RetroN5: Hands on first look

[treismac]

... you totally miss out on that warm fuzzy feeling of playing the authentic cart, whether the hardware is authentic or not.

Yeah. There is a small nagging part of me, which I wish would die half the time and the other half I celebrate, that really seems pleased knowing that I'm playing a cartridge over a rom. It's not rational; it is the nostalgic part of me as a retro gamer that is gets all warm and fuzzy when I fire up a cart from my collection, and this same side of me will probably unfortunately feel like the experience is still cheapened when I play a game on the RetroN 5 because it isn't the original hardware. And the thing is I enjoy emulation. It feels convenient and fun and "futuristic." It still feels a bit "off" sometimes, but whatever- I just go and play some rom hack, translated import, or homebrew and justify emulation to my emotional side. But with a clone, it kind of operates in a no man's land: neither fully nostalgic nor taking advantage of the newest technology (roms). I can't help by think that the fuzziness and warmth will want a bit with the R5, if popping carts is one of the big selling points for the user.

Also, for all those who bemoan the illegality of roms, buying an old cartridge of Super Mario Bros., Metroid, or Legend of Zelda from ebay or a flea market vendor takes just as much potential money out of Nintendo's bank account as downloading a rom of these games. No one who developed or published a game does a special dance when you buy the twenty plus year old original game in its original form. If you have a soft spot for following pointless laws, knock yourself out, but if you're concerned with roms hurting owners of property like in other, real physical theft, think this one through and chill out, man. To me, roms aren't theft as in stealing a CD from a store, but, rather, are more like copying a CD, taking nothing from anyone. But this is a dead horse, flogged ad nauseum to where it isn't even interesting any longer.

[Gatucaman]

Hell, at least with those ripped lables, you know it's bound to be legit (ie not have a bunch of wires bunched up and an EPROM inside)! BTW, your argument is moot since Shantea and Earthbound are both available on Virtual Console as of summer 2013. Plus, there's plenty of retro games to enjoy for around $5-$10 bucks or so.

I know I argued that downloading ROMs is illegal; that doesn't mean i don't brake the law from time to time. I also have a few repros of unreleased, translation, hacks, bootleg multicarts, etc, and I do occasionally use flash carts to play "unobtainable" games.

Can people just accept the fact that I prefer to game on actual carts if/when I have the option and my space/budget allows it?

Carts are a special part of history meant to be enjoyed but also preserved. I once lovingly restored a roach feces covered Panic Restaurant that I picked up at game-X-Change for $5. See here:
http://www.nintendoage.com/forum/mes...hreadid=100979

The game required a donor PCB to work in the end so I sacrificed a Home Alone 2. Was happy to get it working in the end and it's a great charming game. Eventually I sold it along with a Bucky-O-Hare for $230. Had I not picked up this dirty cart despite being only $5, it would have likely ended up in a landfill. Instead it went to a good home in Canada.

People have been selling illicit repros of Wild Guns, Hagane and of course Eathbound that even looked like that, legit.

and sorry but, the only reason why Shantae was put there on VC in teh 1st place, was because of the high demand because of the sequel and that's because of the interest in teh original game, who have been playing it via emulation, because the original sold like crap because i came out at the wrong time.

and as for the games available via legal form for 5-10 bucks, fair enough, but it doesnt change the fact that rarely they put out obscure high demand stuff (like your Uforia, Rondo of Blood, Monster World IV, Shantae and Sin and Punisment, (and where do you think interest for those titles came from?), there's at leats 25 game who hanst been released and probably never will, not just because of licensing issues, but also because of extreme obscurity, the source code non exiting anymore outside of ROMS, Companie IP selling hell, and in some cases, lazyness and even dishonet trolling, (earthbound being teh greatest example, nintendo LIED for years as for why they didnt released Earthbound on Wii VC despite the GIGANTONUMOUS DEMAND for that game, they made so many excuses as to why, the most prominent being the music having lots of sampling form pop culture music...............and then the WII U was not selling so they slapped Earybound on the pitiful Wii U Shop with only one change..........a different piece of dialogue, everything else was the same as in the original release, so they lied, that was disgusting)

As for your issue, i think you should have specified and have tried to avoid sounding close minded.

