so if you're like me you may be a little tired of AAA developers releasing broken
or subpar games over and over again
often with DLC that officially or not fixes the experience this phenomenon has
pushed myself and a number of my friends back to the Retro Gaming crowd but
managing a collection of old consoles and managing the space required for old
school TVs can be frustrating enter the
Retron 5 from hyperkin also I will be hopefully reviewing the Makey Makey or
the Kano fairly soon so stay tuned for
that from December 13th to 20th 2014 you
can save on select Intel CPUs KN and ssds with special holiday rebates from
select retailers click now to learn more first off we have the actual
physical unit on the front we're greeted by Game Boy Game Boy Color and Game Boy
Advance slot and the power button which takes a kind of surprisingly long time
to engage but does feel quite solid and has a satisfying click to it on each
side we have a controller port for NES SNES and Genesis which totals to six
controller ports in all for a two-player gaming experience on any one of the
consoles on the back we have an HDMI port USB mini for the included
controller an AC power jack and an SD card slot which you can use for things
like updating the system cheat codes and screenshots along with Save State files
speaking of the included controller it's garbage and I don't recommend using it
for absolutely anything the quality control seems to be more than a little
rough two seemingly identical buttons in the top corners of the controller feel
completely different one has a nice tactile audible feedback and the other
one feels mushy and dampen the shoulder buttons are similar
again the left side shoulder button has a satisfying tactile and audible
feedback while the right one is mushy and sometimes leaves you wondering if
you even press the button at all the best word I could use for the other
buttons on the controller is acceptable
but then it comes to the eight-way thumb stick which is straight up puke worthy
it squeaks when you spin it which will happen while playing from time to
time and while most of the lower directions work fine I guess there's
some sort of obstruction in the top which grinds against the stick creating
an unpleasant noise and a horrible
feeling I wish hyperkin would have ditched this abysmal excuse for a
controller and just lowered the price Unfortunately they didn't so we're stuck
paying full price and ditching the controller ourselves but wait Luke it
has a redeeming feature
Wireless really Wireless you wanted to
add more latency to this setup we're
playing retro games with a wireless controller there's more latency between
your controller input and your character's movement and it's noticeable
in this case this will stack on top of the input leg on most modern TVs
compared to Old CRTs and you're going to have a bad time speaking of latency it's
a shame that the only output option is HDMI so this pretty much precludes the
use of a CRT TV so forget about light guns and superp Scopes if you don't need
those you can have a TV with game mode which turns off the image processing or
a low latency PC monitor and that would help a lot in fact having it next to
your PC monitor seems like a really cool use case for the Retron 5 if you're
concerned about the legality of PC emulators and we'll talk about that more
later on simply plug the Retron 5 into an alternate input on one of your
monitors and switch your input to it whenever you'd like to play and with
that we'll jump back to the top of the unit in the back there's a slot hold the
controller but we just use it to hold games and just ahead of that we have the
glossy finish something I wish manufacturers would stop using for
Fairly obvious reasons slotted into that
glossy finish is your ports for Genesis SNES NES and famicom cartridges other
reviews are complaining that on this Retron 5 the slots are too tight to
actually remove the game from and sure the first time you use it it might be a
little bit tight but even after a moderate amount of use it becomes quite
easy to just swap games in and out in front of these slots we have the logo
for the Retron 5 and an LED indicator system letting you know which game is
inserted the LED would have been much nicer if it was possible to have more
than one game inserted at a time anyways
if you insert more than one game instead of just choosing which one you want to
play you are served an error message until you remove all the game cartridges
that you don't want to use when you boot up the Retron 5 you're greeted by a
simple yet surprising ly or not
Android-based gaming system within the settings menu you'll be able to find
various video and audio settings included but not limited to image
filters scan lines and sound enhancement
which actually sounds pretty good you also have options like controller
remapping when to load save states and where to save things for those that wish
to use maybe an SD card there are loads of options and overall this menu system
is a good experience even with its overall kind of cheap easy menu sounds
and a little bit tedious software and firmware updating process which really
isn't that bad if you watch their video on how to do it you can even access
quick menu within the game for stuff like save states and other various quick
menu options simply by pressing down and start at the same time now loading games
can be a little funky with no official compatibility list as far as I know it's
a bit of a gamble plugging a game in it will probably work and you'll mainly
just find issues with multi-game cartridges or multi- cartridge setups
but there will be the odd game that should probably work but totally doesn't
another frustrating issue with this is that sometimes a ROM May load and it may
be able to run the game making it playable but it won't actually recognize
the game meaning that it won't L load any of your save states and none of the
cheats will actually function properly one really cool thing that the Retron
lets you do however is to utilize old carts that have dead batteries much more
effectively than you could have otherwise if the battery is dead in your cartridge and you don't go through the
process of replacing it you won't actually be able to save anything
properly but if you use save states on the Retron you can essentially replace
this functionality which is great as it can breathe life back into some old
beloved games those are problems I can look past however as honestly the vast
majority of games will work just fine you just have to be careful about
keeping things like the contacts on your carts clean enough for the conso will be
able to read it as well as possible every time to get a good load and a good
detection whenever you insert it what does get on my nerves however is moving
the save data from the game to the Retron and from the Retron to the game
it feels like moving the save data to the Retron Works essentially every time
but I can't really be all that sure that moving the save data from the Retron
back to the cart actually ever worked it it didn't actually ever work work it
seems like it would be able to sometimes work but it would wipe part of the data
that was on there and then not load the new data which is essentially destroying
your save file I had that happen to my
Pokemon Blue cart rest in peace Pokemon
Blue save game rest in peace early on I
mentioned that this is a cool way to play your old games through emulation in
order to utilize things like save states while doing it more legally than
emulating ROMs on something something like a PC or a phone and while being
able to use your badass original carts at the same time unfortunately it seems
that hyperkin may be using other developers code for a lot of their
emulator support without asking or contacting those people at all all of
this is under a code license of gplv3 which forbids incorporating the
software into something like for example a locked down piece of Hardware which is
then sold so
there's a bunch of legal mumbo jumbo going on which I don't fully understand
and the situation is kind of a mess so if you want to learn more I suggest you
just Google retroarch versus Retron or retroarch versus hyperkin and you'll
find more information there in conclusion is this the end all
replacement to Old School console clutter no latency issues that you will
most likely have to deal with at some degree due to the inclusion of HDMI will
be frustrating and it has its quirks
with features like moving saves on and off the Retron totally not working and
in some cases even breaking what is already there and it comes with a
controller which will just add Mass to landfills but in a lot of cases the
actual unit can get the job done I personally think it would be pretty neat
accessory for someone's PC setup when configured as an alternate input to
their monitor but at its current price of
$160 I see most people looking the other
way let me what you guys think in the comments down below things that are
worth their price tag however are free things especially Intel CPUs and today
we're giving you a chance to win one for free if you head over to the giveaway
page on our Forum using the link in the video description down below you can
view full entry details and sign up for a chance to win one of two i75820k from
Intel we'll be running this contest from December 19th to December 26th so just
consider this an opportunity to get a very cool belated Christmas present from
Intel we've covered these chips quite a bit since launch and I bet you'll be
pretty impressed if you get your hands on them yourself especially if you're
someone who does a lot of multitasking or whatever so head over to lineus Tech
tips forum and enter for a chance to upgrade your rig to a Haswell e
processor all right guys don't forget to comment down below what you think about
the Retron 5 and all the funky stuff that's going on with that if you don't
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link to buy a shirt we always have some kind of cool shirts going on thank you
guys for watching nice doorbell and I'll see you next time
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