This is why everybody wants the AYN Thor… transcript

I went to a convention last week, and whenever I go to a convention, people come up to me and they say something like, "I bought a Nintendo Switch because of you." Or I bought a Steam Deck because of you, or whatever the handheld might be at the time. This time, it was, "I bought an Ayn Thor because of you." And that made me realize something. Should have put a damn affiliate link on that video. It's been a week since that convention, and I've had several people reach out to me while I'm in my own home asking me about the Ayn Thor. >> Bob, under mine one of your videos, is it is is the Thor awesome?

I don't want to watch 20 minutes right now. >> [laughter] >> It is a phenomenal handheld. It was my favorite Android or retro handheld of last year by like a lot. It is essentially a 3DS, a very similar form factor, if not a little thicker. But, it's very powerful. It can emulate most 3DS games very easily with minimal effort. It can even emulate Switch games and a few Wii U games. And it looks pretty good on this dual screen.

It's a really cool concept. For me, it's the Steam games. If you've seen me before, you know I've been beating the drum of Steam games on Android. They're awesome. And if you've seen me before and you're not subscribed, I'm mad at you. Playing Steam games on something you can close is awesome. I would much rather carry this thing around than a whole ass Steam Deck. All of these PC handhelds are way too big. If I can get a game running via game native, I'm just playing it on this.

It's way easier to take around. It fits right in my jacket pocket. My Steam Deck doesn't exactly fit in there. Oh, wait. Kind of fits. Really, what I think is drawing people towards this handheld in particular is all the cool launchers that have come out with it. These things have given this Ayn Thor a kind of second life. When it first came out, no apps really supported the dual screens, and I kind of just ignored all the launchers.

It wasn't really a priority to me. Now, it kind of does look really cool. This new look is pretty simple to digest for most people, maybe even people who've never seen an emulation handheld before. You're not staring at a 3DS with an Android home screen anymore. You're looking at what looks like a 3DS, but with every game under the sun available locally. I think the thought of taking this thing around and launching 3DS games, Switch games, or even Hades 2 right from your Steam library is really appealing to people.

The Thor might just be the way to break Android handhelds into the mainstream. Honestly, I haven't really used this in quite a bit. I've been busy. So, I decided to break it out to revisit it, to see what everyone's doing on it. Maybe I should make mine look as cool as theirs to see what all the fuss is about. Why is everyone so interested in this thing now, 6 months after launch? Oh, man, I should have eaten something before this triple showing of The Lord of the Rings.

How much is left? What? It hasn't even started yet. Whose armrest is this? Go go get something from concessions. Like what? Chips and cheese? I'm going to put chips and cheese in my IBS app? Your what app? Never mind. Ah, it's mad at me now for having a sip of your soda. Fine. I wasn't going to do this, but here, you can have my Factor meal. I brought it in my bag. You just have to go find a microwave. You have a bag?

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All right. >> Thank you. This Factor really hit the spot. >> So, how did you get the bag back? >> I'm in their POLYCULE NOW. >> HEY! STOP HOGGING THE ARMREST. >> I'M NOT even touching you. I'm going to punch THIS GUY. >> NO, DON'T! MY POLYCULE! >> I FIRST GOT MY HANDS ON THE Thor right when it was launching, maybe even before it launched. So, at that point, not a lot of apps were supporting the dual-screen configuration.

And there was like one launcher that supported dual screen, and it it kind of sucked. Now, getting everything on here is way easier. Sometimes, I use an Android app called Obtainium that will automatically update any of the apps that I have on my Android devices via side-loading, not apps that I have via the Play Store, but apps that I've installed myself. And that happens to be most of the apps that I have. Someone in my chat pointed me towards this, the Obtainium emulation pack.

If you add this to your Obtainium, it will load it up with all of the emulation apps you would ever need. From here, you can bulk download as many as you think you need. You definitely don't need all of them, so you should just kind of go through them and see which ones are best for you. Obtainium will also easily update all of these when necessary. This makes setting up your brand new Ayn Thor way easier. You don't have to navigate to a million different GitHubs.

