As my latest acquisition seemed to generate a bit of interest in the "We want to know..." thread I thought I'd give you my impressions of the console after using it extensively for the last week. I also used my girlfriend's camera to upload a video so you can see it in action.
Right, firstly the controls, which I am mostly happy with. Even though the fire buttons are very close together this has not impeded me in any game other than Super Mario Kart, where it was a little more difficult to tap the power-up button whilst holding down the accelerate button but all this requires is a little roll of the thumb. No biggie once you get used to it but for someone who has played the game so much that they achieve a zen-like autopilot state when playing it, it does affect me slightly. Mind you, the same thing could be said about playing SMK with anything other than a SNES pad. The other issue I have had is that the lack of pivot in the d-pad has prevented me from pulling of moves in fighting games with the ease I'm normally accustomed to. This is something I'm getting used to though and, as my preferred fighting controller is a stick anyway, I was never going to achieve a seamless transition to pad. The shoulder buttons deserve a mention for being perfectly positioned and usable, at least for my hands. The touch-screen, whilst under-used, makes ScummVM an absolute joy to play.
Secondly, the screen. As I mentioned before, the contrast of the OLED screen is simply stunning. Even when playing in complete darkness, blacks are black, and older games with black backgrounds such as Galaga, Space Invaders and Pac-Man look f*cking great. Vector games such as Asteroids and Tempest are worth w*nking over. Someone on a WiZ board described it as being like a CRT display in your pocket... I think it's more than just a CRT as the colours are so bright and vivid. I've never seen the so-called 'muddy' palette of the Megadrive look so colourful and vibrant! So yes, it's amazing *but* I'm sure you may have heard of the diagonal tearing. To be honest I never noticed it at first but as I put more an more ROMs and emulators on the machine I have begun to notice it more. It seems to occur most when the screen updates very quickly, such as when it is quickly flashing before a round in KoF. I haven't really noticed it much whilst scrolling and never with static or slow-moving images. Some emulators are more susceptible to it than others (Picodrive's developer has eliminated it entirely), but there is a script available which can reduce if not eliminate the effect. I feel that the quality of the OLED screen far outweighs this minor flaw, and as a retro-nut whom prefers crisp, colourful displays I'd take this over a sh*tty LCD display any day of the week.
Now we move on to the emulation. Pretty impressive as far as consoles are concerned, not so for arcade. All the usual lot - SNES, Megadive/Mega CD, PC Engine/CD - run amazingly. The SNES emulator requires overclocking for some games with transparencies or mode 7, but as the PC Engine and Megadrive emulators can be underclocked to around 400Mhz this should compensate for any battery life lost whilst playing SNES games. The CPU is clocked at around 560Mhz IIRC, and my unit can be clocked reliably up to 833Mhz. Overclocking is just a case of changing an option in the emulator menu and the setting can be saved individually for each game. Oh yes, arcade games. Most older MAME games run just fine and, as I mentioned earlier, look amazing on the OLED screen. Newer games, however, range between playable with sound and playable without sound. For example, Gradius III had way too much slowdown with sound enabled. The CPS-1/2 emulator is fantastic and games such as Final Fight, SSF2T and Dodonpachi run perfectly. Both MAME and FBA2X (CPS/NeoGeo/Other) support tate mode, in which case the menu button is used as a firebutton. This works well until you need more than one button as the volume controls are used as the additional fire buttons and they're a little awkward to reach.
NeoGeo emulation ranges between perfect and a complete headache. Whilst smaller ROMs such as SamSho 2 and Neo Turfmasters run perfectly using FBA2X, the 64mb RAM of the WiZ makes playing larger ROMs problematic. There is a PC utility which can convert larger ROMs into .fba files and these will run on FBA2X. The downside is that the emulator rips graphics from the SD card on the fly when using these file types, so the speed of emulation depends entirely on the speed of your SD card. Whilst Blazing Star ran fine using this method, Garou: MotW and Metal Slug 3 were choppy. The solution to this is to use another emulator - GnGeo - but this doesn't emulate sound as accurately as FBA2X does and is very fussy when it comes to which ROMs can be used. I've had an absolute nightmare trying to find ROMs that will work with it but now I have some I can tell you that Garou: MotW runs very well on it, as does Slug X but KoF 2000 has missing tiles that show the energy bars. Due to the hassle it is getting ROMs to work, I wouldn't buy a WiZ if I was just intending to play NeoGeo games.
What else? Battery life is decent - it's rated at six hours but my initial charge lasted all week, playing for a couple of hours each day. The unit uses a proprietry USB cable which some might sniff at but it's usable. If anyone has any questions just fire away.
