Review cover BittBoy: NES/FC Emulator (Hardware)
Official GBAtemp Review

Product Information:

The Bittboy attempts to give us a viable NES/FC emulation system to be played on the go or on a TV, but is the BittBoy a little Bitt of heaven, or has it already Bitt the dust?

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The BittBoy is the first product released by the team simply known as “BittBoy”, which advertises itself as a pocket/plug-in console NES/FC emulator containing 300 NES and Famicom titles all in one little package. It comes in yellow, black, blue, red, and white, and is available at https://www.bittboy.com/collections/handheld for $39.99.

Show me your package.

Upon initially cracking into this bad boy, the first thing I notice is the company's catchphrase adorning the top of the maroon box, which proudly proclaims "Everything Old Is Retrolution." Ignoring for a moment that the term "retrolution" sounds like the name for a solution of old game consoles dissolved in acid, I am immediately reminded of popular, retro-inspired, game controller manufacturer, 8bitdo's, tagline of "Everything Old Is New Again." Perhaps it’s a deliberate, yet still legally distinct, nod to the catchphrase?

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The box itself is unassuming and squat, but its colors and design are pleasing enough to the eye. On one side of the box, there is a diagram of the unit, labeling every button and doo-dad with their respective functionality. This is the best and only thing you’ll get in the way of a user’s manual with this product, but as I soon discovered, that’s more than sufficient, as the device really needs no explanation beyond the immediately visually obvious. Aside from the console itself, the box only contains 2 cables, a 77” (~196cm) Audio/Video cable, in composite format, and a 20” (~51cm) USB A to USB Micro cable for charging.

The physical console

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(This battery compartment will break your fingernails off if you try and open it. I only wish it weren't locked up tighter than a Swiss bank who’s waiting until marriage.)

As advertised, the BittBoy is rather petite, but not so small as to feel dwarfed by my mighty man mitts as I attempt to grasp it. Its official measurements are, according to the box, 6.8x9.9x1.3 cm. The dimensions of Nintendo's own GameBoy Pocket come in at around 7.6x12.4x2.3 cm, so comparatively, it's just a touch shorter, a smidgen less wide, and a smattering thinner, to be less than precise. The ratio of the dimensions between the two comes out to be roughly .89 for the width, .80 for the height, and .57 for the thickness, (that’s BittBoy:GBP) meaning that the most drastic difference in form factors is in the thickness, coming in at just over half that of Nintendo's handheld phenomenon. As for feeling, it sits just fine in the hands, with all buttons being exactly where I feel like they should, the spacing of which makes rolling my large, ogre thumb back and forth between them feel easy and natural. It’s never a struggle to reach or depress any of the buttons, so the layout functions well in that regard.

The console boots directly into a games selection screen, so the reset button in the center serves as a quick way to return you to the main menu from within a game without doing a full power cycle. All of the face buttons correspond to those on their NES controller counterpart, but there are two extra face buttons above the A and B buttons which aren’t labeled. After a bit of experimenting, it seems these are rapid-fire A and B buttons, which are barely useful and for very few games, but their inclusion is nice all the same.

Unfortunately, the D-pad, otherwise known as the heart and soul of 2D platformers, is mushy and awful. It lacks a pivot beneath its center, so when you press a direction, the entire D-pad gets pressed down with it. As a result, it's extremely easy to accidentally press a second direction during normal use, something I found myself doing on multiple occasions, to my chagrin. Using this device in either handheld or TV mode requires you use the console’s own controls, so you’re stuck using this D-pad no matter which way you choose to play. The D-pad’s pads feel fine enough, at least, but a there's a noteable feeling of light internal friction between the cross pad and the mold itself with every press. This might very well be fine for someone who happens to be into some hot plastic-on-plastic rubbing, but for the rest of us, it will likely feel a bit odd, distracting, and generally socially unacceptable.

This device sports the ability to output audio and video in composite format through a jack on the bottom of the console. While in that sense, this allows for you to treat the BittBoy as something of a plug-in home console, it doesn't allow for the use of external controllers, meaning no multiplayer action is possible. Even outputting to a TV, you'll need to be holding the BittBoy to play it regardless, so it’s almost tantamount to just playing it as a handheld. The only reason I could see people preferring this method would be if they happened to dislike the built-in screen, and to an extent, I’d forgive you if you did.

