The Yinlips YDPG18A

Discussion in 'Mobile' started by Ashen, May 28, 2012.

  1. Ashen

    Ashen GameCube Révolutionary

    So I've been tossing around the idea of buying one of these for around a month or so now. Today I decided to take the plunge. From all the stuff I've read, you can't get any better for the price range. I'll do a full review when it gets here, which could take a bit.

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    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSa2m3_D7mE

    Video is of the previous model, just a regular YDPG18 not the YDPG18A. Supposedly the "A" version has a pretty sweet capacitive touchscreen and some other upgrades. Supposedly you CAN now root the device/install a custom android OS image.
     
  2. AfroLH

    AfroLH Frequent Poster

    Seems badass.
     
  3. Ashen

    Ashen GameCube Révolutionary

    Very badass IMO. Full speed PSX and N64 emulation on top of android marketplace and all the other flax it can do. *Can'tSayThisOnTV* yes!

    They also make a "baby brother" to the one I bought. The YDPG16. It has just about the same specs as the 5" YDPG18(A) but its smaller with a 4.3" 2 point touchscreen. At $90 you can't go wrong IMO. If the one I bought is as good as everyone says, I'll prolly buy two of the YDPG16 for both my kids.

    [​IMG]

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8T0QQhisrw
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYQ8xZG31xk

    Check out that nice smooth frame rate in the snes emulator on DKC. Its also capable of playing superFX chip SNES games (starfox, etc.).
     
  4. nuke

    nuke Well-Known Member

    I want one. :cry:
     
  5. Kickback

    Kickback Teen Idle Staff Member

    I've been thinking of getting an Android tablet for gaming since they keep going down in price.

    This is MR, so i'm guessing someone will end up building their own..
     
  6. Noah

    Noah Frequent Poster

    Tell me how it is once you get it. I've been thinking about buying a YDPG16, like you said, can't go wrong at $90. By the way, did you buy yours from Willgoo? Seems to be a trusted site for everyone who's bought one there.
     
  7. Ashen

    Ashen GameCube Révolutionary

    Yea, I ordered from Willgoo. Seems like THE only reputable place to buy from. The YDPG18A was $145 with free shipping. If you can live without the 5 point capacitive screen though the YDPG18 is like $30 cheaper.
     
  8. Noah

    Noah Frequent Poster

    I'll most likely hold off a month or so, see if the introduce a model with the joystick at it's own control. Not very likely, but who knows. Also, something occurred to me, so you'll have to tell me once you get yours; what do you use for the C buttons when you use N64 emulators? I've seen most of the review videos, and I've never seen anyone use them. :confused:
     
  9. Ashen

    Ashen GameCube Révolutionary

    I'd imagine you'd use the on screen controls. You can map the buttons however you like though. I agree, its a bummer that the "analog" is just mapped to the d-pad controls by default. I have some idea's how to fix it though. We'll see.
     
  10. nuke

    nuke Well-Known Member

    I plan on getting one soon as well. Let us know!
     
  11. Ashen

    Ashen GameCube Révolutionary

    Got this thing in the mail the other day. :D

    I spent just about a whole Dang day messing around and learning how to use Android, updating, rooting, setting things up, messing about, etc.

    My initial impression of the device was a solid 6/10 on the awesome scale, for various reasons I'll explain in the huge writeup I'll do a bit later when I have more time. To make a long story short, this thing is *Can'tSayThisOnTV*ING AWESOME after a bit of modding. Right out of the box it leaves some things to be desired though... More.... Tomorrow.

    For now, here's a teaser pic of my 2 favorite systems together:

    [​IMG]

    A couple little mods to the system are apparent in the pic if anyone cares to look for em.
     
  12. superben51

    superben51 Well-Known Member

    I will be eagerly be awaiting said huge write up.
     
  13. bud

    bud DAT ASS

    I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking at, but it looks like you changed out the D-pad and added a psp slider. Maybe different buttons too?
     
  14. Ashen

    Ashen GameCube Révolutionary

    You pretty much hit it on the head there Bud. Small mod's, but they make a world of difference IMO.

    The D-Pad that comes with this thing is totally unacceptable and ruins the whole experience right out of the box. The included d-pad is four separate buttons, which honestly may well have worked fine had they not been beveled upwards in middle of the d-pad. This however makes it feel unnatural and wonky right out of the box. Luckily the buttons/layout are close to the size of a standard PlayStation d-pad, and with a little modding you can make one fit right in:

    On the left is my modified PS d-pad, on the right is a standard un-modded PS d-pad for comparison. Aside from removing the plastic edges I also had to sand/file away a bit of the actual edges of the buttons to get it to fit correctly.
    [​IMG]

    If it had not been for the wonky d-pad I would have given this thing a 8/10 right out of the box. The fact that these guys are selling a gaming system that makes playing games FEEL terrible right out of the box drops the initial score to my previously mentioned 6/10. There is no real excuse for this blunder, even a Chinese rip/knock-off company should know better IMO.

    The other couple complaints I have about this thing are minor and could have potentially been lived with long term. I bought this thing expecting to have to mod it though so these little things don't really bother me. My few other gripes were:

    1. Stupid button layout... A, B, X and..... OK buttons. All in non-standard button positions. Not a huge deal, but again I ask WHY? When they could have used the standard A, B, X, Y or Triangle, Circle, Cross, Square.

