RetroN5: Hands on first look

[stardust4ever]

I just want to say that I have been working with Hyperkin a bit with the R5. So far they seem to be taking compatibility and some other issues very seriously. I brought my major issues with the system a few weeks ago and a developer messaged me on Skype the other day saying that they believe they have fixed this issue. Since I don't know for sure if the issue is fixed I can't comment on what the issue is/was. However this issue I believed would be an issue that would have turned many customers off, so if it is indeed corrected that is very good news. Its honestly the biggest issue I had with the system.

I know you've got an NDA and you're talking in riddles right now. Whatever it was, I hope it has something to do with being able to load games not in the database, ie homebrews.

It's good to hear that Hyperkin is committed to making sure that the RetroN5 is a quality system.

Hey, how much of an annoyance, if at all, is the side-placed controller ports? I understand that Hyperkin has had to cram a good bit into the R5's shell, but the placement of the ports still irks me. Perhaps it won't be an issue with the NES & SNES controllers, but the Genesis DB-9 controller ports could cause problems not being front and center, just like they did with the 2600.

There's a lot bigger issues than controller placement. I find it inconvenient to plug controllers into the back of my Atari 2600, but I do it. I also have to get off my butt and walk over to the system to hit select/reset switches. The side controller ports are nothing on the retron5 compared to other more pertinent things like homebrew support. Truth be told I'll probably be using the wireless controller more often on this system to make it convenient to access things like home menu, etc. Also I prefer clicky arcade controls over leafswitches, so I have a hunch I'll like the tactille microswitches in side the R5 controller. I also have large man hands so size is no problem there.

[StoneAgeGamer]

Are you referring to the limitation that you can only have one game inserted into the system at a time? because Hyperkin said that and I speculated it might be possible for them to fix that several pages ago. You also mentioned that you found that to be a big issue that might turn off some people. Or are you talking about something else?

No I am not talking about that.

[StoneAgeGamer]

It's good to hear that Hyperkin is committed to making sure that the RetroN5 is a quality system.

Hey, how much of an annoyance, if at all, is the side-placed controller ports? I understand that Hyperkin has had to cram a good bit into the R5's shell, but the placement of the ports still irks me. Perhaps it won't be an issue with the NES & SNES controllers, but the Genesis DB-9 controller ports could cause problems not being front and center, just like they did with the 2600.

I would prefer them on the front, but to me not a deal breaker for them to be on the side.

[StoneAgeGamer]

I know you've got an NDA and you're talking in riddles right now. Whatever it was, I hope it has something to do with being able to load games not in the database, ie homebrews.

I don't have an home-brews for the system it supports, but I have seen the system say "Unrecognized Cartridge" before and it still gave you the option to attempt to run anyways. So I am not sure if homebrews will be much of an issue, but I can't tell you for sure.

[stardust4ever]

No I am not talking about that.

Homebrews or games otherwise not in the "database" will be loaded anyway?

StoneAge, you might as well fess up; gamers are going to play 20 questions until the truth squeezes out like a tube of old mayonnaise...

I don't have an home-brews for the system it supports, but I have seen the system say "Unrecognized Cartridge" before and it still gave you the option to attempt to run anyways. So I am not sure if homebrews will be much of an issue, but I can't tell you for sure.

That is good news! I love you, man...

[Tanooki]

Well said Tanooki!

Man, you really came out of your shell there. I remember you from NA. on the repros from the far east.

Yeah and if I posted that over there I'd be strung up by the hangmans noose for sure with that kind of fury. That's what I would post if there was a fair and even handling of things that wouldn't get one banned or read but not write privileges for not agreeing with the pack. It's all warez, it's just depending who you steal from it's ok to peddle and promote. Homebrew is fine, what PikoInteractive does with lost releases is fine too, but the rest is just selective theft. As far as bubble bobble 2 and samson (lickle) goes, they caught on, because it wasn't until those games really cracked $200-300+ respectively that the Japanese or importers figured they could do well on those one way or the other.

