Gadgetory

it's no secret the PlayStation Classic is not exactly done well within a month of its release it price dropped to almost half its price from $100 down to 60 and some places even sell it below $50 so it's pretty clear that Sony's not exactly recaptured the same kind of popularity that Nintendo had with the NES and SNES classic now there are numerous reasons why this happened we'll get into some of them but there's one company that might actually have a solution that at least partially fixes some of the major ones and that's 8-bit dough with this little controller adapter so why did the classic fail well once again there are a whole lot of things but I think there's two main reasons why it didn't do well one game selection which there isn't a whole lot you can do about that post-release outside of actually full-blown hacking homebrewing just putting whatever games you want on it and that's somewhat defeats the spirit of what it's supposed to be about although I do agree game choice not the best possible ones the other big problem however is the lack of options something that the NES intestine II editions did that it was really appreciated by a lot of people is how much you could customize the experience of the games you're playing changing the aspect ratio adding borders having scanlines all kinds of different changes and the PlayStation Classic basically offered none of that and to top it off all the games that are being run are running in their pl versions meaning that they're playing at 50 frames second instead of 60 which a lot of people in North America would be used to and a lot of games just honestly look and play worse as a result that's where this adapter comes in so this is actually the same kind of USB adapter that a pedo is made in the past you might have seen it in a more Mario brick-red design which allows you to use a variety of different controllers on other consoles for instance you can use on the switch an Xbox one controller ps4 controller so and so forth well this is the same idea made for the PlayStation Classic and it allows you to once again use a lot of different controllers wireless so you couldn't do normally and that's by itself already an appreciated thing because well I get the idea behind having wired controllers on a classic system it's kind of a bit too much novelty versus functionality it's great having a wireless controller but what this does beyond that that's really interesting is that it gives you access to basically a secret menu on the PlayStation Classic see the PlayStation Classic is basically a very simple computer that runs a dedicated PlayStation emulator an emulator that if you were running on say a computer would give you access to an emulation menu where you could change all kinds of settings well when Sony shipped the PlayStation Classic obviously there's no way to access that menu using a traditional controller but what if Bedok has done is that with this adapter and you're using any kind of wireless controller whether it's an Xbox one a Dual Shock one of their Bluetooth controllers whatever you have access to a special shortcut where if you hit the shoulder buttons and start at the same time voila you have access to that emulators options how much does this impact the experience in the classic and can it save it let's check it out the first thing we need to do is set up the adapter with the PlayStation Classic which is actually really really easy to do all I have to do is plug it into the slot and then you just have to hit the syncing button and whatever control you want to use you use a different button combination how you want to sync it so for instance on a DualShock 4 controller you're gonna hit the normal home button that you'd use for pairing sometimes button you're gonna hit it with the share button at the same time that's how you use the DualShock 4 controller with a variety of different Bluetooth devices and it works and so right now we're using with the DualShock 4 controller because that just makes the most sense you know playstation but again you can use this adapter with a variety of different controllers including Xbox one or just a pin to Bluetooth controllers in general so the interesting thing here though is accessing that menu so first we have to go into a game I've already got a session of Final Fantasy 7 running so we'll just go there so once we're in our game of choice you can access the emulators menu using this adapter by hitting the shoulder buttons and options at the same time of Duloc the controls vary depending on what you're using so just hit that and there's our menus so there's actually a lot of in-depth stuff you can mess with here you can redo controls you can do save and load States although there's already a slightly prettier way of doing that built into the PS classics menu however we're most interested in is messing with the display properties on this gun or options so right here in region it's set to auto and we can actually change it to NTSC and that's going to change the framerate the games being played at now obviously in a video you can't actually see the difference of framerate but we can also turn on an FPS counter so you can actually see it in the bottom of the screen you can see in the bottom that we are gonna getting basically 50 frames a second so if we switch it back Oh we're gonna change this again and this time we're gonna leave the FPS counter on but we're gonna switch it to NTSC and there we go the game is now running at 60 frames so it's a little smoother looking and just honestly it's just more appealing to the eyes especially if you grew up only on 60 Hertz screens this is just this the game looks right now now this isn't the only thing we can change with this once again there's a lot of other options you can get in-depth on for instance we can add scan lines so for that we just go to options go to display and then there's toggle for turning scan lens on or off and then you can also adjust the brightness of them so that'll change how exactly those lines look so if you really want an old-school feeling like if you grew up playing your original PlayStation on a CRT this is gonna capture that appearance a little more faithfully so yeah here we have the game now running at 60 frames with scan lines which just honestly looks a lot better than if we had left it the way the PlayStation Classic wanted you to play it without having them and running at that lower frame rate now these are pretty in-depth emulator options if you've never messed with an emulator before you might want to be a little careful about what you messed with because sometimes you're gonna have pretty funny consequences for instance let's take a look at messing with the frame limit if you go into the Advanced Options on the settings you can go to what's called disable frame limiter and what that's saying is that hey instead of the game running at only 50 or 60 just let it run as fast as it can run and that might sound really good if you're used to messing with settings on modern games but older stuff isn't always programmed that way so if you do that not only is the game going to run at a higher framerate but it's actually going to be running in a fast forward way with even the music playing faster which might not always be best for a gameplay but can be really silly looking another thing worth noting with all of this is that all these settings can adjust and mess with they are temporarily saved it is not something that's going to be on every time so each time you launch a specific game you need to reopen the menu to make any adjustments you want to make so if there's anything that a certain specific way you like to play the game where you have the scanline set to a certain way having such a specific region you got to do that every time the game launches so the important question does this adapter save the PlayStation Classic a little bit look there still are some major problems the system has in general I mean the game library while there are a few individual great hits I don't think it's really a great overall crowd-pleaser but when it comes to at least getting more out of those individual games in the experience compared to how I launched it was $100 to come with wired controllers and all these locked settings but now after price drops and buying this little adapter for 80 bucks assuming you have some kind of controller that will be compatible with the adapter you now have a full set up that is wireless and offers a lot more control over how the games play I still think it doesn't match up to the same level of quality we've seen with what Nintendo's done with their classic editions but this undoes a lot of the damage and I think if you're a hardcore PlayStation fan it's actually something really worth looking into