You can just do it all right from inside this one app. It is a bit annoying to use though if you already have your Ayn Thor set up like I do. It it doesn't always use the apps that you have already. Sometimes it'll do a different fork, so it'll install next to the one that you have and it won't have all of the same settings as the one you have. It's a little bit annoying. I would recommend this for somebody who is starting fresh with a brand new Ayn Thor.

Then it makes set up way easier. Now, I did have some people ask me if this was a good entry-level emulation handheld. I'm going to say no. I think that if you've never had any experience with the Android platform or emulating on any other devices, then this thing is kind of like jumping into the deep end, which is fine. You'll figure it out eventually. There are other cheaper options that come ready to go right out of the box and are way easier to set up.

Those usually play lower-powered systems like DS and under, but those are much better entry-level devices if you want to just get started with emulation. That way you don't have to spend a couple hundred bucks on this guy. If you do decide you want to jump into the deep end with the Ayn Thor, Retro Game Corps is your friend. He just UPLOADED A 2-HOUR SETUP video on the Ayn Thor. Obviously, you don't have to do every single thing that he does in that video, but you are going to want to do a good chunk of it.

Like to get as a hard the 3DS emulator to work at all on here, there are kind of a lot of steps. It's really not that hard to just follow the simple directions, but I'm imagining somebody who just saw this playing a 3DS game on Instagram and thinks they're going to buy this and start playing Zelda. And this is something that's been kind of tripping me up about this Ion Thor. It feels like it's kind of broken out of this little emulation niche, and that's because people are seeing it on Instagram and stuff with this cool launcher.

How cool does that thing look? All my games could be right there. I could just click on one and it boots right up. That's amazing. Wow. Can't believe it. This is a dream. It does not come like this. It comes like this. There's nothing on there. It's a blank slate. You can achieve these dreams with a lot of work. For example, you got to put the games on here. That's something you're going to have to figure out on your own.

After you get all of your games on here, you're going to need a cool launcher. And that is 3/4 of the way through Retro Game Corps's 2-hour long video setup. So even before you get the launcher, there's a lot of prep work. There are two launchers that are very popular that are both competing to be on your dual screen. There is Cocoon and there is Emu. Both of them are pre-releases, so they're not finished products. They're also not products, they're both free.

Emu made big waves with its extremely well-done launch video. I was immediately turned off though, when none of that worked on the Ion Thor when I tried it when it came out. Now, Emu is way better. It has a setup that is extremely easy to navigate and it scrapes all of your games and it could add game artwork for you and stuff. It does its best to be plug and play and it's mostly fine. Once you're in, I wouldn't exactly call it user-friendly.

If something doesn't work, it's not all that easy to fix. For example, if your 3DS games are trying to open in RetroArch instead of Citra, the native 3DS emulator, the fix isn't very intuitive. When you first launch Citra, it launches into this home screen with no icons on it. Getting it to launch into the ROM section is possible, but it also is not very intuitive. Okay, I actually thought there was a way to launch it from ROMs, but I I can't I thought I set it and it just doesn't want to do it.

And that's one of my big issues with launchers, man. It It feels like a lot of work for very little payoff. People really like having all of these customization options and everything, but the more customization options you throw into something, you're paralyzed by choice. There's just so many options it becomes hard to do any one little thing. Kakoune is a newer front-end that I think gets closer to how I would have wanted an emulation front-end to look just right out of the box, and the customization options are just a little bit more intuitive.

You still run into the same kind of issue where tweaking options becomes a bit of a headache. You're just scrolling through menus trying to figure out how to change the default emulation app for your 3DS games again. Here I am again. But I think it's slightly easier in Kakoune than it is in Citra. And what I think is going to be more appealing to more people is Silk Pod here. It's their collection of user-generated themes that you can just download.

I landed on this Wii U looking one. I think this looks great. Kakoune also allows you to scrape artwork, but it's still a little frustrating. Why can't it scrape the Sonic the Hedgehog 2 artwork? Does it not know what Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is? The most basic ass game of all retro games? It did a good job pointing most of my ROMs and ROM folders to the right emulation apps, but I still had to point 3DS to open in Citra, and even though it did open in Citra, there's this big stupid loading bar right over the top of it.