BTW i saw your work on that restoration of Panic Restaurant, but you shouldnt sold it for that :P.

[ApolloBoy]

(earthbound being teh greatest example, nintendo LIED for years as for why they didnt released Earthbound on Wii VC despite the GIGANTONUMOUS DEMAND for that game, they made so many excuses as to why, the most prominent being the music having lots of sampling form pop culture music...............and then the WII U was not selling so they slapped Earybound on the pitiful Wii U Shop with only one change..........a different piece of dialogue, everything else was the same as in the original release, so they lied, that was disgusting)

Uhh what

Oh and the fact that you type like a 12-year old on AIM doesn't help matters.

[stardust4ever]

and as for the games available via legal form for 5-10 bucks, fair enough, but it doesnt change the fact that rarely they put out obscure high demand stuff (like your Uforia, Rondo of Blood, Monster World IV, Shantae and Sin and Punisment, (and where do you think interest for those titles came from?), there's at leats 25 game who hanst been released and probably never will, not just because of licensing issues, but also because of extreme obscurity, the source code non exiting anymore outside of ROMS, Companie IP selling hell, and in some cases, lazyness and even dishonet trolling, (earthbound being teh greatest example, nintendo LIED for years as for why they didnt released Earthbound on Wii VC despite the GIGANTONUMOUS DEMAND for that game, they made so many excuses as to why, the most prominent being the music having lots of sampling form pop culture music...............and then the WII U was not selling so they slapped Earybound on the pitiful Wii U Shop with only one change..........a different piece of dialogue, everything else was the same as in the original release, so they lied, that was disgusting)

I'm pretty sure the BS about music being similar or having pop culture references was left out due copyright is BS. Nintendo made some pretty drastic content edits to the game when they released it in the states on the SNES, and further edits weren't really necessary for the Wii-U release. I am curious what the different piece of dialogue was though. Honestly I wouldn't mind a direct fan translation of Mother 2 into English like how they've done with Mother 1 and mother 3. Probably a lot of nutty Japanese stuff that got left out would be pretty freaking hilarious if they'd left it in. IMO the stone octopus looked way cooler than the giant pencil, although the pencil eraser pun was really clever. Overall, Earthbound is really cool due to the fact that Earthbound is a Japanese parody of American pop culture that got rereleased in America. I guess that's what makes it so zainy.

As for your issue, i think you should have specified and have tried to avoid sounding close minded.

BTW i saw your work on that restoration of Panic Restaurant, but you shouldnt sold it for that :P.

For the record, Panic Restaurant was going for $360 earlier that year when I found the turdy Game-X-change cart, and by the time Christmas season rolled around, I was out of money and Panic Restaurant had dropped to ~$300 for a pristine loose copy. Mine still had some cosmetic issues and on top of that, I fully disclosed the fact it was refurbished so several collectors who were interested didn't want it. It started at $270, then dropped the price to $240 and finally $215 before I got a bite. The shipping to Canada raised the price a bit so the buyer wanted me to sweeten the pot so I threw in bucky O hare as a bonus. Of course PR has gone back up, but a lot of collectors won't touch a refurbished cart. The fact that I had to transplant the Mask ROMs to an identical PCB in order to work likely tainted the cart in their eyes, so taking 25% off the price was fair I guess.

I'm not a good negotiator when it comes to haggling. In 2012, I traded a Bonk's Adventure for a Shantea Game Boy Color. I decided I wanted either Earthbound or Shantea for it. At the time both were worth $160. Earthbound was going for $200 at the time but in reality it's way too common to be that high. Now the value of Bonk's has ballooned to $250 and Shantea dropped to $125. I should have looked at the pricing trends. I purchased Bonk's at DK-Oldies for $60several years ago, I thought was outrageous at the time. Shantae was $200 even back then, so looking at the trends Game Boy Color went down while NES went up. Who could have guess the obvious would happen? I failed to read market trends, but the guy who I traded with did.

