Several years ago Hyperkin shocked the world with an adapter for smart phones which was reported to allow you to play your classic Nintendo Game Boy cartridges on your phone. Sure, emulators had been out for some time but the promise of Hyperkin’s adapter was that you’d be able to play with physical controls. After a lot of interest, design, testing, tweaking and modifying Hyperkin has actually done it and brought their April Fool’s joke to life and the result is the just-released Hyperkin Smart Boy. Much like their proof of concept piece the Smart Boy will allow you to play your Game Boy and Game Boy Color (or Game Boy Colour) games natively on your smart phone. Check out how the Smart Boy comes out of the box, how it fits our test phone and more in this unboxing.
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In today's living room the HDMI connector is king. Unlike audio/video connectors of the past it is capable of carrying a lot of data in one simple and easy connection. This was not always the case however. Back in the dark ages, we'll call them the 1980's and 1990's, we had to suffer through low-resolution connections such as RF (gasp), Component (Shriek!) or Composite (Faint!!!).
It is possible to connect devices from yesteryear to modern HDMI-equipped televisions. We have one such offering here in the Mini AV2HDMI adapter. Purchased off of eBay for under $15 I wanted to see if this little box was the miracle I was hoping for to help me connect my Nintendo Entertainment System, Super NES, Famicom, Sharp Famicom Twin, Super Famicom and Nintendo N64 via HDMI.
The connection is super simple, just connect your AV cables to one side, the Mini USB cable to another and finally your HDMI output cable to a third. Once connected and power has been provided you're ready to go. Sort of. The systems I was trying to up-scale all ran at a naitive resolution below even today's Standard Definition Standard of 480P. To begin with the adapter is having to up-scale a pretty crummy resolution. Beyond that when I connected ANY input device to it I had a noticable audio buzz coming through my system. I tried different Mini USB cables to make sure the insulation wasn't too thin and causing RF noise, different HDMI and AV cables but the buzz was always there. Just for that fact I would say pass on this adapter, but there are more reasons yet to come.
On my classic NES titles they were all blown out to 16:9 aspect ratio with no way to bring them back to their naitive 4:3. This lead to the graphics not scaling properly and also some pretty gnarly artifacting in the graphics themselves. The title screen on Mike Tyson's Punch Out is one of the worst offenders but everything from Super Mario Bros to Excitebike and everything in-between had weird artifacting in the graphics. When compared to my NES Classic there's no comparison, the AV2HDMI does a poor job at up-scaling.
There is one thing that this adapter does well and that's convert AV cables to HDMI. That's about all it does well. The 720/1080 switch didn't seem like it changed ANYTHING, at least I never noticed a discernable change. If you're on a smaller TV, like 24-27" you might not notice all the artifacting I did on my 60", but even on my 48" in my media room it was distracting and, honestly, my AV cables looked BETTER on the same TV!
If you're into retro gaming and looking to connect your old system to an HDMI port pass on these adapters. They are all over eBay and if they are anything like this one they are port adapters, not up-scalers. Don't waste your money on this, instead save your pennies and have the guys at https://www.game-tech.us/product/hi-def-nes/ upgrade your console for you, you won't be disappointed. Or less expensive but super fun is to pick up an NES Classic, it supports HDMI naitively!
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