RetroN5: Hands on first look

[Tanooki]

Dude unless an admin here or a lawyer said so, don't be spineless, put your posts back. There are people here very interested to learn what we can about this thing that want to throw real money at it if it's a good device.

I'm seeing you think the audio is less than execellent and that the system reads carts then fires up the emulator to play the stuff. Can't say much to the first as I never heard a retron in action before, but to the other it would make sense I suppose if they feel that works best for their save/load states on games, but it still seems weird.

[shadowkn55]

Dude unless an admin here or a lawyer said so, don't be spineless, put your posts back. There are people here very interested to learn what we can about this thing that want to throw real money at it if it's a good device.

I got an early phone call this morning. One of those two things did happen.

[Tanooki]

Gotcha, that's a shame. I'd guess lawyers, they're usually full of shit and looking to make a buck any slimy way possible. Sorry you ran into trouble and I wish I had read this thread an hour earlier as it's infuriating they keep delaying and keeping their traps shut. Eventually I just won't care or pay for one if they keep it up.

[shadowkn55]

The system has the potential to be an outstanding product if the development time was put into it. I'd rather see it continually delayed and come out near perfect than come out early as a cash grab. Otherwise, you'll stain your reputation beyond repair with the broken promises of the Neo-Geo X. How Tommo convinced SNKP that it was a good idea is beyond me.

[T2KFreeker]

Wow, what a way to derail a thread. Craziness. Was looking forward to seeing what was up with this thing, but I guess not now.

[Tanooki]

Well going by your feelings about the NGX. I'd guess it's acceptable and your average casual player with memories probably won't notice, but to people posting on this site I think it'll end up being another in the line of retrons they don't want to own. I hope that's not the case, but hey if it is I save a $100. Oh well, we'll see how it goes with the delays.

[nusilver]

Wow, I came into this thread too late, huh?

Incidentally, i heard from Hyperkin recently that they wouldn't ask their beta testers to test my Mother 3 repro (which they are familiar with) because of the legal grey zone associated with repros, but they did say that whatever incompatibilities the R5 had with any cartridge at all would be fixed with firmware updates.

[Satoshi_Matrix]

For those who missed it, OP basically stated that he's mostly unhappy with the fact that an android based emulation machine.....is an android based emulation machine. Brilliant.

pretty much everything he said can be attributed to beta firmware and could/will be fixed down the road, but the basic beats that I picked up on: (I'll delete this if necessary, but c'mon, it was already publically released, and I didn't sign any non-disclosure for this)

-The Retron5 dumps roms, doesn't read from them. So it creates a rom file of your game cart and loads that, and thats how it does savestates and such. OP claims NES and SNES games dump quickly, but GBA games can take several minutes. I asked if this reoccurs, but never got a response. If I had to hazard a guess, I bet this is like the loading of Call of Cthulhu for Xbox, where the first time you do it the load times are lengthy, but on repeated plays the loadtimes are shortened. That's my guess.

Dumping carts to roms rather than reading directly from them is what I was suspecting, and its not necessarily a bad thing. That would mean that games with dead batteries are savable through a digital storage medium (probably a small amount of onboard storage?) or savestates. yay for that.

However, OP did also mention that because the rom dumps are checked against a database, reproduction carts probably won't work. Based on that, I suspect Flashcarts like the Everdrives and Powerpaks probably won't work on the RetroN5 either. Take that, everyone who planned on buying this solely for use with Flashcarts.

-Only one game can be inserted into one of the five slots at a time. This ties into that it dumps the roms. If you put in more than one cart into the slots, it will confuse the system.

-HDMI only. According to OP, there is no composite video outputs like Hyperkin showed off at PAX last year.

-OP claims the wireless controller is garbage, with "mouse like" buttons. He didn't explain his position much, just that he didn't care for it. I'm still not going to judge the thing for myself until I have it in my own hands and use it myself. Maybe it's awful, maybe not. We'll just have to see.

-OP claims there were slight audio issues, but didn't explain.

-OP played NES games then switched to SNES and then used an OEM Nintendo NES controller to play Super Mario World, but didn't like that the NES controller didn't magically have all the buttons needed to do every action in SMW. Read my first reply comment for more info.


That was pretty much it. Just that he felt that the RetroN5 needs tweaking, and that's somehow surprising given that its an Android based emulation machine in beta. I was hoping to get specific useful info, but alas, all we know right now is that the beta system is in beta. shocking.