See no evil

A 2.2” IPS panel is integrated into the device behind a plastic covering. I must say that I was at first greatly impressed by the vividness and clarity of the screen, being easily visible even directly in the brightest sunlight, but I soon discovered 3 weaknesses that serve to bring it down.

Firstly, there exists rather massive amounts of overscan in both the horizontal and vertical directions on many games, sometimes to the point of being highly disorientating.

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Secondly, the screen has trouble depicting the colors accurately in games, particularly when it comes to light reds/peach colors, which appear much darker and more saturated than they should be. As a result, things like characters’ skin colors (especially Mario’s in SMB3) appear as a much deeper red/orange color than they should. This ends up really muddying the whole visual experience and making any humans portrayed look like they have a combination of jaundice and a sunburn. This is a result of the screen itself and not emulation inaccuracies, however, as the same color distortion doesn’t appear when the console is outputting to a television.

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The third and last weakness is something only barely noticeable to me, but there is a very tiny amount of screen tearing that occurs when the screen is scrolling quickly, producing a tiny jittering effect. It barely cropped up and had absolutely no impact on my enjoyment of the device or the quality of the gameplay, but I thought it bore mentioning for the sorts who might be bothered by that.

I really must commend them, though, it was an incredibly unique and revolutionary idea to construct the plastic overlay protecting the screen out of pure butter. At least 4 fairly noticeable scratches appeared in the screen after using my soft and snuggly pajama pants to wipe dust from it the morning after leaving the device out to charge for the first time. Not jeans, not steel wool, just the fluffiest and most benign pajama pants you’ve ever experienced. To its benefit, however, with the brightness and clarity of the screen being the way they are, those scratches become absolutely invisible during gameplay.

As for TV play, there are 2 major factors which make it less than ideal.

The first is that the A/V port is incredibly finicky, causing large image distortions or dropping the signal entirely even at the lightest brush of the cable. Since you need to always be holding the console in your hands to play it, I found this happening quite often, even just as I shifted my hands idly.

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Secondly, the battery life is terrible, only lasting for an hour. Now, it’s reported by BittBoy to have “2-3 hours per battery charge, depending on temperature and usage”, but regardless of what I tried or how I played, every one of my tests clocked in at a 1-hour battery life. The console has no way of indicating how much charge is left on the device, either. The only warning you’ll get is a slight dimming of the screen seconds before the console freezes in a display of bizarre colors and glitches, which then leads to a full power-down. This wasn’t just a typical soft-locking of the emulator, however, as in each instance the console would need to be plugged back in and charged before it would boot once more. With that in mind, I highly recommend getting a much longer charging cable, because as previously mentioned, the included one is a measly 20” in length, and that’s from connector tip to tip.

As a final feature to the BittBoy, if you look at the top-left corner of the device, you'll find that there’s a Micro SD card slot!

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(Hahaha. Funny joke.)

Unfortunately, much like the concept of true love, this is a cruel illusion meant to disappoint and mock you. This port literally goes nowhere, and if you were to try and insert anything into it, it would just drop straight through and rattle around the inside of the rather spacious casing. I can’t begin to speculate on why they would include an SD card slot in the mold of their emulator, yet have it lead into nothing more than a sad abyss, but I image there’s some designer somewhere chuckling to himself as I weep salty tears. In short, that means that there is no such thing as loading your own ROMs onto this device, but with a library of 300 NES and Famicom games, the need to do so must be nigh non-existent, right?

LET THE "GAMES" BEGIN

Haha! Wrongo, boyo. In a sea of exactly 300 ROMs, I was only able to pick out 26 games that were recognizable to me, and even among those, only 4 that I would be inclined to play multiple times. These notable titles (for me) include: Super Mario Bros, Super Mario Bros. 3, Contra, Super Contra (JP), Contra Force, Double Dragon 1-3, Chip and Dale (JP), Chip and Dale 2 (JP), Ninja Gaiden 2 + 3, Adventure Island 1-4, Bubble Bobble Part 2, Darkwing Duck, ExciteBike, Dr. Mario, Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., Joust, Mario Bros. (Arcade), Golf, and Pac Man. If you’ll notice, very many ROMs included on the device are the Japanese versions, even for games which had English releases, like Chip and Dale and Super C. The box boasts that the “games are English version and no Chinese”, and while the latter is technically true, the former is patently false.

