Is my Polymega dead!? N64 Performance Fix! 

Seems really telling that Polymega decided to cheap out on such a low end CPU. It's a definite bonus the motherboard is compatible with the better CPU.

Wave Race 64 is honestly heaven on earth. Vivid memories of playing that as a kid.

No wonder the emulation was stuttering, it was using a celeron.

CONGRATS and God bless ya Ralph, this video stressed me out like a Gilligan's Island cliff hanger from childhood...you got some big RI ballz on ya opening that brick and going elbow deep into that pricey hardware, glad it had a positive improved ending. Always enjoy your fun, different content...

The head-bobbing cat never gets old! Haha. I haven't seen it in a while, and it gave me a good laugh. I almost fast-forwarded that part before you mentioned you were going to speed up your progress. Im glad I didn't miss that part. Man, I feel like I've been keeping up with the Polymega forever. Delays, lost deals with Walmart, and more delays. It has always appealed to me. I really want to play and preserve my Saturn collection with it. I have other physical media I could use it for as well. I also wanted to play light gun games with it. I suppose I should either go for it or look for an alternative.

hold eject while your powering on to access safe menu to fix pm

The PC guy in me immediately wanted to replace that stock cooler and case fan with noctua units. Especially after installing an i7 8th gen, that cooler does not look up to the task.

Cancelled my pre order. Still no regrets. Tons of people online saying they’ve been having issues with dying systems. I appreciate them finally actually shipping units. But this isn’t good enough.

One I7 makes the world better. It's a way better processor than the Celeron that they put in there for sure. Being cheap in a product seems to be commonplace these days. That one swap fixed a lot of stuff so kudos to you for that. The PC guy in me is happy to see this.

The polymega was like, "you saying I don't work well?" How bout I not work at all!!! It was meant to be!

Great video Ralph. Definitely looked like an overheating lock up to me.

looks like Polymega did poor Quality control check, it was more important to deliver consoles, because some of us are waiting now for more then 2+years

I just received mine yesterday after two years, and it (base unit) doesn't get past the boot up, and just continues to loop. Awesome.

Can't really see the point of the Polymega, given that despite all you're paying, they can't even give you decent (i.e. perfect) N64 emulation. Might as well just buy a second hand USFF office PC with that 8700T in it, and throw Batocera on it. Would be essentially just as turn-key, and better supported.

Going from a Celeron to a Corei7 I'd be worried about the thermals. Hopefully that heatsink inside the unit can cope with the increased thermal output!

The only thing that really matters is the CPU when it comes to stuff from the generations that it supports.

Didnt know polymega made a repro saturn 3d controller

Had a look at Polymega, very interesting from a hardware preservation point of view or with a big physical games collection. But very expensive for what it is. Considering they put a celeron processor in the unit and base unit cost over 400 quid? Again there is alot of small form factor pcs like Geekom which offer beefy spec something with a decent ryzen processor and radeon graphic like 680 - 780 which can emulate ps3 games and still play some AAA titles, for arroubd same price.

I've noticed while playing Contra 3 on Snes that there is a 1 second delay when you press a button and the sound has some frames delay as well. Polymega acknowledged it but so far no patch on the horizons. By changing the CPU do you think it would fix this issue?

good info and great vid, but these lock up problems are pretty well known to be a recent update problem with wifi. I just installed a 2TB SSD and hadn't had ANY problems with mine until that install and I started installing my PS1 catalog. once I turned off all internet on the system, all my stuttering and menu lockup stopped. the processor might have helped, but I think if you turned off the wifi, you wouldn't have had any more issues with the console locking up.

Looks like the N64 module fried your CPU. Good thing you already had the fix to your problem before it happened. Not only did you get your Polymega working again but it works better. Win, win! Do your other modules work OK? Again as many said too bad Polymega went cheap with their CPU. I would be upset with this performance on the N64. In the very lease you have helped Polymega trouble shoot the problem. They just have to update their CPUs and make sure they don't cheap out with their thermo paste. In the meantime I am perfectly fine playing my original, umodded N64 with an S-video to HDMI HD upscaler. Unlike other solutions this set up handles the resolution switching of some games like Killer Instinct Gold flawlessly so I can actually play the game.