Arkanoid you're right if you collect to store and not play it is a job, enjoyable for some, not for others, but it's kind of defeating the purpose of what's there since they were designed to be played and not just stared at externally. I don't argue it, it's pointless, but in fairness it bugs me because I worked on games for a couple years over a decade ago back when the PS2 and GC were the new kids on the block. I think the thing is, people here are more gamers, there they're more collectors, and there will always be more people who buy to play than shelve an item to just have it, and those types would rather drop $20-30 on a like for like copy with new parts (like infinite lives boards) than a $600 hole in the wallet for an original old game. There has been a lot of times I'd have loved to ask the bootleggers over there to do a Samson for me but that wouldn't go over well, and the nicest answer probably would be to buy a powerpak(not an everdrive) to support Bunnyboy. I had one, the saving on it drove me nuts so I sold it. :P Gamers are equally responsible if not more for the price problems as collectors are because the gamer is in it for the fun of the game itself and is likely to do less research and they'll think $30 is a going rate on a SMB3 cart when it's like 1/2 that but they'll be happy paying to play it so it harms the informed. Sometimes ignorance is bliss and getting more so with Nintendo game buying.


BB Hood: I said probably. The only reason I said that was after I paid what I did on that one and distributed the map all the copies that have gone up since haven't sold for even $100 where they used to sell for quite a bit on ebay. Collector's won't shill for a PDF I know, but it still is a related deal and if it's easily had only the most die hard of Faria fans or NES collectors will pay up. It just seems to relate unless it's dumb luck the price tanked.


Stoneagegamer: That's great news, if it was that annoying for a gamer and businessman yourself who can regularly deal with consumer complaints you'd know best and if they nailed it, good. And it's very good they're taking their comments of shooting for compatibility seriously if they're really digging into it up until the last moment. I'm curious how that unrecognized game, try and run it anyways, setup will work out. I've got a Supervision 115in1 cart and then the retrozone Gradius II and DK Original Edition games and I'm curious if they'd run or not.

[stardust4ever]

Some simple heuristics will get the discrete and most common MMC chips working. That's 98% of US games right there and many homebrews and repros are based on common mappers. I still invision compatability issues with some NES homebrews using newvhardware like say the INL Streamers multicart, or the new RetroUSB UNROM boards with flash based game saves. Probably Action 52, Cheetahmen 2, Caltron 6-in-1, or Maxi-15 will likely not work either. I also doubt obscure Famicom games with one-off mappers like Lagrange Point's VRC7 will ever work. I have tried (and failed) to get working dumps of Xmas2013 and Study Hall using the CopyNES USB installed on my NES. I don't know if they're bad dumps or if FCEU just isn't compatible with the modified UNROM mapper they use. The cycle perfect "BS" series of emulators I can't be arsed to mess with since the author decided to use proprietary formats that need conversion, since he couldn't be bothered with support for standard iNES headers or SNES SMC file formats.

[Tanooki]

Stuff using those retrozone carts use a proprietary version of the MMC4 chip for their unique UNROM board I think I saw written over at NA. Due to that, your standard dumping methods supposedly won't work for homebrews using that. I'm not certain what they have if it's the same or not on the clearly warez stuff like the VRC hack of Gradius 2 or Donkey Kong Orig Ed. If someone can't hack up a way to do it and share with Hyperkin it probably won't happen because there's no way bunny is going to give them the information they need as it's competition with the HDMI NES he's cooking up, and the Hyperkin will cost less too due to its emulation/cart dump design.

I agree with bsnes aka higen though to a point, don't understand what byuu was thinking on that, let alone jumping multisystem in the first place. Bsnes was accurate and while it could be slow a decent modern computer could run the stuff right, but damn once he went multi-system the bloat took it into the crapper. I've tried using higen but I can't even get 60fps on chipped games at all on this i5core 2410-M laptop with 6GB of ram and a intel hd 3000 chip. I don't mind using the clean .sfc format because those old smc super magicard headers suck. Dropping .NES format headers is asinine though as they're fine.

[stardust4ever]

Stuff using those retrozone carts use a proprietary version of the MMC4 chip for their unique UNROM board I think I saw written over at NA. Due to that, your standard dumping methods supposedly won't work for homebrews using that. I'm not certain what they have if it's the same or not on the clearly warez stuff like the VRC hack of Gradius 2 or Donkey Kong Orig Ed. If someone can't hack up a way to do it and share with Hyperkin it probably won't happen because there's no way bunny is going to give them the information they need as it's competition with the HDMI NES he's cooking up, and the Hyperkin will cost less too due to its emulation/cart dump design.