For having such an expansive library, this device is missing a LARGE swath of staple titles from its emulated console. The Mega Man games, Castlevania, Mario Bros. 2, the Legend of Zeldas, Metroid, Final Fantasy… all these titles and more are completely missing from this unexpectedly sparse catalogue. As a matter of fact, it would almost be easier to list everything that is on the device rather than everything that isn’t, and so I have.

Now, your mileage with this device is, of course, going to vary with taste, but I think that just about everyone will be disappointed with this library for one specific reason:

Asset flips and knock-offs.

You read that correctly; the practice of the asset-flip was prevalent in gaming even before the advent of Steam Greenlight, and the NES was downright infamous for it. Instead of a library of Alexandria-esque compilation of the NES’s greatest hits being contained on this device, what we have is something shamelessly filled to the brim with hundreds of rip-offs and ROM-hacks meant, back in the day, to trick little Timmy’s mother into thinking she was buying him that brand new Mario game he wanted for Christmas, only to come home with a completely different game which had been stolen by some lazy developer, re-modeled to look like Mario, and sold back to the public.

There's one game called "Contra 7” which is just a single screen that loops forever. Considering you’ll see the entirety of the game in just a few minutes, they should have just called it “Contra 7 minutes.” There's one called "Small Mario" which is just a roulette wheel and nothing else. There's another called "Kung-fu Mario" which is just a completely different game with Mario's bulbous head conspicuously superimposed over the main character's. That’s not even to mention that this game appears once more as a duplicate under the title "Mario 10" to pad out the device. Then there's "Mario 14" which is, again, another slap-dash ROM-hack of some unknown game. A game claiming to be “Chip and Dale 3” opens with the line “Mission: Destroy the enemy’s underground artillery base.” as an attack jet fighter drops a soldier onto a battlefield from low altitude. You then play a top-down shooter as a crudely drawn chipmunk firing a rifle at enemy army men. Something tells me that this is not an officially licensed Disney game.

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(From left to right: Small Mario, Kung-Fu Mario, Mario 14, Chip and Dale 3, and Angry Birds 2.)

There’s also a game called Nuts Milk, but I was beyond done with self-flagellation at that point, so I reluctantly forewent exploring that little cave of nightmares, despite the admittedly tempting and hilarious moniker.

The list just goes on and on, but I invite you to look for yourself. There’s an Angry Birds knock-off. Does any more really need to be said?

The Emulation

Hooo boy, if there were one area in which I expected this device to crash and burn, it would hands-down be this one. Now, while there are some issues of fairly large significance that came up during normal play, the BittBoy didn’t end up stumbling in the one way I expected most, but we’ll get to that soon.

Firstly, the graphics. Of the games that decide to work, there are almost no instances of massive graphical glitches akin to the kind we’re used to seeing in things like Missingno., but often text strings will be scrambled up and unreadable, most notably in Mario Bros. 3. Aside from that, there’s some sporadic line-flickering that occurs during gameplay as well as the occasional tile glitch, but most of the visual inconsistencies and niggles come from the built-in screen itself.

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Now, compatibility. “How in the world could there be compatibility issues with a console only capable of running pre-loaded games?” I hear you ask. Well, you’re asking the wrong person, first of all; all I can report to you is that there are. Some games will sporadically decide to either load properly or glitch out (à la Double Dragon 3), or will simply always load into an unplayable cacophony of graphical and audio glitches. This has only happened consistently for 2 of those “knock-off” titles I talked about earlier, but having not tested every one of the 300 games on the system, I can’t say exactly how many of these broken games are present. To be fair, it’s pretty clear the manufacturers didn’t exactly spend the time to test all 300 either.

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As for features, the emulation sports absolutely zero customization or functionality aside from simply playing the ROMs. There are no filters, no settings of any kind, no sleep mode, and most distressingly, no savestates. This device doesn’t support any games with built-in save functions either, like The Legend of Zelda, so you either beat the game in a single sitting, or start back over from the very beginning each time. In that sense, it removes a lot of the flexibility that usually comes with a portable system, making it feel that much more like a plug-in console.

