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.