Either way it is moot now. I collect games to play them, and I don't believe any game cart is worth spending more than $100. I imported the Famicom versions of both FC Genjin and Wanpaku Kokkun no Gourmet World so I'm happy now to own and play the much cheaper Japanese variants.

[Niku-Sama]

i'm an excellent negotiator
I just walk up and say something like:

"how much for this funky little TV thing?" (vectrex)
"Five dolla"
"OK!"

or
"what do you want for Megaman X3"
"twenty bucks"
"eh I guess i'll but it then too"

it usually happens like that

[stardust4ever]

Try negotiating with serious collectors attempting to sell a less than pristine game. You're gonna take a chunk off the going price. I made a fat profit off that $5 cart once I was done restoring it.

[Drclaw411]

Hyperkin's facebook page is a shitshow today. The entire world went there today looking for a release date because it is now April. All Hyperkin has posted is their April Fool's joke about a RetroN Arcade console. Nobody is having fun with it and everybody is just shitting on them in the comments. One guy is calling the R5 the "RetroNever 5". Another guy simply commented "Hyperkin you are an ass.", and that one wasn't even in response to the joke...it was just a stand alone comment. It's honestly kind of funny, but at the same time I kind of feel bad for Hyperkin, everybody crapping down their eye sockets. They continue to say "April 2014" is the release date, but haven't given an exact date. Amazon hasn't updated their page or given ETA ship dates. Newegg customers are saying their orders are showing an April 30th release, which Hyperkin hasn't commented on and has ignored all inquiries about.

One guy said he was emailing with a Hyperkin tech who told him that they are just waiting for their big ass shipment to get here from China, and that they already had one shipment but the "boards were screwed up"...the guy didn't know if the tech was referring to the issue with faulty pins from last December or if this was something new. Hyperkin did post that they received the boxes and posted a picture...these weren't boxed units, they were actual empty boxed. Sooo...is the small tiny staff at Hyperkin just boxing the consoles up themselves and then sending them out to Amazon, Newegg and the like? Could that be why they won't give an actual date? They have no idea when they'll be done boxing and sealing these up?

[Tanooki]

Wow PIC bomb! Hah. No it's not alright for people to ask that much, but right or wrong the bastards do it. And what's more sickening is that if you want to get rid of a game you have four primary choices. Trash it, give it away, stand on principle and sell a $50 game for $10 so some fuckstick can resell it, or ask at or somewhat below the asking price so that you can make a buck but enough someone won't resell it.


As for that one dude charging money for like for like labels -- I wish MORE did it and the quality would continue to increase to being just right. Ripped up labels suck as an OCD eyesore, but paying $100-300 to replace a game over a fuzzy fucked label is even worse.


The story about Earthbound beind held back so long is a lie. The game was vetted in the 90s for any such issues and even their over the top stuff with religious icons and other simple things like bottles. The translator of the game in the 90s was interviewed in the last year, someone on NA tied a link to it and the guy said as much so I'd take his word on it.


Hey stardust what did you do to restore a cart to sell it for more as I'm curious what your practices are.

[Atarileaf]

With regards to the rom issue, personally I've only downloaded roms of games I own on cart. Perhaps still not completely legit but I'm fine with it.

[Zap!]

With regards to the rom issue, personally I've only downloaded roms of games I own on cart. Perhaps still not completely legit but I'm fine with it.

How about .mp3 tracks back in the Napster days?

[Tupin]

Seriously, I'm sick of all of this April Fool's Day shit. Who the hell falls for it? Like, with literally everyone having some sort of massive "change" all at the same time? Goddamn.

[StoneAgeGamer]

Seriously, I'm sick of all of this April Fool's Day shit. Who the hell falls for it? Like, with literally everyone having some sort of massive "change" all at the same time? Goddamn.

