You might wonder how I got here. I was looking into chiptune music, and a colleague recommended Jeremy Blake’s music, which is indeed awesome if you are into this stuff. I recommend listening to his album called “Superstructures”. This album is created using a tracker, similar to the trackers I used on the Amiga 500 back in the days. My favorites were Protracker and later when I had a MIDI keyboard Octamed. It turns out Jeremy is using a Dirtywave M8, which can also be built using open source software and one of these handheld gaming consoles. Houston we have a project!
Searching for a good console that has roughly the same screen and button layout as the Dirtywave M8, I found the Anbernic RG40XXV. It is very well priced, and as a bonus I could play some old school games on it. The Teensy 4.1 I needed was not shipped and I got into an argument with the seller, so while that was going on I had time to play with the Anbernic games. That was not dissapointing, but there are a few things I need to address.
Anbernic is apparently very good at SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and marketing. All reviews you find are very praising, and most videos of gamers claiming to have bought the device (and suspiciously multiple colors of the same device…hmmm…) seem like they have either not played with it or are not very critical in their reviews. So here we go with the things I found, I hope this helps you in making your decisions.
✅ Build Quality
The mechanical build quality of the device is indeed very good, buttons feel very nice, and playing a gameboy game on it immediately feels comfortable and familiar. With the buttons there are 2 rather obvious problems which irk me a bit:
- 🟨 The shoulder buttons on the back protrude and are easy to hit. In gaming that sounds nice, but when you put the device on a table between rounds, it is very easy to press a sholder button, inadvertently causing the game to do something you did not want. Not a problem in most games, but I’ve been kicked out of Speedball 2 a few times by this.
- ❌ The reset button is just as easy to click as the power button. The reset button is a hardware reset, which *immediately* reboots the machine, even if it in the middle of writing to your SD card(s). I’ve accidentaly ruined one SD card image already, so always make a backup. I opened my RG40XXV and took out the plastic in front of the reset button so I don’t accidentally hit it; I now need to poke a toothpick in the hole to reset it.
❌ “sleep” is using too much power
When you short-press the powerbutton, the device goes into sleep mode. Don’t use this. You think you can put it away for a day, but you can’t. The sleep mode of the Anbernic RG40XXV uses quite a bit of power, killing the battery within a few hours. Don’t use sleep mode, just power it off completely (hold the power button until you feel the vibration and let go).
✅ Shipped Games
There SD cards that come with it contain loads of games, but it is hard to exactly tell which. There are also quite a few knockoffs and stange titles on there, making it harder to find the ones you are looking for. Anbernic provides games lists on request, but these are excel files with nothing more than one tab per system, and bare filenames in each tab. It not always clear from the filename what game or version you are going to get. Nevertheless, there are so many, there is probably a game you like in there. If not, you can always go to Vimms Lair to find the classics you like.
✅ Screen quality
The screen on the Anbernic RG40XXV is very nice. Bright colors, good contrast. Very nice. Nothing to complain about here.
Brightness tip! To change the screen brightness, hold the “M” button while pressing the volume up/down buttons. It took me a while to find this, you are welcome.
❌❌ Audio Quality
Brace yourselves. This is by far the worst part of the Anbernic RG40XXV, and given that I wanted to make music on this device, it is a big frustration to see that the design of the audio output has been bodged. The audio level on any headphone you plug into this device is low. If you have Apple earpods and want to play games in a car, chances are that the outside noise will be louder than the game sounds. It is amazing how they overlooked this.
And there is no bass. At all. Everything below 300Hz or so is cut off. For gameboy games this is probably okay, but for Genesis (Sega Megadrive), Amiga or Dreamcast titles it is sad to hear that the thumping bass tracks are reduced to almost tss-tss-tss-tss.
I have tried to modify the output of the RG40XXV, as I see that each audio channel uses a 1uF capacitor in series with a 32 Ohm (or so) resistor, which is a very cheap trick to protect the audio amplifier from shortcuts. Making the capacitor 2uF does not do much, I haven’t found bigger capacitors yet. The capacitor should be more in the range of 10uF or so to make a difference in cutoff frequency given $$f = {1 \over {2*\pi*R*C}}$$ but that still does not solve the low audio volume of the device. And I haven’t even started to talk about the intermitting buzzing and popping, probably caused by the operating system not addressing or muting the sound card correctly.
Conclusion
If you are expecting decent audio, don’t get the Anbernic RG40XXV, and I assume any Anbernic device because I think the audio output stages will be using the same bodged design as usual in heavily optimized-for-cost Chinese devices. It’s okay for the cheesy music when playing Paperboy, sure. But you get what you pay for I guess.
If you know of people who have fixed the audio of the Anbernic RG40XXV, please drop a comment below, I’d be happy to hear about it. Who knows, maybe I’ll find a way to fix it, in which case I will update this blogpost.
Cheers!