We have one of those Amazon Return stores around my neck of the woods. If you don't know what that is, either because it's the far-flung future where this kind of thing no longer exists, or because you've been lucky enough to avoid one so far, the idea is that since Amazon (the mega-retailer) apparently doesn't actually do anything with the mountain of returns it gets every day, it instead gathers them up into lots that they sell instead of throwing them into landfills. People/businesses will get these giant grab-bags of returns (usually without really knowing what's inside) and then sell the contents, usually packaged in such a way that you can't really tell what's inside, either. It's like the telephone game, but with used and/or broken merchandise being the 'prize'. The store that we have has a schedule where they restock on one day of the week, and the price is a flat amount per item, then every day after that, the price goes down until the next restock day, where it goes back up again. My sister visited on $5 day and asked if I'd be interested in a Super Console X. The box boasted that it had lots of emulators on it, and I figured I could give it a try for $5.
The device is small, roughly four inches on a side, and about a half an inch thick. The colors and design of the case is (very) roughly analagous to the Super NES. There are a couple of USB ports, power, network, an 'A/V' jack, and HDMI connections across the sides, and a micro-SD slot with a card it in. It even came with an HDMI cable, which was hanging out of the box when I got it (it wasn't repackaged well).
When I took the thing out of the packaging, I saw a label on the top that advised me to "(not) update the EmuELEC software", which told me that this shady device is somehow extra shady, so that was nice. There were also a couple of definitely-not-PS3 controllers in the box. They looked a lot like real PS3 controllers, but had no rumble motors, used AAA batteries, and felt incredibly cheap. There was also a small wireless receiver that had, amazingly, not been lost. We also had a four-port USB hub and a power supply to round out the contents of the package.
I plugged everything in (except the network, this thing is janky enough that I didn't feel comfortable giving it access to any network if I could help it). There was a pretty slick intro and I got greeted with the main interface. It looked like it was a fancy front-end to the EmuELEC software, already preconfigured with a lot of games, all officially licensed, according to a comment I found on the Amazon store page for these things (which is, of course, a complete fabrication).
I tested out a couple of games across a couple of systems (I only used this device to play copies of games I already own), and there were some issues. Super Mario Bros. 3 appeared to be in Portuguese (or possibly another language, I'm really not very good at identifying languages I don't speak), and there was a significant amount of input lag. On the order of a quarter of a second or so, making the game unplayable. The same could be said for Super Mario World (which was in English this time). The input lag was so high that it just wasn't playable.
After being thoroughly disappointed (but not *that disappointed, the thing was only $5), I decided to break the 'void if removed' sticker over the SD card and see what else I could do with this thing.
First, I decided to make a backup of the SD card, partly because if I did something stupid I could always restore it later, and partly because the menus sometimes jittered and froze after a while. I suspected that the performance issues might have been caused by some filesystem corruption on the card or a failing card, so a backup was probably a good idea anyway.
The card was partitioned into three partitions, two were identified as VFAT by Clonezilla, and one was identified as EXT4FS. I got a drive of appropriate size and started the clone process! All went well until Clonezilla got to the third partition, where the ROMs were stored. It started throwing tens of thousands of errors. The screen just kept showing nothing but errors as it tried to read the SD card. After pretending for an hour that the file operations were ever going to finish I decided to take a different tack and just make copies of the things that were on the different partitions.
It turns out that the SD card had over 100GB of information to copy over, which was going to take some time. While I waited I took the cover apart and looked at the innards. I don't know much about single-board computers, so I nad no real idea what I was looking at. I found the code MB.S905.04 silkscreened in the corner, and a tiny chip with the Realtek logo on it, but not much else I could readily identify. It was about this time that the backup bombed out because I didn't have enough free space on the drive I was using to make the backup. In my haste to get things started over again, I deleted the OS from the original SD card. Oops. Well, at least I could still back up the rest of the data.
I found and installed the latest version of EmuELEC, got it configured, and copied the games over to a new SD card (fresh out of the package). I'm not going to go over how to set up EmuELEC or where to find games to run on it. You're on your own for that. I was thinking that the input lag that I was seeing was a result of an old version of the launcher, and I figured the stuttery performance was because I had a corrupted SD card, so I figured this would be a good test.
It turns out that the new version was just as laggy as the previous version, and just as unplayable. Some consoles were better than others, though, and there didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason for it. Super Mario Bros 3 remained unplayable, as did Super Mario World (although Super Castlevania IV seemed better after I tweaked a few settings). I also tried connecting a USB keyboard thinking that the generic bluetooth controllers might be at fault, but there was no difference, so it's probably something with the emulator itself). Bust-a-Move '99 on the Nintendo 64 was playable, but since it's a puzzle game that doesn't really need precision inputs, that's not too surprising. Crazy Taxi II was completely unplayable (which isn't too surprising). Pitfall II was probably the most playable, but the sound was so loud it was distorted.
This thing is somehow being sold on Amazon for over a hundred dollars. If I had paid that kind of money for this device, I probably would have returned it, too. For $5 it was fun to play around with for a day or so, and there might be something else I can do with this thing if I put my mind to it.