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Review: e-time D22+ TV-Connected Hand Held Sega Megadrive/Genesis Emulator
AKA: "The Genesis Device"
by Mike (strider_mtk) and Larry (gadgetmiser)
The e-time D22+ - or "Genesis Device" - is a hand held video game player that emulates 16-bit Sega Megadrive/Genesis games and lets you play them on your TV.
It is sold by DealExtreme for a side splittingly roll-on-the-floor-for-hours hilarious $21.97 with free shipping (Shipping is free but sometimes takes weeks. You do get what you pay for.)
The Genesis Device, is similar to other devices on the market which contain a set of games for a particular gaming system, such as the Atari Flashback. It plugs into the auxiliary jack of a television set for game play.
What sets the Genesis Device apart from the rest of the mainstream pack is the fact that it has an SD Card slot, and a full-blown emulator in firmware capable of playing most of the 16-bit Sega Megadrive/Genesis games we threw at it flawlessly. With a nowadays puny 2GB SD card, you can fit just about every Megadrive game ever made on it.
THE NAME
Strider_mtk dubbed this thing the "Genesis Device" because it's way cooler than the existing name.
(DealExtreme also sell another model which terraforms previously uninhabitable worlds into Class M planets, but that one is $219.70, and you need a starship (and an uninhabitable world) to make proper use of it. It can also be pretty dangerous, as they’re still using protomatter in those ones. Poor value DX. Epic fail!)
WHAT'S IN THE BOX
The Genesis Device arrives in a very brightly colored and slick looking box that features a Chinese language manual and an English one pager which contains little in the way of English (but still gets across the ideas of what the product looks like and what it does...kind of). Check it out:
As for the rest of the package, well, you get protective plastic, a bendy wire thing to keep the cable wrapped - and that’s about it.
BUILD AND ERGONOMICS
The Genesis Device is made of shiny black plastic which shows all fingerprints and smudges but is and remains comfortable during prolonged play. It is shaped like a modern game controller, and moulds well to your hands. It’s about the same size as an Xbox 360 controller.
In a great design decision however, the manufacturers have put the power switch where your forefinger might normally expect to find a shoulder button. This could lead to some unfortunate experiences involving Phantasy Star 4, a 16 hour gaming session, and forgetting to save.
The unit itself feels solid, not creaky at all and does not have any give or twist when being used. That’s not to say that this is a unit built to the highest standards (the finishing around the power button and 2nd controller port is rough to say the least. However, its been built to a price, and the 75c apparently invested in industrial design clearly all went into the right aspects of this device!
The direction pad and buttons work better than the brightly-colored plastic in the photos would have one believe, providing solid control. The dpad is the right height, and has a nice spongy but “in control” feel to it. The fire buttons are fine. The Start button however, was not very responsive, requiring some firm presses from time to time. Thankfully, one tends not to press start as much as the B button.
Power is provided by three "AA" batteries which get inserted in its back. There is no DC power-in port, unfortunately. After about an hour of play the batteries still worked – and they weren’t alkalines – so the battery life is at least that. However, this thing reads and writes a lot to the SD card, so you should keep some spare batteries on hand.
A red power LED can be seen when the unit is powered up, but is not evident while playing, because it faces forward, which eliminates it as a distraction. The transparent housing where the led is suggests that the unit might have a built in light gun – but sadly, this doesn’t appear to be the case.
A second controller port for two-person games is provided as well. And it even works (see below)!
A 2 metre AV cable comes out of the machine. Plug it into any Composite AV port, and you’re in action. 2 metres is reall too short for a device of this type, so be prepared to be closer to your screen than normal. Still, there’s nothing here a cable extender won’t fix.
LAUNCHING THE GENESIS DEVICE
When you connect the Genesis Device to a television and switch on the power you are greeted by an outer-space graphic and the word "GAME" before a very simple menu appears. This menu allows the selection of games from internal memory or to be loaded from a memory card.
Volume can be adjusted by holding "Select" and up/down on the direction pad both in this menu and during games, which is convenient.
