First of all, sorry for the image quality. I'll try making better pictures if there's anyone really interested, but I've already asked for a return+refund. I was (still am) quite angry, my hands shaking and such, couldn't take better ones after several attempts. Also, no matter how high-res a picture of a turd is, it'll still be a picture of a turd...
It
has integrated storage. Where the internal SD should be (if it were an RG300) it reads:
RG99_V1.0
20191221
USB-C charging port, most likely USB 2. Light leaks from both sides of the screen, in and out. Shoulder buttons feel a bit more... wiggly than those of the RG300. Games... it's your dear "169 in I" (sic).
The screen does actually look better than the RG300's but it's also smaller; it's got the same "IPS" sticker behind the battery the RG300 had, go figure. The infamous blue "mp4-like" menu has the text squashed, wider and shorter than it should be, but readable. If I had to guess I'd say maybe the screen is 480x320 and that menu has (almost always) run in 320x240, but your guess is as good as mine. I'm not feeling like counting pixels right now.
This turd is
underpowered. For example, Street Fighter 2, Megaman Power Battle, Strider Hiryu, all have very annoying sound/music artifacts and slowdowns. Fatal Fury 2 plays and sounds like half speed, being generous there. Also, remember those 2 buttons for savestates and emulator menus? Not bound here; in the menu the "key pressed" sound is played, the emulators do nothing when they're pressed or held down. Shoulder buttons do work in Mario Kart, which works surprisingly well compared to other's I've mentioned, but nothing to call home about. Specially noticeable in GBA but also in other systems: there's one column of pixels to the right which is
wrong. It's either from the other side of the screen or garbled, you know what I mean, right? Nothing new, really. Oh, my previous battery adapter for the RG300 fits perfectly, as anyone could expect.
I'm returning it, so I'm not tearing it apart unless I have to keep it and that would
really-really-really piss me off. It does smell funny, not a figure of speech. It has a transparent sticker on the screen, what's beneath feels like plastic, not glass. It feels like an RS90 in a different dress, maybe a bit more underpowered than the RS90 but that might be because of the screen or my bias (I'm still pretty angry, it's taking me
ages writing this). If you want any details, info, plugging it to the computer, you name it... just tell me. I'm not feeling...
creative with this unit.
Summing up: If you buy an RG300 and it has the well-known blue menu and no internal SD card, congratulations! You've got an RG99! Don't ask
me what to do with it!
Again, sorry for the poor photos.
P.S.: I didn't feel like counting pixels, so I made a "picture" folder in some SD card I had lying around, tossed my templates (320p, 360p, 480p) and opened them using both the "image viewer" and the file explorer in the RG99. They appear rotated 90deg no-matter-what (I got 2 versions of each, one at zero and another one at 90deg, all show up misaligned); I rotate them pushing random keys (as usual) and they won't show full-screen but squashed. Cool, not that I expected better but had to try. But... the screen
flickers. Like, a
LOT, disco time! I use the middle buttons (those which won't work with emulators) to lower the brightness and it gets more noticeable. Top brightness, less noticeable, still annoying. It's not there while playing, but made me wonder... >30Hz screen? Final nail for its coffin?