The point I'm trying to make here is that you can make your Ayn Thor look really cool and really nice. It I'm just trying to set expectations here. I love it. It's probably the best emulation handheld that you can get right now. But emulation handhelds do take a little bit of work. It's like getting a husky. I don't know why I just decided that was the analogy I'm going to make here. I got a lot of controversial takes on emulation handhelds.

First of all, they're called emulation handhelds. Calling them retro handhelds doesn't make any sense. A retro handheld is a Game Boy. That's a retro handheld. This is an emulation handheld. But my hot take is that I actually kind of just like the launcher that it comes with. I don't need all of this. It sure it's nice to look at, but sometimes it feels like an extra barrier between me and the game that I want to play.

I know that Aether is the app that I want to use to play 3DS games. So, why don't I just launch Aether and click on the game from there? That just seems so much more intuitive to me. I could see a launcher like cocoon working really well for maybe somebody who doesn't want to see how the sausage is made. Maybe you want to gift this to somebody. They could just turn it on, it'll launch right into cocoon, and they can just open the game they want and just start playing.

That could be cool. And you know what? Maybe if you're new to this, maybe you want to set everything up once and just launch all of your games from cocoon or maybe Emu and do that for the rest of your life. Maybe you don't want to know how the sausage is made either. But eventually, this configuration will break. Eventually, you will need to see how the sausage is made. Eventually, a game that you want to play just won't launch or an app update might screw something up in the pipeline, and you're going to have to go in there and fix it.

And if you don't know how the sausage is made, I don't know what I I'm very bad at analogies today. Or maybe you'll need to access the stock Android launcher, which happens to me very frequently all of the time. And don't know if Oh, well. Okay, that time it did it. It's right there. All right. You know what? That wasn't too bad. But, now how do I get it back? I have to open Cocoon a second time. All right. So, I don't like front ends that much.

I see the appeal. I understand why people would want all their stuff to look so nice, but I just want to get in the game and start playing it. Except when it comes to RetroArch games. So, anything that's like two-dimensional, anything that's N64 and lower, I don't like having to launch games through RetroArch. That needs a front end. So, on my AYN Thor, I have it launched straight into the standard AYN launcher. I actually I like it like this.

All of my most important apps are right here, nice and big. And, if I want to play 3DS, I can just click on the Azahar icon. If I want to play a Steam game, I can just click on Game Native. And, for anything else, the entire bottom screen is just a regular Android launcher. This is an Android device, so I kind of just like to treat it like an Android device. If I want to navigate my ROM library, I can still launch Cocoon.

Although, these dual-screen launchers really don't like it when you don't make them your main launcher. They try to take over the whole device anyway. Quitting it and taking it off of both of your screens kind of takes an extra step. And, if you intend to have your AYN Thor look something like this, then I got great news for you. This is how it comes stock. You'll still need to get all of those apps, but that's not that difficult.

What if, say, your main priority is just playing Steam games? Well, for that, all you need is Game Native. That's the app that you're going to use to play all of your Steam games. You just download Game Native, log in with your Steam account, and all of your stuff is right there. And, for the simple indie games like Hollow Knight Silk Song or even like Hades 2, those run amazing on just their default configurations. You don't have to do anything.

It's extremely simple to just plug in and start playing. You can play some pretty hefty games like Resident Evil 2 remake. That actually just got optimized in game native, but I would curb your expectations a bit. You're running a 3D AAA game like that at extremely low settings with an extremely low frame rate, if even at all. This can be your mini Steam Deck if you want something for those smaller games like indie games.

I would say for smaller games, game native has kind of an 85% success rate on here, which is pretty great. If you remember when the Steam Deck first came out, it probably had an 85% success rate for small games, too. We often forget how janky the Steam Deck was when it first came out. Most games that I try to get working on here, they work just great. If I wanted to play something like Resident Evil 9, I'd probably want something bigger with a bit more power anyway.