The games and any games you have stored on an SD card will appear in the extremely simple menu system. ROM images must be in .bin format, and in a directory called “GAME” on the root of the SD, or they will not appear.
Out of the box, the Genesis Device includes two "Sonic The Hedgehog" games ("Sonic 1" and a modified version of "Sonic 1" called, "Sonic Weird") that are installed in two on-board memory locations. These two memory locations are where games have to be copied from the SD card to, in order for the unit to play them.
After boot up, these two locations and the games they contain are show up and are immediately accessible to select games from. To access SD card games, you have to select a different screen by pushing the "B" button.
When a game is selected from the SD card, the menu will ask if you want to overwrite the existing game in one of the two internal memory locations. When selected the game is then copied into internal memory for playing, not unlike with an NDS/GBA flash cart. You make this selection the hard way – select game; press B, press the dpad to the right, then press B again. There is also an easy way: just select the game and press “Start”. The hard way is rather painful after awhile, and is indicative of how the interface could be improved – but frack, that’s splitting hairs - just do it the easy way.
This is a very simple system and it works, allowing the last game played to be run instantly.
Game saves work but dissappear with the game that is being overwritten, so anyone playing a long-term RPG or anything that saves progress will have to do so with care!
(For example, the included Sonic Games are history now that others have been loaded in their place.)
You can load an entire edited romset on a 4GB memory card. Unfortunately, the menu can take quite a long time to scroll though an entire romset, and there is no provision for any other folder for games but the "games" folder due to the simplicity of the menu system. To avoid this, a couple of hundred ROMS are OK – just don’t do the whole romset (though you can of course store it on the same SD Card as long as its not in the Game folder).
GRAPHICS PERFORMANCE
Graphics appear to be spot-on, although neither of us owned an original Sega Genesis to compare. There are no slowdowns or other screen artifacts in any of the games tried. It runs MUSHA without tearing for example (unlike another *ahem* little known Chinese handheldJ, originally at least), and manages Afterburner and Afterburner II with no trouble.
Two player games appear to play perfectly as well. Strider_mtk purchased a cheap Sega Genesis controller for under five dollars and it plugs in and works with no problems.
COMPATIBILITY
The Genesis Device seems to take just about everything you can throw at it, but it is not a 100% success rate. Outrun refused to run, for instance, and so did Virtua Racing (though I suspect this was a 32x game). Anything that actually runs, runs perfectly though, and most ROMS did. There was probably about a 95% success rate.
CONCLUSIONS
A. PROS:
· So cheep you’ll feel like Tweety
· Good compatibility – most ROMS run
· ROMS run well - sound works, and no slowdown
· Game saves work
· Good ergonomics and controls (except for Power button location)
· Can use second controller
· With a small SD Card, fits entire Genesis ROMset – never run out of a Genesis game to play again
· No separate AV Cable to lose
· Reasonable battery life (as far as I can tell)
B. CONS
· Not complete ROM compatibility
· Save games can’t be dumped to SD Card – lost when ROM is removed from internal cache
· Silly location for power switch
· Cable could be longer
· Interface not intuitive (unless you use the “Easy Way” – see above)
· Slow to scroll if too many ROMS are on SD Card
The Genesis Device is a very inexpensive video game system that happens to play most – but not all - Sega Megadrive/Genesis games extremely well. It can store the entire official library of games, so you always have them on hand, as well as the many game modifications and public domain titles developed by homebrewers. It’s emulation performance is perfect, and it even takes a second controller and lets you save games. If the original Genesis worked like this, we’d be playing the Sega GenesisStation 3 today, instead of PS3s and 360s!
What revs me up the most about the Genesis Device however is that a clearly throwaway device works so unexpectedly well. If it only came with 10 games in which all the sprites were modified, and ran with frameskip 1, you’d still forgive it, and happily play. In this case however, the damn thing does exactly what it promises, and even surpasses expectations in many areas. If this is what the industrialisation of China is all about, then all I can say is roll on India.
One day, every PS3 game ever made will be in a similar package, and be available for about the same price. This event might be 20 years away, but when you see that day, remember you read saw the future here first.
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