Software developer here with a quick explanation of what seems to be happening with the scrolling: The screen is slightly taller (in pixels) than the games require, but the system tries to use the entire screen anyway. The easiest/fastest/laziest way to do this is to just double the height of every nth row. This distorts the image, which isn't too bad on its own, but when you start scrolling an image vertically (or horizontally if the screen is the wrong width), you get the ripple effect seen here. (If all you wanted was an explanation, feel free to ignore the rest. From here on I'm just getting ranty, because I'm a developer and these things bother me.) The fact that this happens at all is pretty telling of the effort that went into creating this handheld. Generally speaking, every game for any given console is going to have the same exact resolution. Thus, if you're designing a device to only play a single console's games, you should know the exact resolution your screen requires. Placing an off-resolution screen in the device screams "fuck quality, just slap whatever cheap ass components you can find in there and start shoveling that shit out to our customers." Of course at the end of the day, none of us are subscribed to Ashens' channel because we expect quality, are we?

Huh, that's actually something I'd like to own, although I have a PSP smashed with Genesis games already. This just seems like a little novelty Genesis-only, lovely little emulator thing. And for 20 quid, you say? Edit: holy fuck, the sound on Sonic 1 was terrifying, abort, sticking with the PSP

As soon as you said "AtGames" I knew it was going to be a disaster.

There must be legal punishment for screwing up Mega Drive sound emulation...

If I remember correctly, the reason of the totally off pitch sound is a license issue with Yamaha, the one that produced the sound chip used into the megadrive, so they did this on purpose. By the way AT@ames has a lot of megadrive hardware clone, all with the same sound issue, even one used into south korean school buses and a traditional tv console with 20 pre-loaded games and a slot cart

That's the sonic 2 logo from the beta version of the game. Wonder why they used that. Strange.

The sound and screen ripple wouldn't be deal breakers for me, but the no saving would be.

Sonic sounds like Sanic on this thing.

I’m upset he didn’t play Outrun, I just wanted to hear some of that *Sound Shower.*

HARIBO EVERY SINGLE TIME

"Dat music doe." - Ashens 2015

"Ahhh, the Capcom wibble." -Ash Ens 2015

Bloody hell, they slapped the BETA title screen for Sonic 2 on there and not the final version.

I use to love Knuckles, then I saw him Sonic Boom and can't recover from that.

Portable mega drive and knuckles

I never owned a Mega Drive / Genesis, and only ever played it at friend's houses. That Sonic 1 "music" still caused me to die a little inside.

My only guess would be that the shimmer is because the Genesis/Megadrive ran at various resolutions (256x224, 320x224, 256x240, 320x240) that don't all scale nicely to the LCD which is probably 320x480 or 320x240. For shits and giggles try putting the PAL and NTSC versions of the same game on the SD card and see if you notice any difference in the shimmering. I THINK the resolution for NTSC is 320×448 and PAL is 320x480 not exactly sure. One version may scale better and not shimmer.. worth a try if you are bored. lol

I could hear Yuzo Koshiro crying from my house in Leeds...

Man I loved my Megadrive, I had 3 main games, streets of rage 2, Sonic (the first one) and Rock and Roll racing, damn I played those a lot

When I heard the Sonic intro... my fingers involuntarily did up, down, left, right, A-START..

the reason for the vertical scrolling problem is just cause by the hamster inside getting tired and hungry. upload some food to your SD card and it should solve it right away.

The rippling is probably caused by the native resolution of the LCD not matching the system's resolution. The blue unit specifically is likely because the games output at 320x224 whereas the screen is most likely a 320x240 screen, so it's slightly stretched vertically and doesn't quite line up right with the screen.

"Man, Megadrive music was pretty good, wasn't it?" Yeah, when they did it right and it didn't sound like an electric guitar being put through a chipper-shredder while still attached to a wall of Marshall stacks.

If I were to put an SD card inside, I'd fit it with EVERY single Mega Drive rom in existance (or what I can find anyway) Also, even though the sound is a load of tripe, I'm the kind of man that can put up with crappy sound. =P

No Comix Zone? No Eternal Champions? pff

I still think it's just amazing that games that once required a home console's power, play at all on a small portable that holds that many games at once.

8:43 isn't Zero Wing the game the "all your base are belong to us" originated from?

Why atgames still isn't fixing the sound with new alterations is beyond me. It's an easy fix on the circuitry as mod-fixes show.

4:42 Sounds like an exact history of Detroit.

Holy fuck that Sonic music! It sounds like you made a Sonic.EXE variation of Green Hill! That was hard to listen too...

Regrettably, it sounds like SEGA's been selling off IPs left and right, so if these devices were recently made, this may be the last we see so many of SEGA's franchises together. "Amid" is more of an American term, whereas "amidst" has more British usage. I see this for "among" and "amongst," as well as "while" and "whilst." We Americans just don't like our prepositions and conjunctions ending in "st." Saturday Night Slam Master's first shot is of a burly man's crotch. Good way to introduce people to the game.

