GameStick $17/$20 (in store/online) at Gamestop

SuperSonic128 said:
Yeah, I've tried that several times, I even tried tethering it from my phone and it does the same thing.
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Give this app a shot, I've had connection problems before and this has solved them:
Screenshot_2015-01-06-16-25-39.png


 
zebular said:
The reason I supplied the CFW with SPMC over the newly released Kodi 14.0 is that some add-ons (such as 1Channel) haven't updated to work with Kodi 14.0 yet. However, I believe Genesis DOES work with Kodi which has all of the links that 1Channel does anyway so it shouldn't be a problem.
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Ah, I see. I just did a couple of test channels and they seemed to work fine.

Two quick questions: First, my sound doesn't appear to be working. I tried the different options in the settings menu and nothing worked. Any suggestions there? Next, is there any proper way to shut it off, or is unplugging the only thing you need to do? Didn't want to mess anything up by just cutting the power but I didn't see any power option on the main screen. Everything else is working great though.

 
MillerTime2523 said:
Ah, I see. I just did a couple of test channels and they seemed to work fine.

Two quick questions: First, my sound doesn't appear to be working. I tried the different options in the settings menu and nothing worked. Any suggestions there? Next, is there any proper way to shut it off, or is unplugging the only thing you need to do? Didn't want to mess anything up by just cutting the power but I didn't see any power option on the main screen. Everything else is working great though.
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Never had any sound problems but I used to run into that problem with the Ouya... check to see in the system settings that your volume sliders are all the way up. Cutting the power is perfectly fine, it's the only thing you can do as that's how it was designed.

 
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I just fell into this thread yesterday and after watching zebular's videos, totally went to GameStop after work and bought one. I don't think I've got a wired mouse at home anymore, so I'm just going to bring one home from work and do it some night this week. I'm super stoked to do it. Any other apps I should make sure to get? I'm actually pretty new to Android. I had it on a camera (RIGHT?!) a year ago, but that's it.

 
ZachIn2036 said:
I just fell into this thread yesterday and after watching zebular's videos, totally went to GameStop after work and bought one. I don't think I've got a wired mouse at home anymore, so I'm just going to bring one home from work and do it some night this week. I'm super stoked to do it. Any other apps I should make sure to get? I'm actually pretty new to Android. I had it on a camera (RIGHT?!) a year ago, but that's it.
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Must have apps: Showbox, Dropbox, Pandora, Dolphin (web browser), Youtube, Netflix etc etc... tons you can do with it :D

 
Okay I spent some time with GameStick this afternoon. Here are my findings, I hope they prove useful to someone.

1. Dev mode is joke. CFW install takes all of five minutes and has more options.

2. You will need to install the aforementioned patch for Ethernet to work with the dock.

3. You can install the Amazon App store and load apps from there.

4. The only Android game I tried was Angry Birds Rio. It install and ran but there were graphical glitches all over the place, not playable.

5. Included controller is trash. Tried using it with SNES 9x emulator, input lag was awful.

6. If you have a Moga controller you can pair it by using the Moga Universal Driver from the Play Store.

7. SPMC and Netflix run just great over Wifi, for me at least.

8. If you have the dock you can use whatever size thumb drive or USB hard drive you want. The 64GB drive was most likely a software limitation of the stock firmware.

9. I could not get Google Play Movies to play. I can see the movies but get a play back error everytime.

I'm really thinking that this should be primarily a streaming or web browsing device. It should have been called the stream stick, not the game stick. I know some of you are playing emulators and having fun. I can't help but feel there is a split second delay of some kind. I can't really describe it, but I know these SNES games felt more fluid when I was a kid. Maybe that's just how emulation is going to be? Is there any performance tuning to be done on the Gamestick for emulation performance?

 
"Must have apps: Showbox, Dropbox, Pandora, Dolphin (web browser), Youtube, Netflix etc etc... tons you can do with it" (I can't quote because CAG thinks I'm linking and I haven't posted enough to link)
Awesome, thanks. I might not install Pandora, YouTube and Netflix only because I've got those apps on practically everything else in the household.

I did see pages ago you mentioned that you can either run the emu apps separate or run RetroArch, which has its own. Which do you prefer? I've heard of RetroArch from peoples' Raspberry Pi projects, but that doesn't mean it's a better option for this. What's your preferr

 
Check out about the 15min mark and you can see what emulators I have installed.

http://youtu.be/pJV7DrO7TdU

I'm not going to tell you guys what to do but there are easy ways of getting a lot of the paid apks for free, though I would say you should pay the couple bucks as these are very small devs making these apps and could use the money.  Almost all of your emulators are free luckily.