Finally, the input lag. This is the one hurdle on which I expected the device to trip, break both of its legs, and faceplant into a fiery patch of thorns, lemon juice, and dynamite, probably killing a few babies in the process, why not. To my utter amazement, however, it performed very well. Not only that, it happened to soar soundly beyond at least two of its more popular rivals, and impress me beyond even my highest expectations (which were admittedly, not all that high).

I took some rough measurements of the device’s input lag by filming the device with a 60fps camera, pressing the A button and, from contact frame, counting the number of frames until a response shows up on the screen. Of the 58 measurements taken across 8 different games, the average amount of input lag (in frames /60fps) was 2.91, with 2 appearing 8 times, 4 appearing 4 times, and 3 appearing for the rest of the measurements. As a means of contextualizing these readings, the popular all-in-one emulation alternative, a RaspberryPi3 running RetroPie, averages around 5 to 6 frames of input lag for its NES emulators, with a much larger spread in the data. (Depending on OpenGL vs. Dispmanx. Optimized frame buffer. Measurements taken myself, as well as corroborated by @Brunnis here.) Additionally, Super Mario Brothers being played on the N3DS Virtual Console (IPS top screen) has a much tighter spread in its measurements, but still averages around 5 frames of input lag.

As you can see, when considering input lag alone, the BittBoy ends up taking RetroPie out back and beating it with a firm stick, and even edges out Nintendo’s own official Virtual Console, at least on the N3DS. As a result, this is by far one of the best feeling NES emulators I’ve ever played, despite not always being the prettiest, and being bare-bones when it comes to emulation features. It’s really a disappointment that an emulator which feels this good is locked out of playing anything beyond the BittBoy’s lackluster library, but that's without considering the terrible D-pad, which brings the overall feel of the experience significantly back down. In conclusion, with all of the aforementioned flaws in mind, I find it impossible to conceptualize a niche market this product could end up satisfying. Without the ability to load your own ROMs into the device, I can only see this being worth the asking price of $40 if the consumer is morosely delighted by clone games and knock-offs, or if they just can't live without being able to play a small handful of the games they actually want on the go.

Verdict

What We Liked ...
  • Phenomenal input lag on the emulation (2.91 avg frames /60fps)
  • Bright, sharp, and clear built-in screen
What We Didn't Like ...
  • Inability to load your own ROMs!!
  • Blatant and utterly shameless padding of an otherwise woefully sparse library (many knock-offs, at least one duplicate).
  • Inaccurate technical specs/reported features (1-hour battery life and many Japanese, i.e. non-English, games).
  • Terrible D-pad which, like a crazy Ex, you cannot get away from.
  • Finicky A/V port.
  • Color inaccuracies in built-in screen, along with prominent overscan issues.
3.5
out of 10

Overall

It makes me genuinely sad that such a uniquely low-lag emulator needs to be held back by being trapped in an otherwise necrotic shell of a console. In all honesty, even if we were simply given the ability to load our own ROMs into this device with no other changes, I think I would be singing at least a slightly different tune. As it is, I’d call this product 1 part surprisingly great to 5 parts absolutely terrible, with very little in between those two extremes.
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Yeah, after reading this review, I suddenly decided that I'm better off sticking to my 3DS for emulation. This looks really cheap. It's bundled with bootleg titles like a multicart from the 80s, sporting a horrible D-Pad, and on top of that, I can't help but be disturbed that people have 3D-Printed Game Boy emulation machines that are miles better than this one. I mean, come on guys. Try harder.
 
So it's old, low quality famiclone thing, except in new, portable package.
For something with such an outragerous marketing (they essentialy flooded popular youtubers with it, bad manners and scam attempts included) it's non-surprisingly nothing.
 
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This is even worse than nes emulator I have on my dreamcast. It even has more games, despite having a bunch of Chinese knock-offs (The dreamst, I mean).
 
Honestly.... i have a 3ds that can do all this and more. Why would I need this Thing... :rofl2:
 
So, extremely cheap and limited Chinese emulator. Like nes mini kek

Not really, at least the NES Mini uses a good emulator, better than Chinese ones.

It's a cool design and has an IPS screen, which looks pretty good, but pre-loaded ROMs and bad emulation, I'll stick to my 3DS XL for unofficial NES emulation.
 
I didn't expect much. Also, I'm curious why the word "emulator" keeps being used in the review. Given the color bleeding and the low input latency, my guess is NOAC. Actually, even before the review when I look at their Amazon and saw "Built-in 300 games", it screamed out to me "cheap portable famiclone" of which there have been tons posted on Amazon.

