LeapFrog. This incredible piece of technology right here is the Leapster GS. A gaming console.
We've got a D-pad, we've got two buttons here, two more miscellaneous buttons, a home button, volume up and down, cartridge slot right here, stylus. Pen thing. Pretty awesome, pretty awesome. Shoulder buttons up top, DC jack.
Oh, and a camera even. Interesting. So yeah, this thing is kind of like the odd homeschooled cousin of the Game Boy Advance, I would say. I believe it's powered by double A's. Oh, that's filthy.
Disgusting. Okay. Leapfrog battery acid.
Who wants it? Nice. We're two for two on the battery acid.
Wow. That terminal is straight up blue. Okay.
So we're just We're just gonna put these covers right back where they came from. Okay so it looks like it's 9 volts to power this thing, so I'm just gonna run it off of DC power rather than battery, because that's disgusting. Nice, it actually works. I actually have not even tested it until now. Well this sounds fun.
Okay, so we can play as River, Daddy, Mommy, or Guest. Personally I-Uh oh. Powered off on me. Alright, well I guess we're just gonna go with Guest.
Oh boy. Okay. Yo, what am I doing using Adobe Premiere when I can just use- this thing.
Oh shoot look at this. Oh you can't even hardly see it. Amazing. Okay well as fun as it would be to play leapfrog games all day, the point of this video is that I'm going to be installing Retroarch on this thing which is un- Unbelievable even for me to say I still have like no faith in this project, but in theory it's doable Here's some of the specs of this thing Okay, so in order to install retroarch on this thing You've got to flash it with Linux tools and I'm not even kidding when I say this my most accessible Linux PC is my PlayStation 4 so that's what I'm gonna be using to flash this and you know what I had said in the Last video about how I've got this cool new capture card and you don't have to watch a recorded monitor and all that well, uh Whatever the equivalent of unshouting out something is, I'm going to do that right now.
Because immediately after doing the PS4 video, I went to record footage for this video, and this thing completely crapped out and doesn't work anymore. Plus, in the software, it gave me a watermark that I couldn't remove, and it told me to register, and I literally couldn't even register. The whole thing is completely jank and broken, so never mind. This product sucks. In the meantime, I have bought an EVGA XR1.
but it didn't come in time for this video. So we are unearning the quality improved get achievement for this video, unfortunately. Okay, so I've just gone through and installed Ubuntu to the PS4 because it seems like that this is going to be easier on Ubuntu based on the guide that I'm reading here.
I'm sure it could be done in Arch Linux, but God knows I'm not the guy to figure it out. So I'm just going to do it here on Ubuntu and... It should be fun.
Alright, well, we're off to a very epic gamer time, I see. One hour of suffering later. Well, after updating and upgrading a whole bunch of stuff on Ubuntu on the PS4, it just doesn't really boot it anymore, so that's cool. And the external SSD doesn't read on the PC anymore, so that is even cooler.
So, we're gonna have to get even more creative with this, I guess. Behold, the spare Mac Mini. Okay, so, setting this all up on the Mac Mini, we should be good to go.
Okay. I'm at the point where I need to plug in the LeapFrog and flash it. Okay, LeapFrog is plugged into the Mac Mini.
Gotta hold down L and R while booting. Oh. Would you look at that?
Okay, well, I think we are ready to flash. Press enter key when you're ready to continue. Oh, it needs Python 2. Okay, well, this is all kind of going horribly wrong.
I don't think it actually did anything because it needs Python 2. Okay, I got Python 2. Let's go ahead and try it again. Okay, no errors in the terminal so far. Looking better.
Excuse me? It's asking for the password to the leapfrog? Oh man, I have no idea.
The guy doesn't say anything about this. I'm just going to hit enter. Permission denied. Oh no. Okay, well, it is frozen, so that's great.
Okay, I've gone through and installed Ubuntu to the hard drive of the Mac Mini. I was just using a live install before, and that took a very long time because it's just a 500 gig mechanical 5400 RPM drive in the Mac Mini, so that was wonderful. But we're back.
Let's see if we can do it now. Okay, so this time we got a device not found, and in the same password error. All right, it's been... Multiple hours. I'm still no further with this.
For whatever reason, let me show you guys what's going on. Every time I want to SSH into it, even though I've got both a public and private key, it still asks me for a password to SSH into the leapfrog every single time. And that's what's holding up this whole process.
I've tried multiple distros. I've tried multiple systems at this point, and I have no idea what's going on. Because Linux really likes me.
But, you know, this dude, Andy's Retro Tech on YouTube, got it working on Windows. So... All right, well, let's try Windows.
My mind is actually blown right now that I'm installing Windows on a Mac Mini because I couldn't use Linux properly on my PS4. Also, I can play RetroArch on a LeapFrog. Holy crap.
I think we're actually getting somewhere. Ubi device does not have free logical erase blocks. No idea what that means, but it says rebooting the host.
Transferring over some games with WinSCP now and we are just about ready to try this thing out. So it's the next day and I'm in the middle of getting some more games and emulators transferred onto this thing and all of a sudden it just was not connecting in WinSCP and I just couldn't figure it out. All of a sudden it just wouldn't connect. It won't show it now because I've already rolled everything back.
