Gadgetory

a few months ago we built our very own arcade machine but a lot of you timed in to tell us that throwing together something with off-the-shelf parts from well-known sources like Ulta mark and North Coast custom arcades wasn't DIY enough ok well what if I told you that this was hand made a truly DIY creation well it is and we're gonna have a look at it after I tell you about our sponsor Mac Weldon Mac Weldon believes in smart design premium fabrics and simple shopping use offer code tectus to get 20% off your next order at the link below okay so even though it looks the part the carry 42 isn't really DIY so much as it is someone else's DIY project that turned into a product that he sent to us and that someone is love Colton a Swedish artist whose hand made a huge selection of limited-production retro gear some of this stuff is incredible and he's even made PC cases so the carry 42 though is right up there with his most exciting and beautiful ideas it's short for carrier for two and ours which was graciously loaned to us by mr. Holten himself features a mother-of-pearl inlay of MS and mr. pacman on the outer casing that's completely flush with the wood it's entirely handcrafted from American walnut with a vintage retro aesthetic and the craftsmanship on it is outstanding everything fits together with a level of precision rarely seen in wood for a commercial product anymore and certainly with a higher level of precision than we ended up with in our own cabinet thanks to our amateur level assembly and having to move it around multiple times during construction speaking of which the size comparison is absolutely staggering let's go for a tour of it so even the control deck of our full-sized arcade machine Dwarfs the carry 42 but it includes all of the following a 12-inch 1024 by 768 display twin 10 watt speakers a humble Raspberry Pi running retropie with some pre-loaded customizations a diminutive 16 gig USB flash drive that contains a handful of games of dubious legality and a USB port to plug it into allowing you then to add your own less dubious ROM files should you please while we're back here you might notice that there are no fewer than two HDMI ports and six and a half millimeter headphone jacks well essentially these ones are outputs these ones are inputs and then inside the box are small patch cables that connect them for use with the included screen and speakers so in theory you could connect this up to an external display and a pair of headphones or even a TV and receiver for a much bigger picture and sound experienced though in practice not everything is as it seems more on that later something you might have noticed missing back here is an obvious way to keep the lid upright while you're playing and that's remedied with this here twisty pulley thing just grab it pull it out twist it and it's locked in place there are three separate angles you can prop it up at I think the only thing that could make this thing more Swedish is a yellow and blue color scheme I love it but it isn't purely a piece of art right how about the gaming experience well we got off to a pretty good start the buttons and sticks are sharp and responsive the speaker's can get pretty loud though they are clearer and sound better in general at lower volumes thanks to the Box acting as kind of a wooden reverb chamber but as for the screen well for starters it's a TN screen with pretty terrible viewing angles meaning that the two-player experience is best enjoyed with a very close friend or romantic partner and there's also some pretty severe motion blur that while it's something you can get used to it's far from ideal especially in shoot-'em-ups and this is all before we get to what was our biggest out-of-the-box issue the input latency now thankfully that was something that can be controlled to a small degree by entering the underlying emulator and making some configuration changes however these changes really should have been the default settings while we're in here though something else retro gamers might not appreciate is the blurry linear filtering effect enabled by default it makes sense here since the screen isn't super high res and the stock effect is too curved the screen to match the bezel and it might have even masked some of the ghosting a bit but we personally preferred our approach where some clever shader work can make for a far cleaner more appealing image that more closely resembles an old CRT so once again this problem was mostly solved bringing us to the one that we couldn't fix the speakers remember that six and a half millimeter headphone jack well that's not for the speakers it's actually power for the LCD and the power led which we only discovered when we went to try plugging headphones in and got a loud buzzing and a blank screen oops the speaker's ended up being driven by HDMI which would be fine except that they were rewired for mono now some games notably arcade games and 16-bit games do actually run in stereo and so does retropie by default resulting in actually missing sound effects after and also config tweak our games at least had all of the sounds instead of just the left channel but this is again something we felt could have been done better with all of that said though these are problems that are probably only going to bother purists bringing us back to the real reason the carry 42 exists to be an artistic piece for retro gaming enthusiasts and collectors and if we look at it through that lens even though it's not perfect it does work out of the box and casual gamers likely wouldn't notice anything was wrong now that doesn't translate into a recommendation that you go out and buy one of these especially considering that it's powered by a PI and the asking price for a base unit without the inlay is 2599 euro + vit but if you're the kind of person who just straight-up doesn't give a crap about money and I know you guys are out there there are only 50 of them in the world and mr. Hilton's craftsmanship is something that cannot be denied here and that beauty and scarcity is what you're really paying for here not the hardware and software which by the way we would love to be consulted on next time speaking of being consulted ahead of time tunnel bear VPN has really gone off the rails on these integration reads I love these guys have you ever been camping and thought I really hope I'm not gonna get attacked by bears well of course you haven't who goes can't who's watching this channel how are you supposed to set the land party in the woods but let's say you were going camping and you did well good news bears aren't actually aggressive by Nature black bears tend to run away from threats and hide in trees brown bears on the other hand can be aggressive but that's as a last resort if they feel like they can't escape so don't poke bears don't try to hug them or take selfies with them they hate that interestingly though some bears like to protect your online privacy in fact tunnel bears like protecting privacy so much they can be found in over 20 countries worldwide working their way through firewalls getting around censorship and helping people enjoy a more open Internet get your own tunnel bear for free at tunnel bear comm /l TT so thanks for watching guys that this video sucked you know what to do but if is awesome get subscribed hit the like button or check out the link to where the buy the stuff we featured in the video description also linked down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join