I agree with bsnes aka higen though to a point, don't understand what byuu was thinking on that, let alone jumping multisystem in the first place. Bsnes was accurate and while it could be slow a decent modern computer could run the stuff right, but damn once he went multi-system the bloat took it into the crapper. I've tried using higen but I can't even get 60fps on chipped games at all on this i5core 2410-M laptop with 6GB of ram and a intel hd 3000 chip. I don't mind using the clean .sfc format because those old smc super magicard headers suck. Dropping .NES format headers is asinine though as they're fine.

So even though it says "UNROM" on the board, it is not? The demo ROMs for Study Hall and Xmas2013 are iNES mapper #2, 128kbytes (UNROM). If would take a lot of effort to completely change up the mapper used by the game between demo and cart release. The RetroUSB UNROM boards (Study Hall, Battle Kid, and recent Xmas carts if you omit the blinky LEDs) contain naught but 4 discrete 74xxx logic chips, a RAM (CHR), a single Flash ROM (PRG), and an 8-pin PIC microcontroller (CiClone 2). No FPGA, no CR2032 battery, all discrete logic. I would scan the chips on board but I'm already far off topic. My guess is that one of the sectors of the PRG Flash ROM is rewritten to save game data on games that support it. I don't know if current emulators support the newer on cart flash saves since Mapper #2 does not officially support it (NOR flash did not exist in the 1980s, or if it did, it wasn't used in NES games).

I have successfully dumped my RetroUSB DK "PIE" Foundry cart. It uses a standard Repropak board and is pure 100% CNROM, same exact mapper DK Classics uses. The ROM is nearly identical to the public dump of the "DK Complete Edition" ROM leaked by Nintendo. Brian made some very minor edit to prevent the game displaying garbled graphics on the Cement stage on some NES systems. This was due to the fact the original ROM as released by Nintendo contains bus conflicts which are ignored by the official VC emulator but cause problems in a small percentage of NES consoles.

Attempts at dumping other RetroUSB boards have been largely unsuccessful. Mr Gimmick repro does not work with the FME-Sunsoft mapper (game reboots ad-infinitum shortly after the title screen), NWC displays a corrupt title screen and does not work at all, and I've attempted every mapper known to man with SMB2j (the only Lost Levels repro I know of with level select code). Some of the older repros said MMC3 on the board, but the FPGA could have been programmed for any mapper under the sun. I honestly believe Brian hacked most of his repro mappers to be very difficult to dump or emulate, so chances of any NES RetroUSB carts other than DK "Pie" Foundry ever working with Retron5 or any other emulation based clone are slim to none. Of course they will all happily boot on his HDMI-NES, when it comes out. I plan on getting one as well.

Finally yeah on BSNES being pretty much useless since I couldn't run iNES or SMC formatted ROMs on it and couldn't be arsed to download his conversion tools and apply them to every ROM I wanted to play. Stupid. Even modern flashcarts support multiple ROM formats. For instance Super Everdrive plays SMC with or without 512 byte header and ED64 supports V64 and Z64 byte orders.

[Tanooki]

I might be off on the MMC but I remember it being brought up when someone else discussed doing what you attempted. It is regardless, abnormal, so taking it at face value you won't get the results. As you figured it, the stuff is unique and it just won't happen outside of DKOE as that already is what it is other than the little fix. I'm quite curious what they did with their warezy releases of Gradius and Kid Dracula to get those going not on a VRC chip.

I know it's almost like borderline arrogance or conceit with how bsnes and especialy higan responds to roms, but considering you need some heavy hardware to get the chipped stuff to run due to all the added bloat going multi-system it isn't worth the effort, but bsnes's last release is fantastic. And I'm not sure why you think there isn't easy conversion tools, it came packaged with snespurify.exe which you run, select the directory, and at the click of a button it converts all the roms in a directory to .sfc files. I use it anytime I buy a new SNES game.