I think most companies do it for fun, not to actually trick people. We did a joke today about a new Sega Pico flash cart called the PicoDrive.

[Atarileaf]

How about .mp3 tracks back in the Napster days?

What about them? The issue is no different whether it's music, movies, roms or software.When we were kids we made copies of friends records on cassette and handed them out like candy. We had a local coco user group that was basically a software trading depot.The point is NOW, this is how I feel, not back in the 90's with Napster or the 70's and 80's with records and software.

[stardust4ever]

Hyperkin's facebook page is a shitshow today. The entire world went there today looking for a release date because it is now April. All Hyperkin has posted is their April Fool's joke about a RetroN Arcade console.

Don't care if it's fake; Dat shit is sweet! It would look nice next to my retro joysticks, which I do plan on using with Retron5 in the future:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/302035...7629736738048/

Hey stardust what did you do to restore a cart to sell it for more as I'm curious what your practices are.

It was possibly the most disgusting cart I've ever seen. I even sealed it in a ziplock baggie because I didn't want my other games contaminated by it's filth. Read this thread:
http://www.nintendoage.com/forum/mes...hreadid=100979

Cleaning up the cartridge itself was the easy part. Due to heavy corrosion on the cartridge connectors that even heavy sanding couldn't fully remove, I finally came to the conclusion that the PCB was a lost cause. I meticulously transplanted the mask ROMs to a donor cart (Home Alone 2) which had an identical board and MMC3 revision. The home Alone 2 was meticulous and looked like it had only been played once or twice in it's lifetime. I gotta feel sorry for the kid who opened it up on Christmas morning. That game sucked balls. anyway with the skill, precision, and care of a surgeon, I desoldered the old PR Mask ROMs and planted them on the new board. The job was almost undetectable and the biggest noticeable difference in the boards was a blue instead of black electrolytic capacitor.

Despite this, when I decided to sell the cart six months later, I fully disclosed that the cart was refurbished and the methods used. I likely took a pay hit due to my honesty as there were several interested buyers who changed their mind after reading the "Unminty PR" thread. I wasn't gonna have somebody buy it and then examine the board with a magnifying glass and notice some bull shit discrepancy like tiny inconsistencies with the solder/flux, simply because the mask ROMs, while 100% authentic, had to be hand soldered.

[Satoshi_Matrix]

...and you totally miss out on that warm fuzzy feeling of playing the authentic cart, whether the hardware is authentic or not.

Don't get me wrong, I suffer from this particular mental disease that afflicts retro gamers too, hence why I own about 2500 physical games. A lot of times I get a new game for a retro system I could easily emulate it, I justify it by thinking something like "well, I already have a huge collection already, what's one more gonna hurt?" or "oh well, it was cheap anyway". Later on when I think more clearly I think "I shouldn't have wasted that money".

Rationally, there can be no doubt about it - the "feeling" you talk about is nostalgia driven nonsense that's entirely in your head. The difference between loading a game up via a cartridge vs an emulator is distinguishable only as far as its the process you repeated tens of thousands of times in the past vs something that's new and achieves the same effect.

It would be like if you were given the opportunity to drive a new future car that ran on electricity and didn't have petals and a steering wheel, but instead a Star Trek like control panel. Totally different process, but the end result would be a car that you can drive around. That "warm fuzzy feeling of playing the authentic cart" would be exactly the same as longing for the gasoline driven, pedal and steering wheel cars of today.

Nostalgia is something to be examined, and those kinds of metal blocks that lead you to prefer the way things used to be simply because you aren't used to using the new methoids shouldn't be embraced. The only legitimate reasons to have a physical collection of anything that can be perfectly emulated is for resale value and not to worry about DRM. You can't sell a digital game short of selling an entire account associated with it.

Yeah. There is a small nagging part of me, which I wish would die half the time and the other half I celebrate, that really seems pleased knowing that I'm playing a cartridge over a rom. It's not rational; it is the nostalgic part of me as a retro gamer that is gets all warm and fuzzy when I fire up a cart from my collection, and this same side of me will probably unfortunately feel like the experience is still cheapened when I play a game on the RetroN 5 because it isn't the original hardware. And the thing is I enjoy emulation. It feels convenient and fun and "futuristic."