Using a Celeron in this day and age is just silly to begin with.

The issue you were having with the system locking up is due to the the recent patch that came out. It effected the Wi-Fi. If you have Wi-Fi on and when system boots up and the Wi-Fi icon turns solid sometimes it will lock up the system. if you boot the system up with an ethernet chord or shut internet off it fixes the issue. something they are looking into. On top of locking up you will usually get garbled noise or screeching sound. All due to Wi-Fi.

I know you can upgrade the cpu… were you able to id the motherboard??? Im interested if the ram is removable to see howcmuch ram we could add as well..

I have the same issue with my Polymega. Random lockup. My troubleshooting points toward using an HDMI cable that didn't come with the unit and my particular display (50 inch Samsung Smart TV UN50MU630D). Testing it with cables included in the box on a different set works without issue. May be a handshake problem?

you didnt use nearly enough thermal paste. that thing is going to run hot.

I'm glad your Polymega is working again. Very cool video, and I enjoy seeing you test stuff. I think it's great that you were inspired by Mad Litle Pixel to make this video. I hope that they fix this software wise for the N64 module.

I think the Polymega crapped out because it knew it was going under the knife. Would be nice if companies put in the best parts they can get their hands on but I understand having realistic expectations/timeframes/pricing and whatnot.

Nice to see it uses INTEL chips. I loath AMD... Their drivers, to quote The Great one, just suck. I've always used Intel and always will. It had a celery chip in it?? WHY? Does have a nice UI... But I'll take my original modded HDMI hardware any day. Unlike the crappy Amico this thing does exist. At least there isn't a raspberry pie under the hood. Good vid as always.

I’ve been having a lot of fun with ours. Great video!

Honestly an I3 or I5 of this gen should be more than enough. The i7 is overkill lol. But its kind of cool you can upgrade the cpu! I thought it would be a laptop style mobo

No the issue you had was not weird, it's the "screeching audio bug" that happens with internet enabled. It's fixed in 1.1.32. N64 games get better with the shader files, cpu barely upgrades it. Just keep booting up the N64 games and playing them with internet enabled to get the shader files.

Where's the link to MadLittlePixel's video? Wish you put it in the description.

I got a i7 Core for mine, but haven't installed it yet. I wrote PolyMega support last week about upgrading. Unfortunately they say they don't support upgrading it, proclaiming if any Core errors arise it may brick the unit on updates. So they say do it at your own risk and that any active warranty is void under it. I hope someone makes a custom thermal cooler kit next, incase.

Always, ALWAYS screw and unscrew the CPU cooler in an X pattern. You are likely to damange the CPU is and the motherboard as the tension flies off to one side.

I'll wait for my Analogue 3d

I'd just build my own launchbox setup

I haven't watched Mad Little Pixel's video yet, but I know that he wasn't the first to actually swap out his Polymega's CPU. He might have mentioned this in his video. If he didn't, then he really should have. The first time I heard of people swapping out their console's CPU was in late 2023, when there was a large Polymega order shipment to Japanese customers. That was when I first saw people doing the CPU swap. Chances are he might have got his idea to do that CPU swap from Japanese threads on Twitter and other social media. If I am wrong, my sincere apologies to MLP.

Oh yeah baby that defo made quite abit of difference to power.

Mine does similar crashes like that quite often. Not sure why.

This is why I run original hardware.

So far 6:12 Minutes in and I see hitches in every game so far!

You’re lucky your’s actually worked. Mine was dead on arrival as of March 2024.

I got mine last month. I see pop up glitches on and off on snes games. Audio and frame issues on n64. The genesis and turbografx, pc engine games cd and huhard work great. As for crashing, yes... I had it crash on me while playing and downloading games on it 6 TIMES!!! I emailed them but no response on the issues.

