medium speed,
and off. However, Im not sure if there is any consequence
to turn the fan off or not.
So, Im guessing the Atom CPU does have
speedstep, so maybe it just wont perform as well? I dont know. So, when they contacted me about doing a review
on this device, I told them that my channel is not really a gaming channel, that I concentrate
on retro tech. So, I said if you want me to review the
product based on its ability to play vintage video games, then Ill review it. They said that was fine, so thats what
were going to do! Now, size-wise, let me show you how big this
thing is compared to a gameboy advance, or better yet a Nintendo DS.
So that will give you an idea of the size
were dealing with here. The device looks sort of similar to the Pandora
handheld gaming console that came out a few years ago, which was based on an ARM processor. So this little switch here on the top will
put the game controller into 3 different modes. In the middle, it acts like a mouse.
The analog controller on the right will move
the pointer, and the analog controller on the left will scroll up and down. The buttons on the back are actually your
left and right mouse buttons. Now, if you switch it over to the left, it
will operate as a game controller based on the D-Input standard. If you move it to the right, it will operate
based on the X-input standard, which is based on the XBox 360 controllers.
One thing that is absolutely for sure about
this computer. It is too small to use in your lap. The keys are beyond tiny. I doubt I could get 5 words a minute typing
on this thing.
And Im not likely to be bringing it into
my local Starbucks to type out my latest scripts like a hipster. So, getting these various emulators installed
and working is going to be a pain but there may be a better way. Since it has that mini HDMI output, Im
hoping I can connect this Mini to full HDMI. Adapter and connect that to this HDMI to DVI
cable.
With any luck I can connect this to a DVI
monitor I have in the house, since none of mine support HDMI, and lets see what happens. Wow! It works! Of course the screen is vertically oriented. But I bet I can fix that. But Im also going to need a keyboard and
a mouse.
Thats where the USB port comes in handy
on the back. Now it only has one port, but fortunately,
this monitor does have a 4 port USB hub built in, so that solves that problem. So, it turns out if I just tell it to extend
the display, basically treating the monitor like a second display, that solves everything
and now I can work on this computer like a regular desktop computer. The only remaining annoyance is the fact the
built-in screen is still on.
Well, when dealing with laptops I have found
that if I just go into the power management settings and tell it to do nothing when I
close the lid, that should solve it. Except, on this computer, it doesnt work
as expected. It just goes to sleep anyway. Rats.
OK, so I got some emulators and other games
setup and installed on the device, lets try out the first one, eduke, which is a modern
32-bit implementation of the Duke Nukem 3D. Engine. It took some fiddling with the joystick controls
and calibrations, but I finally got it working acceptably. The next thing I tried was the VICE emulator,
which emulates the Commodore 64.
So, again, I had to fiddle a bit with the
joystick controls in the settings, but eventually got it working as well. One interesting thing I noticed is that the
speaker is on the side of the unit, and so depending on how you hold your hand, it could
muffle the sound, or actually make it sound even better. The next thing I tried was Project 64, which
emulates the Nintendo 64. I thought maybe I could play some Mario Kart.
Well, this program runs fine in a window,
but it will NOT go full screen. It will always try to go sideways and if I
try to correct it, then the screen just goes blank. Im sure this is more of a Windows 10 incompatibility
than anything else. And this video wont be complete without
trying to emulate the classic Nintendo entertainment system.
I ran into similar problems here, not being
able to get a full screen, so being forced to play it in a window. All right, so its time for some critical
assessment. What do I really think of this device? Well, its pretty cool. But, it has some serious problems.
And, Im not going to beat around the bush. The biggest problem I had was dealing with
the mouse. Because, you can have the option, as I mentioned
earlier in the video, of switching these controllers from being a mouse or a gamepad. Now, the problem is, it does have a touch
screen, but because the text is so small, its almost impossible to use the touch
screen to navigate the menus in the emulator software.
The emulators were pretty much designed for
bigger monitors. So, the problem is I need the mouse in order
to go in and configure, for example, the joystick controls. Now, thats a problem because if I have
the joystick turned off so that I can use the mouse, the emulators wont detect that
theres a joystick attached to the computer at all. And so, I cant configure it.
So, I have to turn the mouse off before I
open the emulator. So that was a real nuisance. I found myself often having to use the keyboard
commands to navigate through the menus on the emulators, which is very difficult in
many cases. On some of them, I even had to plug an external
mouse into the USB port so that I could configure the joystick to work.
And thats just not something that I think
most people are going to want to deal with when they are on the go, in the exact type
of places youre going to wind up wanting to use a device like this. The other problem I had was, of course, with
the screen. Getting it to do full-screen in many of the
applications was just not feasible. Now, I dont blame the hardware as much
as I blame windows 10.
Which, by the way, in case I havent already
mentioned it enough times, I hate windows 10 with a passion. But, most of the emulators were really not
designed to work with Windows 10. They may technically run on Windows 10, but
theyre really not optimized for it. So, I think maybe in a few years once the
emulators have caught up to being more optimized for Windows 10, they may actually end up working
better on a device like this than they do today.
But for $399 list price, I cant really
personally recommend this as a retro-gaming machine. It might work better with the more modern
games, but Im not qualified to review it for that because I dont own any modern
games that run on the PC. Youll have to go to somebody else for a
review on that. Well, otherwise, I hope you found the video
interesting, and I do thank them for sending me this piece of hardware.
It is a really interesting piece of hardware. Its a pity it doesnt work as well as
I hoped it would. Anyway, thanks for watching and stick around,
Ive got more stuff coming!.