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Chinese company Powkiddy has been selling inexpensive handhelds for retro gaming for several years. But the company’s new Powkiddy Y6 GameStick is something a little different.
Instead of a handheld game system, the PowKiddy Y6 is a stick that plugs into the HDMI port on your TV, allowing you to play games on a big screen. It’s not a particularly powerful game system, but it is pretty cheap. The Powkiddy Y6 GameStick is available from AliExpress for $47 and up, and that price includes the TV stick, HDMI cable, power cable, and two game controllers.
The system feature an Amlogic S905X2 processor featuring four ARM Cortex-A53 CPU cores at 1.8 GHz and Mali-G31 MP2 graphics. The starting price gets you a model with 1GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, but you can also pay $6 more for a 1GB/128GB model.
According to AndroidPC.es the device actually only has 8GB of built-in storage, and that the additional storage comes courtesy of a microSD card. If you’d prefer to add your own card, the system supports cards up to 256GB.
It ships with EmuELEC 4.3, which is a GNU/Linux distribution designed to bring retro console emulation to devices with Amlogic chips.
According to Powkiddy, the GameStick should be able to handle games designed for classic game consoles of the 1980s and early 1990s including Sega, Nintendo, and Sony consoles up through the PlayStation 1 and PlayStation Portable or Nintendo 64.
The stick measures 100 x 37 x 15mm (3.9″ x 1.5″ x 0.6″) and features a USB-C port for power, a microSD card reader, and a USB 2.0 port for peripherals. The HDMI connector is hidden behind a removable cap, allowing you to safely remove the stick from your TV and take it with you to another location.
Powkiddy includes two controllers that look like clones of Sony’s PS1 controllers. If I’m reading the product description correctly, only one of these is a wireless controller, while the other is a USB controller… but the company includes a USB dongle that will allow you to use the USB controller over a 2.4 GHz wireless connection.
Considering a half decent controller costs more than that, I would imagine this thing will break easily and run poorly and generally not be very fun. There’s a lot of things you’d probably be better off buying.
Yep. Although I still appreciate the article and news.
Whilst I understand that somethings are necessarily cheap, I just can’t justify the existence of this product. It’s pure eWaste. Even by the conditions of Developing Nations. Going off reports by other people, the product is so poor condition it doesn’t function.
All the ingredients are there for a cheap but acceptable device at this USD $50 price bracket. From the Free OS (Android/Linux), Open Standards (USB, HDMI, microSD), Affordable Processor (Cortex-A53), Cheap Flash (1GB-4GB LPDDR4, 32GB-128GB eMMC 5), and the Construction Material (Matte Plastic).
There’s little need to make this device constricted to the size of a TV Stick, or tiny power requirements.
Couldn’t agree more! Except for the size/form factor argument; stick PCs could be quite useful in business, education and portable private multipurpose media centre contexts…
Ugh seriously, only 1Gb RAM and only USB2?
Looks like the X96S is still the one to beat!
USB 2.0 makes sense. 3.0 has higher power requirements. This thing would probably need a 3A USB adapter.
HDMI sticks are often designed to run on 5V at 500 mA, so that they can be powered by the USB 2.0 port on most TVs.
The X96S is powered through the microUSB port by the included PSU, at 5V 1A or 1.5A according to conflicting reports (on the same website’s product listing), however at least one Amazon answer indicates that the X96S can be powered from the TV’s USB port. If your TV has two USB 2.0 ports, you could use a splitter cable (2x USB A —> 1x microUSB) to ensure that the X96S gets enough power.
The X96S has an AM S905Y2 CPU with Max 4Gb RAM, a USB 3.0 port, MicroSD port, IR port and can be configured with at least 16 or 32Gb eMMC (the BuzzTV VidStick line – based on the same unit – takes that up to 128Gb).
That should read “max 4Gb DDR4 RAM”.
The X96S also appears to have a decent heat dissipation design.