The Supaboy - New SNES handheld from Hyperkin

[Zombisaurus]

Just last week received my Supaboy! Ordered from a seller on Amazon.

Happy with:
+ + + Yay.. Portable SNES! Very rad that companies are doing this.
+ Looks like a large SNES controller! Cool.
+Seems to work when plugged into an external TV and used with original SNES controllers, cool!
+Not very heavy at all


Neutral:
=Fairly tight cartridge slot can be scary to push a cart into because of how tight it is. I guess it's better than a loose one, but I fear for my cart's life some times.
=The LCD screen acceptable. Decent color, brightness, about as nice as an early DS screen. Still has blur and some motion issues, but not as bad as I was expecting.
= I've heard complaints about the position of Start/Select, and I'm fine with it. Quickly adapted.


Disappointed with:
- - - - Many of my games will randomly freeze and then loose their saves. Yoshi Island, Zelda LTTP, Super Metroid, and a few others do it often. Even Super Mario All Stars + World froze randomly and lost my saves! These games work fine on my SNES, are super clean, and don't have battery issues.
- Tried to be sure I wasn't bumping the system or anything by playing through a TV with the supaboy on a table, and yoshi would still randomly crash and loose saves. In he last 2 days, went through most of the game twice on my SNES just to test the cart, and it's fine.

- - Straight out of the box the screen had many fine scratches on the top of the screen, and a few stains on the underside of the screen. While these are generally unnoticeable while playing, it's still not indicative of a quality product when you open a box to find that.

- - The sound really is pretty bad. Quiet volume would be fine if they couldn't fit larger speakers into the system, but there is a distracting buzzing that worsens already poor sound. It goes away if you plug it into the tv, but I want to use my portable system AS a portable.

- - As the battery runs down from fullly charged, more and more problems occur. More screen flicker, more freezing, etc. And this starts after only 30 min or so, and the quality degrades as battery level approaches zero. Of which there is no indicator (even though there is an LED on the front of the system), so the system just glitches and turns off when it runs out.

- - I'm not really going to discuss the average-poor quality of materials, buttons, dpad, etc. Those don't seem to matter if I can't really play games properly on the thing.

[ShakeyOwnz]

It sucks to say the Super Mario RPG barely works with my supaboy. It started up the first time I put it in, but froze shortly after. And now it starts about 1/20 times, but not without erasing all my saves.... again. *Sigh* Maybe a Japanese copy will work better?

Does anybody know of any issues with Earthbound? I don't want to pay the $100-150 unless it works like a game should.

[JSnake]

It sucks to say the Super Mario RPG barely works with my supaboy. It started up the first time I put it in, but froze shortly after. And now it starts about 1/20 times, but not without erasing all my saves.... again. *Sigh* Maybe a Japanese copy will work better?

Does anybody know of any issues with Earthbound? I don't want to pay the $100-150 unless it works like a game should.

EarthBound works perfectly fine in my experience. No increased enemies or anything.

[Satoshi_Matrix]

Does anybody know of any issues with Earthbound? I don't want to pay the $100-150 unless it works like a game should.

I don't want to say JSnake is lying, but he's definitely not correct in saying that EarthBound plays fine on the Supaboy. EarthBound employs all of its anti-piracy measures when played on a Supaboy. Expect enemy encounters to be increased by a factor of four, making the entire game an absolute grind. Just go to the part in the beginning of the game with the town gang thugs. There will be so many of them onscreen it will cause slowdown! And of course, the horrible delete your SRAM final boss.

If you want to play EarthBound, the only system that's suited for it is a real SNES or Super Famicom.

For more on the Supaboy, check out my video review. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAxAu6kx7Zg

[TKO]

Maybe he plat EB on Flashcart? There's a rom that has disabled anti-piratcy measures.

[JSnake]

I don't want to say JSnake is lying, but he's definitely not correct in saying that EarthBound plays fine on the Supaboy. EarthBound employs all of its anti-piracy measures when played on a Supaboy. Expect enemy encounters to be increased by a factor of four, making the entire game an absolute grind. Just go to the part in the beginning of the game with the town gang thugs. There will be so many of them onscreen it will cause slowdown! And of course, the horrible delete your SRAM final boss.

If you want to play EarthBound, the only system that's suited for it is a real SNES or Super Famicom.

For more on the Supaboy, check out my video review. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAxAu6kx7Zg

I'm not sure then. But I do know my EB cart works fine on my Supaboy. If your game is affected by the anti-piracy measures, you should see Spiteful Crows outside of the arcade after defeating the sharks. There are plenty of other examples where enemies appear in areas where they shouldn't. And also I was able to walk all the way from Twoson to the pencil statue in Peaceful Rest Valley without seeing a single enemy. Considering the encounter rate in Peaceful Rest Valley is typically very high in normal circumstances, I should have been seeing a shitload of enemies if the anti-piracy was engaged.

I also was not playing on a flash cart.

[Satoshi_Matrix]

does your supaboy have the horrible audio screech? You might have a different revision than the one I do. Doubtful, but possible.

[kedawa]

Why would any developer code their game to not function on clone hardware?
Clones didn't even exist when the game was programmed, and even if they did, why would they care what sort of hardware it was used on?

[Satoshi_Matrix]

Clones didn't exist, but copying devices did. At the time, there were many third party copying devices that would dump any SNES or Super Famicom game that didn't require special chips to a floppy disk and therefore allow for illegal copies, sort of the predecessor to burning CD based games.

To get around this, many later SNES games began to include anti-piracy measures into their games if they detected any latency from the lockout chip to the system. For example, this happens with Killer Instinct, Donkey Kong Country 2, Megaman 7 and many others.

In the case of EarthBound, Nintendo was heavily promoting the game, and since Final Fantasy II and III were common targets of copying devices, they wanted to ensure EarthBound wouldn't be in the similar position. So rather than refusing to boot, EarthBound would place 2-4x more enemies in EVERY AREA making the game no fun to play, and if you did manage to get your way through the whole game, you'd have your game save erased by the final boss. Nintendo: the original trollface.