 
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Picked one up along with the dock at GS today. I already have a Wii for emulators (which works perfectly), but it should be fun to play around with this.

 
zebular said:
Yep, all USB mass storage devices should be visible. I have a 2TB external hdd hooked up to mine.
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I tried to hook up my external hard drive to the dock, and the Gamestick died immediately and wouldn't power back on until I unplugged the hard drive. I'll try again when I get home.
 
zebular said:
Check out about the 15min mark and you can see what emulators I have installed.

http://youtu.be/pJV7DrO7TdU

I'm not going to tell you guys what to do but there are easy ways of getting a lot of the paid apks for free, though I would say you should pay the couple bucks as these are very small devs making these apps and could use the money. Almost all of your emulators are free luckily.
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And if they aren't free by default, you can always get the V Android free versions.

Since I've rarely used the Game Stick, I might as well just root this sucker. It didn't not wow me either unboxing it or playing it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsDsxktckVQ

 
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Thanks! Yeah, I am usually all-for paying for apps. God knows, I've got an iPhone and pay for a ton of apps between my son and I.

 
keyblader1985 said:
I tried to hook up my external hard drive to the dock, and the Gamestick died immediately and wouldn't power back on until I unplugged the hard drive. I'll try again when I get home.
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Does your hard drive have an AC power adapter or does it get all power through one USB cable? If it's one USB cable it may be pulling too much power.

 
zebular said:
Check out about the 15min mark and you can see what emulators I have installed.

http://youtu.be/pJV7DrO7TdU

I'm not going to tell you guys what to do but there are easy ways of getting a lot of the paid apks for free, though I would say you should pay the couple bucks as these are very small devs making these apps and could use the money. Almost all of your emulators are free luckily.
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We're you still thinking about putting together an apk pack with emulators?

 
Here is a list of the emulators OP has in his video:

NES.emu
MD.emu
GBC.emu
MSX.emu
PCE.emu
Saturn.emu
NGP.emu
GBA.emu
ePSXe
Mupen64
relcast
RetroArch
Snes9x EX+
PPSSPP
 
zebular said:
Must have apps: Showbox, Dropbox, Pandora, Dolphin (web browser), Youtube, Netflix etc etc... tons you can do with it :D
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Glad you are liking showbox zeb; use mxplayer instead of the internal player, so you don't see the buttons and you can have it widescreen w no side black bars

I tried navigating showbox w the controller, but I can't seem to get it to select one box, it selects the whole row, is there a button combo i can do or better yet, what's the mapping of the controller?

 
zebular said:
Check out about the 15min mark and you can see what emulators I have installed.

I'm not going to tell you guys what to do but there are easy ways of getting a lot of the paid apks for free, though I would say you should pay the couple bucks as these are very small devs making these apps and could use the money. Almost all of your emulators are free luckily.
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Just curious, I know that some emulators have both free and paid options such as gbc.emu

Is there a difference or perks to the paid versions? Thanks again for all your help and everyone here who has been aiding in the process as well :)
 
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Ugh, I must have gotten a faulty device or something because this thing is so frustrating.

1. Games on N64 are supper laggy, unplayable. Tried so many different emus.

2. Games on PS1 won't recognize my controller, different emus.

3. Netflix won't play in full screen size.

4. Game stick constantly crashes

5. When playing a show off my HDD it stutters horribly. Both mxplayer and spmc.

6. Image quality is horrible.

7. Any wallpaper not included in the android system results in a pure black screen.

Bad buy for me :/
 
zebular said:
I posted how to do it a few pages back, just involves dropping another file on the micro sd and flashing it as an update in the restore menu like you did with the firmware, minus doing a wipe.
https://www.androidfilehost.com/?fid=95747613655043085
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it's not recognizing the internet through my computers bridged connection oi. gonna have to fix this up when I can set it up near the router


1teaney said:
Here is a list of the emulators OP has in his video:

NES.emu
MD.emu
GBC.emu
MSX.emu
PCE.emu
Saturn.emu
NGP.emu
GBA.emu
ePSXe
Mupen64
relcast
RetroArch
Snes9x EX+
PPSSPP
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That'd make this even more too easy lol

 
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Do any of emulators work very well? Does anyone have issues with the controller. Mine looks to be charging but I can't get it to work at all.
 
I tried an NES Emulator and it seemed to run full speed, but that CONTROLLER is terrible and laggy. I would like to try a different one and post my results soon.

I'm not sure people are having issues...I suppose it it could be a faulty device :(

 
Try the new firmware.

If it still doesn't work, I recommend deleting SPMC and using official android Kodi from their website (ARM version).

I highly doubt your problems will continue....

 
tried out the SNES 9x and the NES.emu and they run awful

is there a setting somewhere i have to click? CFW. XBMC runs great but these emus can't play anything at full speed (frameskip off, obviously)

 
Just grabbed one of these and a dock from my local Gamestop. The dock is pretty awesome and well worth the extra $5 for the extra ports / better power supply / on/off button / and fan. XBMC works great, Plex for Android works great. Chrome / email / etc. work well. Android wise everything seems to run more or less as expected.

Emulation is kind of a different story. Snes 9x seems to work like garbage. I tried RetroArch and SNES games work terribly on all the cores there too. I'm not sure if there are settings I've got to change or what, I'm NOT finding it good for emulation so far. GenPlusDroid crapped out when i tried to navigate to a rom 2 times in a row.