But in Device Manager, under DataLogic USB LAN Adapter, for whatever reason, there was a yellow triangle and it said that the device could not start. And I was just racking my brain like, what the heck, this was working fine. And then I had remembered that the little computer I'm running this off of, it did a whole lot of Windows updating last night. And I was like, well, that's the only thing that's changed. So I rolled back the update, and you can see here, it's totally fine now, the device is working properly.
WinSCP connected properly. So for whatever reason, the Windows update, as it usually does, completely broke what I was doing here. And so to document this for anybody else having any kind of issue like that, if God help you, you're actually trying to do this. This is the version of Windows 10 that I had to use to get this working.
I don't know which version I was on after the updates, but it wasn't working on that version. So stick with this one if you're going to try and do this. This video is sponsored by PCBWay.
I assume you've already heard of PCBWay before at this point. They do custom electronic circuit boards, 3D printing, CNC machining, all that cool stuff. But you might be thinking to yourself, that's pretty neat, but I don't really have a use for that.
I don't even know how to design my own PCBs. And that's fine, because guess what? Same. So what can PCBWay do for people like you and me? Well recently, I've discovered that PCBWay has a section on their website called Shared Projects, and it's like Thingiverse, but for electronic projects.
Here's a few things I found just by searching Nintendo. Okay, so we've got a Game Boy Color Type-C power adapter board in here, that's sick. An N64 cartridge dumper, that's really sick.
And here we got a replacement power supply for the NES. All of these things are made by the community, and PCBWay gives you the option to add almost everything you need for these projects to your cart instantly. They'll even have the whole thing assembled for you at their factory. There's really never been a better time to get into modding and creating with a utility like this.
Head over to pcbway.com after the video to get a look at some of these awesome projects, and you can also get $5 off your first order as a new user. Alright, well, our Leapfrog with RetroArch is ready to go! But before we check out how this thing plays, I do want to give a shout out to Andy's Retro Tech, who has since rebranded their channel to Retro Leap for LeapFrog Leapsters.
He's the one that ported the flashing tools over to Windows, and thanks to Mac2612 who ported RetroArch and created the flashing tools in the first place. We'll start off with the NES. Obviously this is going to be no sweat for the LeapFrog.
The games run great, the controller layout works perfect, and the screen actually lends itself really nicely to the bright and vivid titles that you find on the NES. Overall, no complaints to be had here. Game Boy games find themselves a little more at home on the LeapFrog since, you know, it's a handheld console and all that. It is basically the same story here as it was with the NES.
The one gripe I do have about Game Boy games on here though is that as far as I could figure out in the settings, there's no way to change the aspect ratio so that the image isn't stretched out. The options are there in the settings, they're physically there, but they don't seem to do anything when you change it unfortunately. Sega Genesis games run really well. It's kind of the same deal with all the retro consoles, they all just run great. However, it actually shut off on me when I was playing Sonic Spinball, and the mod that gets RetroArch on here actually runs the clock speed higher than default.
on the CPU on this thing, my best guess is that it started overdrawing from the batteries and it just shut off. So from here on out I tested pretty much everything else while on DC power so it wouldn't happen again. Super Nintendo games run fine, it just all depends on how well any particular game decides to run.
For example, Aladdin runs great, no complaints at all. Donkey Kong Country 2 doesn't even start. SNES emulation is always surprisingly poor on weaker hardware and it just it shows here on the leapfrog.
What runs well runs well, but the compatibility is not great. Game Boy Advance games run fantastic and this is really where this mod shines for me because everything from the form factor to the button layout here is dead on to the GBA. One gripe though I do have is that the resolution of the Game Boy Advance doesn't scale well at all to the resolution on the LeapFrog, so it does not look all that sharp. Despite that though, the screen on here is much better, much clearer, much brighter than any Game Boy Advance screens that Nintendo ever made. I'd say it's definitely even better than the Game Boy Advance SP backlit screen.
And that's probably where you would reasonably expect this thing's capability to taper off. But surprisingly, it's actually capable of playing PlayStation 1 games. 3D games give it kind of a hard time, but they do play.
It's not too bad, it's kind of playable. 2D games though run great, and I mean, like at least for Rayman here, it's running just fine at full speed. An issue with PlayStation 1 games on here though is that the onboard storage... storage holds less than 2GB, so you can fit 2 games on here at best.
And even if you did that, there wouldn't be any room for any other games from other consoles, which sucks. And there might be a way to compress the PlayStation 1 images down a little bit, but I'm not really aware of a way to do it on here, so you've got to hold on to the full 6-700MB file. Either way, it's super cool to see on here, and it actually blew my mind that this runs at all. And that's it for RetroArch on the Leapster GS. Make sure you get subscribed if you want to see more mods and homebrewing hacking with me. consoles just like this.
And if you haven't seen my previous video where I ran Steam on my PS4, I'm going to add that up here right now. Let me know in the comments if this thing actually surprised you with how well it handles emulation. Or if you have any other janky weird mods like this that you want me to show off on the channel, absolutely post it down below. I'm always looking for new stuff to show off. And thanks for making it all the way to the end of the video.
If you want to directly support the channel, there's going to be links for my Buy Me A Coffee page and my Patreon down below in the description. And a special shout out to all of my current supporters right here. And that's it. I'll see you in the next one.