Keep in mind when I say 85% success rate, I'm not even bothering trying like Helldivers 2 or something on here. Obviously, that's not going to work. I played a ton of Ball Ex Pit on the Thor. I bet that's the game I played most on here. That worked great with just the default settings. That's a small enough game where having to lug around a big Steam Deck felt very unnecessary. So, this felt like the perfect device for a game like Ball Ex Pit.

And that's sort of a mindless game, so having a YouTube video on the bottom screen, that's kind of been sick. Slay the Spire 2 is another game I've been sinking a lot of hours into. Now, this game actually does not work with game native at all for some reason. But, there's another app called Slay the Spire 2 launcher. It's extremely easy to set it up with this. You just log in with your Steam account again, and it just downloads Slay the Spire 2 with your cloud save, and it just runs at default settings perfectly.

This is me trying to set expectations again. If you're just trying to play low-powered Steam games, you're going to probably be pretty good. But I'd say about 15% of the time, you're going to have to tweak some settings or find a workaround or it might just not work at all for you. If you want to get an Ayn Thor and there's a specific Steam game that you want to play or group of games, I would highly recommend checking out the MU ready website and going over to the Ayn Thor and seeing if anybody has had any success with that specific game.

I would still be highly skeptical of people who are getting high frame rates on 3D AAA games on here. Like no one's labeling Cyberpunk as playable on here. I'm sorry, that's ridiculous. Most of these low-powered stuff will be just fine with the default drivers and settings. But I've been using these Mr. Purple drivers for most stuff. And sometimes it gives you a little extra boost in performance. Sometimes you got to try a different driver.

I would set that driver up in apps like Eden and Azahar, too, if you can. If you're a launcher nerd and you really want to go through all of that, you can now put these Steam games on your launcher as well. Retro Pop has a video on that. There's yet another app that you can get called Steam Shortcut Generator and it just generates shortcuts for your game native games. And those go right into your Cocoon launcher. I'll admit, that's kind of cool.

And it's making me like the idea of launchers a little more. >> Couldn't get it to scrape the artwork, though. Not sure what that's about. See, there's always There's always something. >> But Cocoon still gives me an issue with 3DS games, so that kind of defeats the whole purpose of this being a modern 3DS. I'm not trying to deter anybody from getting an Ayn Thor. That's not the purpose of this video. I I finally put an affiliate link on this video.

I do think it is the best Android handheld. It might be the best emulation handheld. It might be the best indie game machine, the best 3DS emulator. This thing is great. Ayn makes some of the best emulation handhelds out there. Not a lot of the other companies are making good emulation handhelds. Aya Neo is up there. Their PC handhelds ass, they're ass. All I'm doing is setting expectations. You cannot just buy an Ayn Thor and expect it to look like this.

You have to do a lot to it. Which you can do. It is possible. This is an emulation enthusiast console. It doesn't have to be. If all you want to do is just play some games, you will have an easy great time depending on the game. But you are going to do a little bit of setup. If you want an aesthetic Instagram showpiece, set aside a lot more time. You got to do a decent amount of setup and a lot of curation to your library here.

And there's nothing wrong with that. Go nuts. It does It ha- It does look pretty. What do you guys think about the Ayn Thor now after a couple of months of being out? I haven't touched this in a long time because there's been so many other things and I reviewed them. So, I got to I've been bouncing between all different ones and I compare them to this sometimes, but I've been playing games everywhere else. But if I could get one, this is probably it.

Also, there's different versions. A lot of people really want the Max and they want that because of the 1 TB of storage. What? How many DS games are you putting on here? I have I think the Pro and most reviewers just have the Pro. That seems to be the flagship one. That one's just fine if you want to save a couple bucks. I don't think you're getting any additional performance here. There is also a microSD card slot. So, if you need more storage, you can put as much as you want in there.

Anyway, leave it in the comments below. Add me on Twitter. Any and all this other social media garbage. Thank you to all of the Patreon supporters over on the podcast channel. We do the podcast right here. I would really appreciate it if you would subscribe, even if you don't use your subscription box. It still helps us out a a ton. And share this video with a friend. A friend who is thinking about getting an emulation handheld for themselves, this is probably the one to get.

Thank you very much. You have yourself a very good week.