The sad part, of course, is precisely that it'd only take a few tweaks and you'd actually have a great portable famiclone instead of the consistent medicore ones. *sigh* I agree, though. n3DS or even o3DS are across the board better with just about everything. Not that I want to give away my Gamebox Advance. :)
 
"Some games will sporadically decide to either load properly or glitch out (à la Double Dragon 3), or will simply always load into an unplayable cacophony of graphical and audio glitches."

Having owned an actual NES and played actual licensed retail cartridges on it, I can confirm that this is 100% accurate emulation. I'm annoyed that modern NES emulators always work all the time and have no "blow on cartridge" option anywhere in the menus, so this device sounds perfect for me.
 
"Some games will sporadically decide to either load properly or glitch out (à la Double Dragon 3), or will simply always load into an unplayable cacophony of graphical and audio glitches."

Having owned an actual NES and played actual licensed retail cartridges on it, I can confirm that this is 100% accurate emulation. I'm annoyed that modern NES emulators always work all the time and have no "blow on cartridge" option anywhere in the menus, so this device sounds perfect for me.
You can't be serious about the accurate emulation.

Simply, games are intended to work. No blow, no garbled mess when they get loaded. They should just work.
This is not accurate emulation at all. This is accurate reproduction of hardware problems, and those shouldn't even happen in the first place.
 
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"Some games will sporadically decide to either load properly or glitch out (à la Double Dragon 3), or will simply always load into an unplayable cacophony of graphical and audio glitches."

Having owned an actual NES and played actual licensed retail cartridges on it, I can confirm that this is 100% accurate emulation. I'm annoyed that modern NES emulators always work all the time and have no "blow on cartridge" option anywhere in the menus, so this device sounds perfect for me.

Accurate emulation my foot, Nestopia UE is cycle-accurate, this is utter garbage emulation.
 
As usual, excellent review!

I personally got more lucky than the reviewer in terms of battery life as the bittboy is able last through my 2x45 min commute.

I really appreciate how light and pocketable the device is: you can fit it in a not-too-tight jeans pocket unlike the 3DS it's being compared to.

The 2.5mm jack is a weird choice: there seems to be more than enough space to fit a regular 3.5 jack. Although the speaker sound is excellent, sometimes you've got to keep your 8-bit music to yourself and plug headphones, so I ordered a 2.5-to-3.5 adapter which I hope will do the trick despite the finickiness of the jack.

Since you made the effort to open up your bittboy, wouldn't it be worthwhile to take a look at the other side of the circuit board to assess if the storage is replaceable without too much effort? Other Chinese emulation boxes are known to just use cheap microSD cards, glued or soldered to the board.

EDIT: I received my 2.5-to-3.5 adapter, but it unfortunately doesn't work - quite disappointing that I have to mute my BittBoy during my commute.
 
It is crap as hell... No sd card support totally absurd these days.

Funny thing that have slot for sd but only hole in plastic.
 
As usual, excellent review!
This was my first review, actually, but thank you all the same! ^_^
Since you made the effort to open up your bittboy, wouldn't it be worthwhile to take a look at the other side of the circuit board to assess if the storage is replaceable without too much effort? Other Chinese emulation boxes are known to just use cheap microSD cards, glued or soldered to the board.
I did try that, but despite having removed all of the screws, the board was still otherwise adhered to the front face of the console. Trying to pry it off resulted in rather significant bending of the board, and I didn't want to break anything in case some of my footage or screenshots didn't come out right, needing a working BittBoy to replace them. That being said, now that the review is actually published, I should just get rough with the little bugger and maybe get a spicy full-frontal pic of the board. Today's a bit busy for me, but if I can, I'll come back to this comment and edit it with a picture.
 
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I didn't expect much. Also, I'm curious why the word "emulator" keeps being used in the review. Given the color bleeding and the low input latency, my guess is NOAC. Actually, even before the review when I look at their Amazon and saw "Built-in 300 games", it screamed out to me "cheap portable famiclone" of which there have been tons posted on Amazon.

