Supaboy Revisited

fenikso

Slug Flyer Pilot
15 Year Member
Joined
Oct 6, 2004
Posts
3,932
The new Supaboy is garbage - 16:9 screen WHY?!

I was thinking the same thing when I saw the reviews. I find it hard to believe they can't source cheap 4:3 lcd screens with better viewing angles and less interference (lol composite). The cynic in me wants to belive it's pandering to hipster millenials who don't know any better.
 

GohanX

Horrible Goose
20 Year Member
Joined
Sep 28, 2001
Posts
12,490
I wouldn't even mind if you could just set it to 4:3 mode, but you can't.
 

GohanX

Horrible Goose
20 Year Member
Joined
Sep 28, 2001
Posts
12,490
Wise from your gwave!

Hyperkin quietly released a new revision, the Supaboy SFC. It looks identical to last year's model, including the stupid 16x9 screen, but it adds the option of playing it in 4:3 mode now as God intended. There seem to be some other tweaks but I never tried the S.

Improvemnts:

It's a bit more comfortable to hold. It's a little thinner than the original system, but due to the larger screen it's actually wider. It's a bit lighter as well.

The dpad is much better now. The super stiffness is gone. It's a little lose like a good third party pad, doesn't quite feel like an original SNES pad but it's decent. Buttons are the same distance from each other as a real pad unlike the original where they were a little too far apart. L and R buttons are serviceable, but I liked the stiffer buttons on the original better. The Start/select buttons on the new model suck balls, but they're only start and select so who cares.

The cartridges are very easy to insert and remove, yet they are solid. Once it's in there you can shake the system all over and it won't miss a beat. The original system would sometimes glitch out.

Audio quality through the headphone jack is improved quite a bit. For one thing it's actually stereo this time, and the humming and noise is gone. It's not super high quality though, but it gets the job done.

The bad news...

The screen. Hyperkin gets so close sometimes, but they always have one critical flaw. Once again it's the screen. While the screen is a clear improvement over the original, it's still composite. So it's not nearly as sharp as a handheld made in 2018 probably should be. It doesn't seem to suffer from most of the composite artifacts that plagued the earlier units, it has better viewing angles, and I can actually read the text in Secret of Mana on this. The color is actually a bit weaker so it's a little washed out. Overall it's a much better screen than the old model but it leaves a lot to be desired.

Anyway, it's still the best way to play a real SNES cartridge on the go, but there's still room for improvement. If they could just put a decent screen on it it would be gold. If you don't care about playing real cartridges though, using a New 3DS's SNES VC games or a GPD handheld would be a better option I think.
 

GohanX

Horrible Goose
20 Year Member
Joined
Sep 28, 2001
Posts
12,490
I paid $87 from Amazon. I bought from there since they don't give a shit if you return hardware simply for sucking ass. I went through two Retrobit handhelds and they did the returns no problem.
 

Tanooki

War Room Troll
Joined
May 24, 2016
Posts
1,745
The first two versions (no idea about S) of the thing had a broke ass d-pad internally that was set up on 4 posts to the main board about an inch away from it and the dumb design allowed you to register a button push in all 4 directions at once which is impossible on a real SNES controller d-pad. This caused a lot of games to have some really crappy problems with control, especially 360 motion stuff like shooters or the circles in street fighter moves. A game like Gradius would get stuck going in the last direction it detected before more points were picked up, and circles to do fireballs were more a matter of luck than doing it. I had to mod the one I had with a little trick to make it rock right when I had one.

I've considered getting the system back since, but only if they fix the d-pad and make their chipped game support stable so the SA1, FX1/2, and SDD1 games work right.
 

sparksterz

Camel Slug
Joined
May 2, 2013
Posts
511
Would be awesome to see someone gut it and put a Super NT in there. Too bad it can't do analog out, but if the screen is that bad, maybe a screen swap wouldn't be horrible. Not like it's a cost effective project either way lol.
 
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