Sega Ultimate Portable Game Player 2017

The Good: Feels lightweight and buttons are solid, rarely get any slowdown or glitches, pretty much every game for the Genesis plays, loading your own ROMs is a huge plusThe Bad: Awful speaker, SD card driver is flawed and requires special software to format correctly, cheap packagingWhen it comes to playing classic games on a portable system I usually stick with the real deal or use my PSP to emulate them. I just so happened to come across a portable Sega Genesis emulator and it seemed fairly solid. It had licensed games, and original, ranging from Sonic the Hedgehog 2 to Mortal Kombat and Altered Beast. This was a spur of the moment buy and I didn’t do much research.I can’t say I don’t regret my purchase, but I did at first. When you open the box you don’t get any fancy packaging like you would from a first party company. It’s the game player in a cardboard tray, a loosely packed USB cable, and a manual tossed in. I realized it was probably a Chinese knock-off, but still of some sort of quality.The system itself is extremely light and some would say feels cheap. We are used to the weight of portable systems like the PSP, GBA, or even DS. This has no moving parts and only needs a small battery. It has a 2.8″ 4:3 screen which is perfect for these older games as widescreen was not a thing at home at the time. The D-Pad rolls rather than rocks which is nice for fighting, and it includes A, B, C button as well as X, Y, Z which are used for a fighting game. There’s a start button and a menu button as well as an on and off switch. All the essentials are there and the buttons feel quite nice and I was pleased.The screen itself is of surprisingly decent quality. The game looks great and I didn’t experience only washed out visuals like on some cheaper players. The biggest issue, hardware wise, is the speaker as it’s really bad. If you only turn the volume up about 3/4’s it’s not so bad, but all the way up and it sounds blown out and tinny. Thankfully these older games don’t need surround sound or anything, but a slightly better speaker would have been nice. Thankfully, it sounds way better with headphones on and the sound was quite nice and can get pretty loud. Shame on you AtGames for such an easy oversight.Software-wise, the menu lacks any flair. It looks like a third party emulator menu with a list of games and a box shot next to it. You can flip through the 85 games and they play! Surprisingly at great speed as I had no slowdown or any crashing as of yet. The major software issue was with the SD Card and loading your own ROMs.It states to put a “game” folder on the SC Card and use .bin Genesis ROMs. That’s easy enough, however, no matter how many different cards I used the system would not read the files. I tried formatting it as exFAT, FAT, FAT32, etc. and Google didn’t really come up with much. I found a small comment somewhere stating that Windows 10 does not format the cards properly and doesn’t play nice with this player. I had to download a drive partitioning software and it finally read the cards. This is just absolutely absurd and is a huge oversight by AtGames. Clearly, their SC Card driver is awful and 99% of users who buy this system won’t know how to do this.With that said, it loads games of the SD Cards, and I didn’t run into many issues. There are a few games that won’t play on here, but they are more obscure titles, but all your popular go to ones will.Overall, this is a decent player if you’re a hardcore Genesis fan. Albeit, you can emulate these games on your PC or even a PSP and a DS if you have the hardware for it. However, when you getting a Genesis kick it’s not to pull out a dedicated player and pump out some time real quick or pull it out of your backpack while on break or something. Maybe their 2018 model will fix these major issues, but the hardware itself is pretty nice.

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 This product is horrible! We purchased it for our boy’s birthday in three days and it doesn’t work. The first time we turned it on to test it out it froze and wouldn’t select a game. I turned it off and tried again and it kept resetting the game once it finally loaded. Not a suitable gift seeing as though it doesn’t work. The esalesgreat owner that amazon went through was kind enough to refund us and also send a working system shortly after. They got the new one to us fast and our boy loves that he can play his sonic games now! Not satisfied with the system itself due to it being a 50/50 chance of working but I do appreciate the out sourced sellers customer service.

Exceeded expectations. The screen is clear and bright. The x button is a bit sticky but bucks it’s is a great deal. The only draw backs are the music quality which is not as good as the original Genisis. The speaker is not the best but it’s works for me. There are not 85 genisis games. Most are cheap indie titles, but the large selection of genisis classics are more than worth it. The best part is this system, can play roms you download from rom sites (only legal for games you own the original genisis cart).To play roms on this sytem. You need a 8gb SD card or smaller. Format to FAT 32, exFAT will NOT work. Most SD card 8gb and under are already in FAT 32 by default. Create a folder called GAMES. Most important step!! Rename roms. You have to rename the entire rom name. This is not to be confused with file conversion. Those conversion apps are vectors for viruses and other malware do NOT use. All rom file names need to be shortened and end with .bin extension. Example: downloaded rom = Streets of Rage 2.gen should be renamed streets_of_rage2.bin. The shorter the name the better. Only NTSC games will run, PAL games will not run. There are certain roms that just don’t work.This system is the cheap and affordable retro console anyone will enjoy.

85 games included, light weight, and very easy to operate. Perfect gift for my son who loves “the olden” video games….he actually puts his switch down to play this portable system. Only negative to me is the size of the system, it’s pretty small.