Retrode
Emulation-nut Mike Saunders is in heaven. And for once, it has nothing to do with Weißbier…
Plug in your game cart and its contents appear as a ROM image on a removable drive – simple as that.
Shiny and black, the Retrode reminds us very much of the Sega Master System II.
What a fantastic idea this is. We love emulators, and spend way too much time playing classic games from the 80s and 90s. But there’s always one problem: the legality of ROM fi les (the fi le that contains the data from a read-only memory chip – more or less a clone of a game cartridge). Some people argue that if you already own the physical version of a game, there’s nothing wrong with playing a ROM fi le in an emulator – but then, where do you get the ROM fi le from? Chances are it has come off a website somewhere, and generated by someone else, so the legal questions remain.
The Retrode avoids all of these complications by enabling you to play your original Super NES and Sega Mega Drive (aka Genesis) cartridges in an emulator on your PC. And the way it does that it is beautifully simple. It doesn’t require special data transmission software or custom emulators or anything like that – it just works out of the box.
On the top of the Retrode are two cartridge slots for the aforementioned consoles. Plug in a cartridge, connect the Retrode to your PC via the included USB cable, and you’ll see a new removable USB drive appear. Open this drive and voilà: the contents of the cartridge are available as a ROM file (eg for SNES games they appear as .sfc files), ready to play in an emulator such as ZSNES. You’re no longer playing a random ROM fi le from an unknown source, but the exact code in the physical cartridge that you own.
Rainbow Road revisited
One of the most common annoyances that people have with emulators is having to use different controllers to the original machines. You can get adapters to connect original Super NES and Mega Drive joypads to USB ports, but the Retrode is ahead of the game here and includes four joypad ports: two Super NES and two Mega Drive. These appear to the system as standard USB game controllers, so they will work with any emulator.
And it gets better: if the game has battery-backup save states, in many cases you can access them too. We plugged in our copy of Super Mario Kart that we bought in 1992, and a .srm fi le containing our lap time records appeared on the drive, which loaded seamlessly into ZSNES. If you have some saved games that mean the world to you, and you’re worried about the in-cart batteries dying, you need this. Now.
The Retrode worked with all the Mega Drive (5) and SNES (8) cartridges we tested, although there are compatibility notes on the website, so it’s worth checking those before buying the device. You can even get adapters to play Nintendo 64, Game Boy and Master System games. We’re beaming with delight at the prospect of getting our old Wave Race 64 records off the cartridge…
LINUX VOICE VERDICT
A brilliant idea, executed well. Not cheap for casual gamers, but for hard-core emulation fans it’s bliss.
4.5 out of 5 stars
Web:
http://www.retrode.org/
Developer: Matthias Hullin
Price: €64.90 (~$75.08)
Retrode 2 out now!
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Originally Posted by Leo_A