[stardust4ever]

I might be off on the MMC but I remember it being brought up when someone else discussed doing what you attempted. It is regardless, abnormal, so taking it at face value you won't get the results. As you figured it, the stuff is unique and it just won't happen outside of DKOE as that already is what it is other than the little fix. I'm quite curious what they did with their warezy releases of Gradius and Kid Dracula to get those going not on a VRC chip.

I know it's almost like borderline arrogance or conceit with how bsnes and especialy higan responds to roms, but considering you need some heavy hardware to get the chipped stuff to run due to all the added bloat going multi-system it isn't worth the effort, but bsnes's last release is fantastic. And I'm not sure why you think there isn't easy conversion tools, it came packaged with snespurify.exe which you run, select the directory, and at the click of a button it converts all the roms in a directory to .sfc files. I use it anytime I buy a new SNES game.

Maybe I didn't play around enough with it. I think I spent ten minutes trying to get it to work with NES and SNES ROMs, then said screw it. Honestly, SNES9x and FCEU are good enough to play 99% of commercial and even homebrew ROMs. The fancy cycle perfect emulators are only necessary IMO if you need to verify whether hacks and other stuff runs on real hardware. Honestly, for that purpose, there are plenty of flash carts readily available for testing purposes.

[Satoshi_Matrix]

I know I've gone way off track in the past myself, but c'mon guys...can't we all voluntarily agree to stick to the topic of the RetroN5? If you guys want to discuss other things, make another thread for that. Here I think we should only be talking about the RetroN5 and things related to that.

[Tanooki]

I know, even said the other day a request to a mod/admin to break the posts to another thread as it was a good conversation, but in the time Ive still been replying.

[StoneAgeGamer]

Been playing a lot of Genesis games and they look and sound great. Streets of Rage sounds amazing as it should, graphics are crisp and clean like the other systems I have played.

[Satoshi_Matrix]

Do you have any Japanese MegaDrive games? There was a post a while ago of someone wanting to know if the Retron5 will fit megaDrive carts. I think it probably will (it would really be stupid of Hyperkin if it didn't) but I'd like you to confirm.

[StoneAgeGamer]

Do you have any Japanese MegaDrive games? There was a post a while ago of someone wanting to know if the Retron5 will fit megaDrive carts. I think it probably will (it would really be stupid of Hyperkin if it didn't) but I'd like you to confirm.

I probably do somewhere, but who knows where? From looking at the slot there appears to be enough room and I think Hyperkin has already stated that it does.

[NESter]

I probably do somewhere, but who knows where? From looking at the slot there appears to be enough room and I think Hyperkin has already stated that it does.

I think the deal-breaker for a lot of enthusiasts (and, for me, perhaps a deciding factor in whether I should get a Retrozone HDMI NES) is going to be the accuracy of the NES sound. Does anything sound off, and would you be willing to a do a quick comparison between Retro 5 and real NES music? Or is there a big fat NDA preventing you from telling us that?

[treismac]

I find it (just a bit) strange that more than a few retro gamers on forums are weighing the RetroN5 against Bunnyboy's hdmi NES. One plays NES and Famicom games and the other plays those plus a few other systems. If all you want is the ability to rock NES games hdmi ( yeah, I know, it has the hi score feature too), grab the hdmi NES. If you want to play/emulate other games for other systems too (and other repective features), go R5. While they're similar, they are distinct enough to merit the consideration of separate purchases.

Anyway...

[DeputyMoniker]

Let's talk about this some more, guys.

[NESter]

I find it (just a bit) strange that more than a few retro gamers on forums are weighing the RetroN5 against Bunnyboy's hdmi NES. One plays NES and Famicom games and the other plays those plus a few other systems. If all you want is the ability to rock NES games hdmi ( yeah, I know, it has the hi score feature too), grab the hdmi NES. If you want to play/emulate other games for other systems too (and other repective features), go R5. While they're similar, they are distinct enough to merit the consideration of separate purchases.

Anyway...

I'm definitely considering both. But I'd definitely hold off on buying the HDMI NES for a while if I knew how good Retron 5's NES emulation was, because the NES functionality is what I'm looking forward to above else.