    2. Terrible battery life. Original battery was giving me 3 hours or less. Luckily this seems to be a symptom of the cheap flax li-po battey they stuck in this thing. The original battery claimed to be a 2900mah 3.7v single cell li-po. However I swapped it out with a smaller (physically) 3000mah cell that I had here (batteryspace cell) and I now get roughly 6 hours hard playing time out of it.

    3. Small internal flash memory installed to unit. 4gb that's gotta be shared with the system partition? C'mon...

    4. "Clicky" (and I mean LOUD when pressed) buttons for everything other than the D-pad and A, B, X and OK.

    5. Pre-installed android OS is full of Chinese bullflax and shovelware.

    6. This thing gets pretty Dang hot, hot enough that I was actually a bit worried it would catch fire....

    Luckily, all of the above including the d-pad are easily fixed. The unit is pretty easy to get apart. Take out the 4 screws on the outside of the unit (2 on top and 2 on bottom) and (carefully) pry off the back plastic piece. I'd recommend de-soldering the li-po battery from the board once you get this far, just so its not flopping around while you work on the system. There are 8 more screws on the inside that hold the motherboard to the front of the case (4 screws on the left and 4 on the right). Remove them and you can easily get the board out. Please be careful of the HDMI port on the top of the board! The HDMI port on my unit was not being held to the board by anything but the ports solder connections. The ports support stems were never soldered to the board! doh!. After all that, you should have something in front of you that looks like this:

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    As you can see, the board is for the most part built pretty well. I was pleasantly surprised to see when I opened it that right beside the main flashram chip is a spot for a second flashram chip! How convenient! Especially since I happened to have a dead Wii motherboard sitting here with a 8gb flashram chip of the same type on it:

    Instant upgrade :D
    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    Ahh, how sweet. But Dang, this thing still gets smokin hot... what do:

    [​IMG]

    [​IMG]

    I actually didn't expect this little sheetsink to do much good. But the system now feels a good deal cooler when playing for an extended time. It still gets warm though. You can also see my solution to the clicky tacts in the pic above. I just glued some thin membrane material to the buttons that press the tact switches. Its not a 100% improvement but it does feel better and is a little less loud when you press those buttons.

    My solution to the Yinlips retarded button layout was to simply take out the buttons and sand the bottoms of them until the text wore away. Used some plastic polish on the bottom so the scratches from sanding were not apparent and I repainted them all black on the underside. I had originally thought to use the colored SNES or xbox color scheme on the buttons, but I thought since everything else was black on the unit it might look odd.

    After all that, this is what I ended up with:

    [​IMG]

    I now give it a 10/10. This thing was an awesome investment and it was actually a fun little project to fix up. The touch screen on it is high quality and responsive and this thing will indeed play PlayStation AND N64 games with full speed and little to no lag/glitchy'ness. I didn't even have to use PAL roms or ISO's or any bullflax. It has no trouble with NTSC games whatsoever. I also has no trouble with some of the higher end Android market games. I've got ShadowGun and GTAIII installed and it plays them both pretty nicely.
     
  15. bud

    bud DAT ASS

    That's ballin'
     
  16. Abyss

    Abyss I put the BRO in brony!

    Uktrasex. Great work again Ashen!
     
  17. hailrazer

    hailrazer Frequent Poster

    Now if it had a true analog stick and a better button layout. Then N64 would be AWESOME on it.
     
  18. grossaffe

    grossaffe President Groosevelt Staff Member

    Have you thought about using a Wii Classic Controller's buttons on there? It looks like it uses a semiconductor rather than actual tact-switches, so I figure you could use the membrane, and I think if you got the black CC buttons, they'd look very nice on there. Also, any thought to re-replacing the analog with a 3DS slider?
     
  19. Ashen

    Ashen GameCube Révolutionary

    Actually, if you do a bit of digging you'll find that once Yinlips release the 4.0 ICS update the analog stick can be separated from the d-pad (its only mapped to the d-pad through software, not hardware). Gingerbread apparently doesn't support the use of true analogs, though ICS does.

    Even still, N64 games play pretty sweet on this thing. The control setup actually works pretty nice. I have Z mapped to the L trigger (since its rarely used) and the C-buttons set to display as on screen controls. Everything else is mapped to where you think it'd be.

    I tried a whole bunch of different buttons. Unfortunately the stock buttons are all much smaller in diameter than most other controllers. I would have had to modify the actual case, which I didn't want to do. Replacing the analog stick with a 3DS stick is on my list of things to try in the future. The stock analog stick isn't really to bad though. It did feel terrible at first until I broke it in a bit.
     
  20. Noah

    Noah Frequent Poster

    Just found Yinlips released a ICS update for the G18 upgraded version, G16, and the G18A. This means the analogue is now a separate control, and newer apps can be installed that require 4.0. The download takes a while though.
    http://www.yinlips.com/en/services/downs.aspx
    I haven't tried it out yet, as mine's still somewhere in the mail. :p
    Edit: Might be a bit buggy, because the newest build is still the first one.