So here's the video then:
Right, firstly the controls, which I am mostly happy with. Even though the fire buttons are very close together this has not impeded me in any game other than Super Mario Kart, where it was a little more difficult to tap the power-up button whilst holding down the accelerate button but all this requires is a little roll of the thumb. No biggie once you get used to it but for someone who has played the game so much that they achieve a zen-like autopilot state when playing it, it does affect me slightly. Mind you, the same thing could be said about playing SMK with anything other than a SNES pad. The other issue I have had is that the lack of pivot in the d-pad has prevented me from pulling of moves in fighting games with the ease I'm normally accustomed to. This is something I'm getting used to though and, as my preferred fighting controller is a stick anyway, I was never going to achieve a seamless transition to pad. The shoulder buttons deserve a mention for being perfectly positioned and usable, at least for my hands. The touch-screen, whilst under-used, makes ScummVM an absolute joy to play.
Secondly, the screen. As I mentioned before, the contrast of the OLED screen is simply stunning. Even when playing in complete darkness, blacks are black, and older games with black backgrounds such as Galaga, Space Invaders and Pac-Man look f*cking great. Vector games such as Asteroids and Tempest are worth w*nking over. Someone on a WiZ board described it as being like a CRT display in your pocket... I think it's more than just a CRT as the colours are so bright and vivid. I've never seen the so-called 'muddy' palette of the Megadrive look so colourful and vibrant! So yes, it's amazing *but* I'm sure you may have heard of the diagonal tearing. To be honest I never noticed it at first but as I put more an more ROMs and emulators on the machine I have begun to notice it more. It seems to occur most when the screen updates very quickly, such as when it is quickly flashing before a round in KoF. I haven't really noticed it much whilst scrolling and never with static or slow-moving images. Some emulators are more susceptible to it than others (Picodrive's developer has eliminated it entirely), but there is a script available which can reduce if not eliminate the effect. I feel that the quality of the OLED screen far outweighs this minor flaw, and as a retro-nut whom prefers crisp, colourful displays I'd take this over a sh*tty LCD display any day of the week.
Now we move on to the emulation. Pretty impressive as far as consoles are concerned, not so for arcade. All the usual lot - SNES, Megadive/Mega CD, PC Engine/CD - run amazingly. The SNES emulator requires overclocking for some games with transparencies or mode 7, but as the PC Engine and Megadrive emulators can be underclocked to around 400Mhz this should compensate for any battery life lost whilst playing SNES games. The CPU is clocked at around 560Mhz IIRC, and my unit can be clocked reliably up to 833Mhz. Overclocking is just a case of changing an option in the emulator menu and the setting can be saved individually for each game. Oh yes, arcade games. Most older MAME games run just fine and, as I mentioned earlier, look amazing on the OLED screen. Newer games, however, range between playable with sound and playable without sound. For example, Gradius III had way too much slowdown with sound enabled. The CPS-1/2 emulator is fantastic and games such as Final Fight, SSF2T and Dodonpachi run perfectly. Both MAME and FBA2X (CPS/NeoGeo/Other) support tate mode, in which case the menu button is used as a firebutton. This works well until you need more than one button as the volume controls are used as the additional fire buttons and they're a little awkward to reach.
NeoGeo emulation ranges between perfect and a complete headache. Whilst smaller ROMs such as SamSho 2 and Neo Turfmasters run perfectly using FBA2X, the 64mb RAM of the WiZ makes playing larger ROMs problematic. There is a PC utility which can convert larger ROMs into .fba files and these will run on FBA2X. The downside is that the emulator rips graphics from the SD card on the fly when using these file types, so the speed of emulation depends entirely on the speed of your SD card. Whilst Blazing Star ran fine using this method, Garou: MotW and Metal Slug 3 were choppy. The solution to this is to use another emulator - GnGeo - but this doesn't emulate sound as accurately as FBA2X does and is very fussy when it comes to which ROMs can be used. I've had an absolute nightmare trying to find ROMs that will work with it but now I have some I can tell you that Garou: MotW runs very well on it, as does Slug X but KoF 2000 has missing tiles that show the energy bars. Due to the hassle it is getting ROMs to work, I wouldn't buy a WiZ if I was just intending to play NeoGeo games.
What else? Battery life is decent - it's rated at six hours but my initial charge lasted all week, playing for a couple of hours each day. The unit uses a proprietry USB cable which some might sniff at but it's usable. If anyone has any questions just fire away.
So here's the video then:
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