So I watched a video on a little emulator console that comes with two wireless controllers and 30000 games all for under £50.
To put that in context you pay £50 for a single AAA game for the switch.
Apparently this console will run psp games and I just discovered there is a castlevania game on the psp I haven't played !
So that's almost worth the £50 by itself
Plus atomic runner on the mega drive.
Those 2 alone are worth the 50 to me.
Hell wireless controllers run to £15-30 by themselves.

Discovered that AliExpress now works with PayPal and took a dangerous step down a very slippery slope !

Do I need an emulation console I can plug into the telly ?
Nope.
But I bought it anyway..

But then I started looking at drones, gadgets and 3d printers for £60 !

Haven't actually bought anything else, oh but the temptation !

Anyone else entered the Aladdin's cave of cheap Chinese electroware ?

Oh yeah I have emulators on my phone and pc.

So I've already got some roms.

But !
The advantage of this system is that:
1) it's portable.
you can plug it into anything with a hdmi socket. So I can plug it into my pc monitor if i want, or the telly or some kind of small scale screen if i want to.
Plus it comes with two wireless controllers and a 64gb card - I went for the 30000 cheapest option, on the grounds that should i ever need more space I've probably got a spare 128gb sd card around anyway and it's a doddle to just clone the whole thing to a larger card.
And there weren't any hardware upgrades for the more expensive models that i could see - just more games.

At the end of the day I'm not going to add a lot of games.
Plus I've never heard of many of the consoles this is set up to emulate. And I love scrolling shoot em ups - some of these emulators are arcade emulators with a lot of games in I've never played. .

looking at the video below - the display is clearly upscaled on all the consoles he tested, even the ps1 games were looking good.


2) All the tedious rom downloading, controller setup and emulator tweaking, finding and loading different firmwares for different consoles - is already done.
To add new games I just connect the sd card to my pc or phone and just drop the games in the relevant folder.

3) it's also a fairly decent android tv box.
Install cinema hd and I've got access to just about everything on all current streaming platforms for free.

At the moment I tend to download to my phone and then stream it to the telly direct from the phone.
And while i do have 380gb storage on the phone, between videos and downloaded content - it's filling up

So that's why i went for this.
hassle free, all the tedious work has already been done and I'm not a heavy gamer anyway.
But just recently I've had a hankering to play the odd game downstairs on a larger screen than the switchlite has.

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47VB-2kXgF0

Between the dreamcast, n64 and psp -there is just about any game genre you could wish for with more than acceptable graphics quality.

Throw min mame for all the arcade stuff i used to play at college and we're golden.

I also think i saw the original atari console listed - my dad still loves the original invaders game.

Basically for the money, it does an awful lot and you get a lot.

On top of all that, were I to copy the sd card I reckon I could use it on any standard £30 tv box and sell them to the odd client.

I also reckon you could run it off a decent li-poly battery if you wanted to.
Plus while i bought a hacked psp when they came out, with a bunch of roms.
the frequent hack updates were a pain and I stopped using it when I got my 3ds.

So there are a whole bunch of decent psp games I've never seen or played.
And scaled up ,on the telly - they should look pretty good.
it's only a hd tv, so I don't need 2k or 4k output.

And for £48, what have I got to lose.

Apart from a lot of money buying cheap gadgets from aliexpress

As it turns out I've actually got a newish TV box, which is a slightly better spec.

So I'll clone the 64gb card over to the 128 GB one I gave in that box and use that with the Chinese one  used as a portable device.

It's 5v, so with a usb to round socket afaotir,nitll run from a decent lipoly phone charger.

Be interesting to see how much run timebyounget from sb10000mah charger.

I could probably download the card image on Emile, but on my broadband, it'd take about a week.

And I have a couple Bluetooth controllers as well, that should also work.

Gonna be fun

On a different tack I set up s little laptop today that's going to be used with an sdr dongle as a software defined radio setup.

Apparently with the right software you can pick up mobile phone conversations, pretty much all air traffic transmissions, even the military stuff.

The technology you can get your hands on for a few quid is bloody amazing.

Curse you AliExpress for finally deciding to allow PayPal payments !

There's this motion activated if camera that is the size of a normal dice. And looks like one as well.
So many shiny shiny toys !