The sad part, of course, is precisely that it'd only take a few tweaks and you'd actually have a great portable famiclone instead of the consistent medicore ones. *sigh* I agree, though. n3DS or even o3DS are across the board better with just about everything. Not that I want to give away my Gamebox Advance. :)

I have an awesome Supercard GBA flashcart with built-in NES emulation, using the flashcart's built-in processor. It works pretty well, and has a crap ton of settings to mess around with. It runs on my GBA SP, so it's super portable. That's how I play NES on the go.
 
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Why input lah is in the pro's?
Also - i hate the current scoring system- "this is bad, so is that, and it and also this, 3.5/10"
What are the 3.5 for? It should mean that this is better then the bottom 35% of similar stuff, while in reality you meant "it is worse then anything I expected" just give it 1 or 2....
 
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Oh man, I was really thinking this one would be different, at least I hoped for a SD card slot. At least I won't waste money buying it to play NES on the go now. Really wish I had something smaller and lighter than a phone + controller combo, like a GBA or a PSP.
Also geez, that board looks crappy as hell, I have seen better Chinese electronics than this piece of crap, furthermore it seems like it is literally just one single ROM loaded into it, since that 300-in-1 game list is awful similar to one of those bootleg cartridges.
Great review man, keep up with the good work!
 
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I have an awesome Supercard GBA flashcart with built-in NES emulation, using the flashcart's built-in processor. It works pretty well, and has a crap ton of settings to mess around with. It runs on my GBA SP, so it's super portable. That's how I play NES on the go.

Yea, that's the major reason I got a GBA SP back when it was released. Unfortunate that I can no longer play extended hours on my GBA SP. :(
 
the one on ebay that look like a psp or similar ones i own 5 different version and they are why better then the bit boy when you consider that they cost me me around 8nzd to 15nzd free shipping
 
B
Odd, this just came up on my YouTube home page:


Systems like these are a dime a dozen, really. My toaster can play NES games at this point.
 
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Not really, at least the NES Mini uses a good emulator, better than Chinese ones.

It's a cool design and has an IPS screen, which looks pretty good, but pre-loaded ROMs and bad emulation, I'll stick to my 3DS XL for unofficial NES emulation.
The SD card will be updated on the bittboy next version,will support load more games in it.
 
Oh man, I was really thinking this one would be different, at least I hoped for a SD card slot. At least I won't waste money buying it to play NES on the go now. Really wish I had something smaller and lighter than a phone + controller combo, like a GBA or a PSP.
Also geez, that board looks crappy as hell, I have seen better Chinese electronics than this piece of crap, furthermore it seems like it is literally just one single ROM loaded into it, since that 300-in-1 game list is awful similar to one of those bootleg cartridges.
Great review man, keep up with the good work!
The SD card will be updated on next bittboy version.
 
The SD card will be updated on the bittboy next version,will support load more games in it.

Source? I haven't heard of this, but if true, this will eliminate the shovelware. I call BS, because I don't see how it can support micro SD, unless there was a hardware revision. The 3DS does a damn fine job emulating NES nearly perfect.
 
It looks cute though, it's a shame they tried to sell it with all those problems, who cares if input lag is great ? I mean for the sake of the test, it's great you tested it, but its problems are too important to ignore and would ruin everything for everybody (except if you're color blind and want to play it only at home but not on tv and near an electric socket ^^')
 
B
It looks cute though, it's a shame they tried to sell it with all those problems, who cares if input lag is great ? I mean for the sake of the test, it's great you tested it, but its problems are too important to ignore and would ruin everything for everybody (except if you're color blind and want to play it only at home but not on tv and near an electric socket ^^')
Input lag can be a serious problem, especially in some NES games which rely on twitch-reaction gameplay.

While there weren't that many competitive fighting games for the NES, input lag can be a serious inhibitor if you're trying to get good at a game through an emulator.
 
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Input lag can be a serious problem, especially in some NES games which rely on twitch-reaction gameplay.

While there weren't that many competitive fighting games for the NES, input lag can be a serious inhibitor if you're trying to get good at a game through an emulator.
I totally get your point, input lag is indeed an important matter, I was only stating the fact that its flaws makes it unplayable, except, because I'm so funny, I know, if you're color blind and want to play it only at home but not on tv and near an electric socket ^^'
 
You can't be serious about the accurate emulation.

Simply, games are intended to work. No blow, no garbled mess when they get loaded. They should just work.
This is not accurate emulation at all. This is accurate reproduction of hardware problems, and those shouldn't even happen in the first place.
It was a joke about how much effort it took to actually get NES cartridges to play on an actual NES. I know sarcasm is lost on the Internet, but I had hoped my hyperbole would get it across regardless.
 