Awesome video Ashens, I couldent comment on your 500th video because comments are disabled. But I would like to say that I have thoroughly enjoyed about 99%of your videos, Please keep up the great work, I love logging into youtube and seeing that there is a new video from you.

Sonic the Hedgehog's music sounds like shitty creepy pasta music if you slow it down.

What I've learned from Mr. Ashens today: 1) I need one of these tiny Sega handhelds. Now. 2) "Sod it!" means, in English slang, "Fuck it!"

I have one of the funky blue ones with the memory card and I absolutely love it to pieces. Sensible Soccer is perfect for a commute!

There are so many variations of the megadrive now,i can't get over the popularity of it still, Thanks for sharing!

If you want to play these games on the go legally I recommend that you just get the Mega Drive/Genesis collection on PSP or Nintendo Switch. They're cheaper, you can save and the emulation is better too.

The vertical scrolling rippling effect must have to do with the image being slightly upscaled vertically but not horizontally, this screen must be 320 x 240, the Genesis/Megadrive runs at 320 x 224...

That Streets of Rage 1 playthrough brought back some great memories! And I always chose Adam - his dropkick was great.

I..... really wish I'd seen this video before I started my KO console series, cause this explains so much about a weird system I looked at!

Featuring Knuckles From The Knuckles May Chuckle Series

Just bought one of these at a boot sale for a fiver. To think years back I paid up to £40 for a single title.... Now I have a handheld console with 12 games wow!

that sonic music down pitched. Thats how I felt when i played Mortal Kombat Trilogy on ps1.

I just picked one of these up today as a prop for a video shoot. Great little gizmo here. I just wish you could save games...

Why comments blocked on new vid?

Oh man. I hear him say that I will weep for Sonic's sound quality. I'm thinking to myself that I wouldn't. As soon as it hits the high notes I'm crying with an awkward mixture of sadness and laughter. It's the sort of butchering of music that physically hurts to listen to.

Gain Ground, Shinobi 3,Strider, and Sonic (3) and Knuckles were (and still are) my favourite games on the Genesis.

When you showed the games on the back i was like 'oh, no streets of rage?' lol i loved that game!!! i actually had the mega drive that worked. it was kept at one of my relatives from when i went round there when i was younger to play on when i went, i went to reclaim it recently but said that she'd thrown it away a couple of months before :/ And i agree about the sound thing, things like that put me off!! if something doesn't sound the same i find it really difficult to get my head around it :(

I have that same toy. The blue one anyway. cost me about $2.30 at my local dollar store.

I work at Argos and i'm always baffled when someone buys one of them things. Download an Emulator or get the original! They're being ripped off!

This brings me waaaaaaay back...

I used to have a plug 'n' play game that had basically all the same things on it. Sega Megadrive stuff. I only played it for a shortish amount of time, but it managed to ingrain the "Sega" jingle into my brain in that short amount of time.Goddamit I wasn't even sentient in the Sega era!

5:03 Amid is correct in American English ;D

why has ashens disabled likes and comments on his most recent video?

Like all ways ... a great and wicked video !!!

*sighs* I remember having a Genisis when I was little. Didn't have many games for it, but we had Sonic 2, and played that quite a lot. I miss that thing, though I did find a website to play all sorts of old games on.

Remember Phantom 2040? Anyone? That game was the tits.

Bloody ell that din't sound right.

That megadrive looks awesome actually. o.o and I play without sound, so it wouldn't bother me. I need to get me one if it's cheap enough/can import cheap enough

Congratulations on 800k on your Quest for the Game Child!!

This Guy Is Pretty Good At Reviewing Games And Other Things..., I Really Like This Channell !

sonic the hedgehog and knuckles sonic the hedgehog 2 and knuckles Dr robotniks mean bean machine and knuckles sonic and knuckles Knuckles and knuckles ristar and knuckles echo and knuckles sonic spin ball and knuckles streets of rage and knuckles streets of rage 2 and knuckles comix zone and knuckles Alex kid and knuckles altered beast and Bruce golden axe and knuckles flicky and knuckles and those snes kids think there so cool. us Genesis kids have *knuckles processing*!!!

Blaze are still around in Doncaster, UK

Doom and Clash at Demonhead are my favorite retro soundtracks. Bio Ape Force is pretty good also.

Sonic 2 Prototype title screen LOL

The Genesis ran at a screen resolution of 320x224, which is slightly less vertical resolution than 320x240, which (alongside 640x480) is a common resolution for small budget LCD screens, so yeah, they're probably just scaling the vertical from 224 to 240 without any sort of filtering, thus producing that ripple effect. (MegaDrive ran at 320x240 due to PAL... might want to see if PAL-format ROMs have the same effect...) And yeah, if my ears could bleed, I would be dead from blood loss from that sound emulation... x_x;

Thanks a lot, now Zero Wing music plays on my head.

Idk why but I couldn't stop laughing when he said "Dat music Doe."

Amid is perfectly fine.

Streets Of Rage 2 does indeed have one of the best soundtracks ever. It was the one Megadrive game that made my SNES-having ass jealous of the rival console, and let me tell you that was serious business back in the day! Edit after watching rest of video: Good grief, that does sound horrible. Am I imagining things or is the music actually out of tune? That's a dreadful shame, totally ruins an otherwise perfectly lovely system. Boo!