Glad to see that upgrading the CPU got it running again. I didn't realize that the Polymega runs on typical intel x86 architecture. It's a little surprising at it's price point that it uses an older basic dual-core Celeron processor, I'd figure a fairly basic quad-core would be necessary at this point for supporting some of the more advance emulation. An 8700T is a massive upgrade, considering it has 6 cores in total and runs at a much higher clock speed with a lote more CPU cache. I don't know what emulators these use (are they custom in house?), but as you eluded to, the best bang for buck is probably running an old small-form factor office PC with a half-decent midgrade processor, while running your emulators of choice.. If you don't mind doing the legwork. The Polymega does look slick though, but I wouldn't try to run 32bit+ emulation on something that comes with such weak hardware!

That has totally sorted 64 emulator

Any cpu for polymega that get ultimate mortal kombat 3 arcade hack, ultimate mortal kombat trilogy hack for genesis working for polymega?

5:15 aRE YOU PERHAPS PLAYING THE pal VERSION? ITS SIGNIFICANTLY SLOWER THAN THE nysc VERSION.

Now you opened the polymega I can see that it worth actually $40 mini pc. It is not worth the price and beside how expensive is to play on a real n64 with a 64SD cartridge fully loaded really is?!

Ralph, if the og Celeron is overheating would it make more sense to also use a better heatsink and fan with the new Celeron CPU? Definitely don't want to deal with another overheating processor issue, especially if it runs at a higher hz rate.

Its alive ..... And its dead. 👍👍.. hey at least you got one.. i pre ordered one and it got cancelled...

Always use jago. He plays very similar to ryu and ken

Ki gold colours are little bit off

I see waverace running better as will with the new microprocessor

The best avail processor for this os the i9-9900t

Nah man I like this stuff too

#PolyProbs

Why are you using an i7? - You could have used a much cheaper cpu like an i5 or i3 and they would have been fine. And in the process save money.

3:05 epic rap battles

No, their customer service is really bad. It would take forever for you to get a new unit. At least a year. This is funny too that they are saying they’re coming with the .32 update…updates from them are sparse 1-2 if that a year so far. Watching your video now I know why mine has been freezing more. It’s definitely the thermal paste. Also just wanna add…I was suggested to join their discord and ask about issues I had with using modules and freezing. I had to leave because all anyone wanted to tell me was that I need to just update and wait it out lol. It’s clearly a very biased and know-it-all server sadly. They hate MLP and have made a lot of negative comments in there about him. Lot of negativity going on in there sadly. I haven’t even taken the n64 module out of the box because I’m on update .30 and it will probably brick the console I’ve heard just like .31 has did to some. It’s a whole mess man. Kind of regret having one now.

Mad Little Jesus Rocks

There was never a reason to buy this piece of garbage anyways whenever an average PC can run all of these perfectly fine at highest resolutions and even the lowest if you want to go there

Lol an i7 for n64 on the polymega thats just sad emulation optimisation.

The Celeron isn't really that bad. From the CPU side it is comparable and sometimes even runs at a higher clock speed. The main differences are the cores and the graphics. It's completely understandable why they took the Celeron. Especially when you compare the cost of the CPU. Whether the additional cores are used in emulation is another question. Perhaps the UHD graphics on the N64 are the main reason why the i7 is better.

Emulation in general is going to get worse now. No devs are going to want to put in the work because one lawsuit can end everything. Especially when the new generation of devs want to get greedy and get paid via patreon. Back in the day it was all about passion. If people would just delete the roms after 24 hrs it would fix the piracy issues. 😂

way to much effort. Sell this piece of crap and use a MiSTer.

So you paid 550 for a system and spent more on a cpu upgrade when you could of spent 350-400 on a xbox which is more powerful 😅

First mistake is buying one of these cheap shit clone consoles anyway. Buy real hardware and then ever drive and be done with it. There are no shortcuts

No way spend my money on this trash. It is a trash in all means. Love my N64 he sends a midlle finger up for you.