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It was a joke about how much effort it took to actually get NES cartridges to play on an actual NES. I know sarcasm is lost on the Internet, but I had hoped my hyperbole would get it across regardless.
Ahhh that makes sense then haha
 
"Secondly, the screen has trouble depicting the colors accurately in games"
What is accurate colors on an NES though?

Colors appeared differently depending on what CRT you had. There is a bunch of different color pallets for emulators because their is no set standard for how NES colors should look. Not only that, I doubt video games (especially older ones), followed a consistent color standard to adjust their screens too. So you won't know what developers saw on their screens. Its basically a free for all for NES. Unless you considered the official NES Classic the Standard pallet. But even then, CRT's displayed differently then NES Classic.

Also this Bittboy sucks.
 
I guess the closest thing to an official pallet is either PlayChoice-10, Virtual Console or NES Mini since they are made by Nintendo, specially the PlayChoice since it was the first. Although I believe most are used to NTSC composite pallet used on most emulators, so people base themselves on that.
 
This was a very good, entertaining review of a terrible product. The empty micro SD slot is just there to trick people who see one at a flea market. Obnoxious.

As far as knock-off Nintendo is concerned, it still doesn't get better than GB Boy Colour. And even that isn't very good.

$40 is just too much for what amounts to a Shitt-Boy.
 
I'm seeing so much hate that, although I'm not affiliated in any way with BittBoy, I feel compelled to list a few points describing why it's better than a lot of other Chinese Famicom emulators:
- better screen: no overscan, good viewing angles
- nice packaging
- great choice of body colours
- customer support (I tested it)
- faster delivery than from Chinese sellers (mine arrived from Germany)
- design closest to the original GameBoy (although, as I really don't care for turbo buttons, 2 buttons would have looked even closer)

Also, if like me you don't like the hacks and non English titles just play the dozen classic games you like. Personally I'm hooked on Dr. Mario, Pooyan, Lode Runner, Snow Brothers, New Zealand Story, Bubble Bobble part 2, and a few others which all render perfectly.

In the end one can still hope that if they sell enough BittBoy, they might be able to come up with upgraded versions and eventually compete with Retro-bit, hyperkin and others.
 
B
I'm seeing so much hate that, although I'm not affiliated in any way with BittBoy, I feel compelled to list a few points describing why it's better than a lot of other Chinese Famicom emulators:
- better screen: no overscan, good viewing angles
- nice packaging
- great choice of body colours
- customer support (I tested it)
- faster delivery than from Chinese sellers (mine arrived from Germany)
- design closest to the original GameBoy (although, as I really don't care for turbo buttons, 2 buttons would have looked even closer)

Also, if like me you don't like the hacks and non English titles just play the dozen classic games you like. Personally I'm hooked on Dr. Mario, Pooyan, Lode Runner, Snow Brothers, New Zealand Story, Bubble Bobble part 2, and a few others which all render perfectly.

In the end one can still hope that if they sell enough BittBoy, they might be able to come up with upgraded versions and eventually compete with Retro-bit, hyperkin and others.
It's not necessarily hate, it's just people pointing out the system's flaws when there are much, much better options for playing NES games these days.

I won't deny that the system has its merits, but it definitely has its flaws.
 
I mean, I know most famiclones are bad, but seeing this thing, I thought it might just be a jewel in an otherwise dull rock face. I mean, I'm aright with the sub-good roms, but I wish that the system itself would be better. I'm gonna take mine apart and see what I can do about that dpad.
 
Ish, just the button layout is enough to dissuade me from buying this. The A and B button are not supposed to be like that, ever. Left and up buttons are for extra actions, down and right for accept/decline.
"Some games will sporadically decide to either load properly or glitch out (à la Double Dragon 3), or will simply always load into an unplayable cacophony of graphical and audio glitches."

Having owned an actual NES and played actual licensed retail cartridges on it, I can confirm that this is 100% accurate emulation. I'm annoyed that modern NES emulators always work all the time and have no "blow on cartridge" option anywhere in the menus, so this device sounds perfect for me.
Don't worry about those who don't get sarcasm. I laughed if it's of any consolation.
 
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