The Ribina advert is pretty terrifying, excellent.

Adam was actually my favorite character because his kick knocks enemies flying. And using the special in the first 5 seconds always happens when trying to figure out what button does what lol

This is like a genesis 2DS

Who would play Sonic & Knuckles without Sonic 3? Ew. I always used Adam when I played SoR. His jump kick was top-tier. Dunno why he never came back. ?!! Wow, all that audio was in minor key or something.

Good to see E-Swat on the bunch, my very first video game.

Your voice is just so soothing

Why can't we get a dream cast one?

Oh there's that Sonic 2 Beta Title Screen. :V I don't get why they added that. The sound emulation in these are shit. You're better off getting a PSP and getting emulators. They really need to fix the sound issues in their emulator, there's no reason why their emulation is off when there are better emulators on the internet. Hell they should have asked Steve Snake if they could use Kega Fusion on these!

The vertical scrolling issue is probably due to the fact that the game is being played on a screen which has a finite vertical resolution. A CRT television has a theoretically infinite vertical resolution - the individual red, green and blue phosphor strips are discrete horizontally (red-green-blue-red-green-blue-etc), but continuous vertically. And a matrix display (one made up of pixels - LCD/LED/plasma/etc) with a high enough vertical resolution (720 or 1080 lines for an HDTV) can mask the issue adequately. But played on a low resolution matrix display, probably no more than 300 or 400 lines for these handhelds, the problem becomes evident.

Picked it up for such a low price. The sound is very strange but not outright terrible, just too low pitched. Beat Streets of Rage 2 last night, picking up an SD card to throw my massive collection onto. Thanks Ashens!

The thing that killed me listening to Sonic the Hedgehog was being American and listening to the PAL's slowed down music.

I bought one of those from argos yesterday!

Hell yeah, Golden Axe was my jam. Played for hours with my brother

Yup I got one of these and what killed it for me was the lack of save feature, and I could never get more games on it even though it is the blue version. Thanks for the video sir! ^_^

PSP 2000+PicoDrive=Win

Do what I did save up and buy a retron5

They have been selling these handhelds (with SD slot) and a console (that accepts cartridges) with two wireless controllers at our local Dollar General... My sister picked up the console for $27 and I got the handheld for like $20. They're actually really cool!

As a man who loves kunckles, this looks like the product for me.

sparking nostalgia right there

I love where they use Sonic 2 beta.

I bought that thing a ways back and while I never use it... It's a damn good little system.

Hearing the Streets of Rage soundtrack gave me goosebumps. The memories...

I have 2 atgames products, the portable and home plug and play system, both had 8 pages of games, and an sd card slot on the portable and cartridge slot on the home one

Poundland now has an amusement park. The roller coasters only go 2 feet in the air, and the carts are too small so you kind of have to sit on top of them. The boat ride goes at a speed of 3 knots per hours, and breaks down within 20 minutes. The horses on the carousal are terribly deformed and you get to enjoy a loop of 3 piano chords while on it.

I actually got the Genesis one for my birthday. I use it to pass a lot of time. I did have an issue though where tons of dirt ends up under the screen. Plus, mine is mainly white, with blue surrounding the buttons. It also has 9 pages of games, sd card slot, on/off switch, av out, charging port that uses miniUSB, AV out, headphone jack, Volume wheel, Charging light, 6 face buttons (A, B, C, X, Y, Z) and a Low battery light.

I've got two of these AtGames Handelds. One is the presented on the video blue model with SD card slot and most of Sonic games... And well, despite problems with sound and lack of save-game it's quite nice device. It's working quite well even with rom-hacks (which is really good thing, especially since there are plenty of good rom-hacks made by community of Sonic Retro). The latest model, with 80 games, (in fact with 40, because other 40 are some simple homebrew games, like tick-tack-toe or chess) is probably the best option to avoid these strange lacks of titles (what is more, there is even Street Fighter II, usually there are only games made by Sega). Probably that's one of the biggest issues for someone who is interested in this device, a lot of shops is selling older models (for lower price). I've got also quite interesting model, with games for Master System & Game Gear. It's working on normal batteries, but it's really nice thing - very comfortable D-pad, sound is quite good, and everything else is working fine. If only it would have this SD-slot, it would be really nice substitute of Game Gear.

Ah, the handheld Mega Drive, a mainstay of Argos catalogues for the last decade or so. I got one about seven years ago, and would say I've probably played it for a grand total of seven minutes

The idea of playing old games like this on anything but a CRT is just something I can't get to appeal to me. Gotta love that Sega music though. I had an SNES, but my friend had a Genesis. For my money, in games of that era, nothing beats that sweet, crunchy FM Synth sound.

Having one of these, I wish they had a better sound chip and the ability of saving games, because it's definitely a good little machine to play some Genesis games on for sure despite those issues.

I was at a Toys R' Us a few days ago and they had a version of this and the tv version which on top of the usual suspects had the Genesis versions of MK 1, 2, and 3. Which is.... an interesting thing to include... I think.