Overall I think it's a cool little device, but I'm going to have to mess with it and see if I can get the emulators to perform OK. 

 
abowen33 said:
tried out the SNES 9x and the NES.emu and they run awful

is there a setting somewhere i have to click? CFW. XBMC runs great but these emus can't play anything at full speed (frameskip off, obviously)
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The emulators in retroarch run nes/snes better

 
Is the one from the tutorial and new link the same? I used the tutorial link and when I check build it does not say 1.4. I am just trying to stabilize spmc. I also added kodi like others insisted but it cannot find fusion source. Says can't connect to Internet after I grant it permission
 
For anyone who is just joining us and doesn't want to read the last 48 pages of confusion, everything you need is in the original post.  If you start linking to other sites you are only going to further confuse each other. If you all want to collaborate and decide which emulators/apps are best for different systems and such I will be more than happy to update the OP with a list.

 
Dukelived said:
Is the one from the tutorial and new link the same? I used the tutorial link and when I check build it does not say 1.4. I am just trying to stabilize spmc. I also added kodi like others insisted but it cannot find fusion source. Says can't connect to Internet after I grant it permission
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It was renamed without a version to stop confusion so as that everyone could follow the video verbatim. I have never had 1.3 (which is the same as 1.4 but with more apps built in that we decided were junk) linked at any point.

 
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If you turn off WIFI before starting the emulators they will improve in frame-rate considerably.  WIFI and BT are on the same chip and the controller is BT ;)
NES.emu and Snes9x EX+  are the ones I have tested so far and are not super perfect, but good enough especially after turning wifi off.  I tested other emulators for both and these were the best for the gamestick.  Some games I played astyanax, ducktales, tmnt turtles in time, etc.

After playing for a few minutes with the controller in both emulators this is what I felt:

Buttons need to be press farther than standard presses, not too much difference, but noticeable in games that you need to constantly press a button.

Dpad is just ok 

Joystick is just awful, huge dead zone IMO.

If they were going to call the thing gamestick, they should have paid a few more bucks for better controller hardware.

 
 
Wish there was a way to turn it off when the tv is off.  I feel like it might consume too much power?

 
Thanks OP, you had me at XBMC. I put that S#%$ on everything.   Worth it for that alone.  Emulators are just a bonus.  I missed the Fire TV stick at $20, This more than makes up for it.  store 4 miles away has the stick, Store 11 miles away has the dock, hopefully the snow Storm coming doesn't make it impossible to pick them up before work tomorrow. 

 
Got this up and running with no problems.  Thanks OP!  One question, my Netflix and Youtube playback is definitely not coming through at 1080P, using this on the same monitor I have hooked up to a desktop that shows 1080p content no problem.  The images both static and streamed look to be less than 720p.  Is this a settings issue, did I mess up the screen fitting?  I made sure to toggle through all the display modes from 720p up and never could get a crisp picture on a video.

Also is there a way to move to a newer Android version?  Or is that not as simple as downloading another img file.

 
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Thanks OP, you had me at XBMC. I put that S#%$ on everything.   Worth it for that alone.  Emulators are just a bonus.  I missed the Fire TV stick at $20, This more than makes up for it.  store 4 miles away has the stick, Store 11 miles away has the dock, hopefully the snow Storm coming doesn't make it impossible to pick them up before work tomorrow.  Any options for hooking this up to older TVs? only got One HD tv  in the house, and that's the one the HTPC and all the consoles are hooked up too.  My wife's roku got trashed, this would more than replace it. 

 
Got everything up and working, played around with some stuff, SNES 9x EX+ works great with a ps4 controller and 360 controller (both wired, also had to change some button mapping especially on the ps4 controller, it is very weird the way it is mapped). I only tried super metroid on it so far though, might try out some other stuff later. Might try retroarch later.

Played some 8bit 1080p mkv files and they run perfectly, which surprised me. 10bit 1080p had graphical glitches but I didn't expect that to work anyway. MX Player doesn't like to go full screen (the home buttons stay at the bottom) unless you lock the buttons. Also a lot of files with multiple audio tracks played both tracks at once, still haven't figured out why yet but I might just try a different player.

Got my ntfs portable harddrive to work on it with paragon ntfs and set up filesharing with samba filesharing, works well but is slow (but this is most likely due to my network and the fact that I was using 2 wireless connections). After I install the ethernet patch I'll try some wired file transfers which will hopefully be faster.

All in all I'm actually not sure what I will end up using this for, I could use it as a streaming device, an emulator machine, a video player, a server, all kinds of stuff. I normally do 90% of that stuff on my laptop through hdmi but this might be a nice option for some stuff just because it takes less power and I can keep it connected to the tv. The server idea intrigues me because of the fact I can access my external hard drives from anywhere in the house, but that is only if I can get it to work fast.

 
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