I've read a few clickbait articles about this thing and to be honest I'm really left scratching my head as to why people seems so blown away by the thing. If you haven't read about it, it's a console planned by a Japanese company that's basically a Retron5 replacing the NES cart slot with a PCE/TG16 HuCard slot and the original controller ports with standard USB ports. It will also supposedly be compatible with Dualshock 3 and 4 pads.

The major difference with it is that it allows you to save the ROM dump to internal memory so you don't have to bother physically inserting the cart again. In essence you could spend an afternoon shoving your cart collection in and out of it then have your collection archived, never having to dig the carts out again.

I was really surprised by the amount of enthusiasm and positive press given to this thing. My first response was "Why would I want this?", which is strange coming from a guy that owns tons of clones and knockoff hardware. The whole pro/con discussion of it just being ROMs played through an emulator and so why bother dropping the cash with the Retron5 has been covered already, but being that this machine doesn't even force you to insert the cart again really drives that point home. Add to that you at least had the nostalgia or comfort factor of using original controllers with the Retron5 and now you don't even have that luxury unless you purchase some additional hardware, I'm really hard pressed to think of any reason to buy/use this over something like an Ouya or a modded Xbox.

Even if I just limit my archive to the ROMs of the actual carts I own, I have a half-dozen options offhand right now to play these games on an HDTV with a Playstation or generic USB pad, and I'd hazard a guess all these options are cheaper than this new console would cost.