Are "Gaming Sticks" a legit thing?

[Keltyx98]

My girlfriends want to buy one of those sticks that come with two controller because she wants to play some retro game.

I was wondering if these sticks are anything good, they are pretty cheap. Are the games actually emulated or are them some bootleg nintendo games?

I would like to avoid plugging one in in my TV and get some viruses or strange stuff.

 

 

[Middcore]

2 minutes ago, Keltyx98 said:

Are the games actually emulated

Yes.

2 minutes ago, Keltyx98 said:

or are them some bootleg nintendo games?

Emulated ones. 

[Gokul_P]

4 minutes ago, Keltyx98 said:

My girlfriends want to buy one of those sticks that come with two controller because she wants to play some retro game.

I was wondering if these sticks are anything good, they are pretty cheap. Are the games actually emulated or are them some bootleg nintendo games?

I would like to avoid plugging one in in my TV and get some viruses or strange stuff.

 

 

It is just a stick (a arm soc enclosed in a stick) that will emulate games the source of the games is questionable but yes they do work. But i recomend picking up some form of chrome cast device and using steam link to play the game or getting a arm tinker board (raspbery pi is good option if you could find for msrp) and emulating yourself so you dont have to pirate it. The games on these sticks is 99% of the time genuvine but it is pirated. 

[Needfuldoer]

21 minutes ago, Keltyx98 said:

Are the games actually emulated or are them some bootleg nintendo games?

They're all emulated bootleg ROMs.

[aisle9]

12 minutes ago, Keltyx98 said:

My girlfriends want to buy one of those sticks that come with two controller because she wants to play some retro game.

You will hate yourself. Understand that if it's Intel-based, you are buying a small stick with a cheap Atom, Gemini Lake or Apollo Lake Celeron, something along those lines. As low-powered as those chips are, the cooling in those sticks is so bad that they still manage to throttle under any kind of heavy load. Ok, moderate load. The CPUs are weak enough as-is. You have to keep in mind the original use cases for stick PCs. They were intended primarily as Intel's answer to the multimedia sticks, like Fire sticks, but a little more powerful so that they can handle some lightweight home and office tasks if, for example, you have a very compact desk and need a tiny, cheap PC for basic work. As something like a torrent slave or a little 720p/1080p streaming box, they aren't horrible if you can find one around the $80 price that isn't an Atom-based piece of trash, but I wouldn't try emulating anything more intense than the SNES generation on one.

 

If it's an ARM SoC-based stick, everything I said above applies, you just can't run Windows. And on the anemic 4GB of RAM most of those come with (sometimes even 2GB still), you really can't run Windows on the x86-based sticks anyway, so yeah. If you can't afford something like a quad-core J3455, N5095 or, best of all, N5105 mini PC, the ARM-based units are better because they tend to cost less for similar performance, but you're not getting a great emulation platform no matter what you do with a stick PC.

 

Also, props to Vilcorn (the reseller) for their choice of logo. Thinly-veiled boobs with controller buttons on them. Very nice.