First, see my response to stardust, secondly, and this is important, I really don't want to offend anyone here. So If I inadvertently do, I deeply apologize. Everyone is free to their own thoughts.

What you said right there got me thinking about science and religion, and the The Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate. One side is rational based, interested in seeking answers to questions and building knowledge, the other side is irrational based, not particularly interested in knowing answers and instead comfortable with the way things are, what is already known, and what will forever be.

So too I think there might just be a correlation to the schools of thought that are behind those who state that something is lost when you emulate vs those who feel like there is only gains.

[stardust4ever]

I did the whole ROMs thing in 1999/2000. I got bored with it real quick, especially with crappy keyboards and stiff Logitech PC gamepads. It wasn't until after my dad passed away I found a CIB NES while cleaning out the garage in 2002, and spent hours fumbling with it and "blowing" in the carts to finally get it to work, then drove to Game-X-Change and practically bought out the store (prices in 2002/2003 were so much more reasonable back then), that I truly got addicted to retro console gaming.

ROMs on a PC didn't do it for me, and they still don't. The most time I ever spend in an emulator is to playtest a game to see if it's worth purchasing as a cart. It doesn't matter that I now have USB adapters to use real controllers, cart dumpers, flash carts, and the whole kit-and-kaboodle. It there isn't a 72-pin connector (or however many pins a given system uses) and a real controller port somewhere in the chain, it doesn't feel right. Playing real carts on the Retron5 is just as authentic as playing ROMs on a flash cart on a real NES system. Fact is both use an interface that requires plugging in a cartridge. Technically, the Retrode doesn't quite cut the mustard even though it has a cart interface, because once the ROM is dumped to my PC I'm back to using emulators. True the Retron5 also uses an emulator, however it doesn't feel like one.

Bottom line, sans official console emulators such as Wii/Wii-U VC, plugging in a cart is the only way for me to appreciate the games. It's gotta have that magical cart connector somewhere in the chain. Doesn't matter how the game data gets displayed on the TV screen or what kind of bizarre controller setup I have; it's gotta be on real carts. Sure I may be a nostalgic old kook that had to get his fix as an adult because he was deprived of video games as a child, but I'm sure others on this forum agree with me that it's all about the cartridges. Retron5 just seems like the perfect marriage of 20+ years old and brand new technology. So are modern flash carts, even if Retron5 and flash carts are mutually exclusive.

Retron5 exists for the exact same reasons why vinyl records are making a comeback. Sure they're big and fugly, but there's something about watching a 12" LP spin around and around on a turntable, just like there's something about the whole "insert cartridge into system and play" vibe.

[Atarileaf]

Interesting, so a virtual console game via the online store and emulated on the Wii is fine but modding a wii for emulation and playing that exact same game is different?

[treismac]

So too I think there might just be a correlation to the schools of thought that are behind those who state that something is lost when you emulate vs those who feel like there is only gains.

I think the Myers & Briggs' Thinker/Feeler dichotomy works well with emulation/hardware line of thinking (or feeling) and is going in a very similar direction to where you were heading, Satoshi.

http://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-p...or-feeling.asp

Mind you, the categories aren't absolutes- they're more like degrees or a spectrum, so it is more of a matter of how much of a thinker or feeler are you rather than someone being 100% a thinker or feeler.

The cold, hard math (thinker) of the matter points to the superfluous of physical media. Once I start playing a game, does it really matter if I popped in a cartridge or selected a rom? However, humans are not 100% rational or objective observers or partakers of experiences. We are no where close. I believe that wine tasting has a great deal in common with retro gaming with it's rituals, labels, accoutrements, levels of expertise, etc., which all effect one's perception of the experience of wine tasting. If someone thinks a bottle of wine costs $750, they are going to experience the exact SAME wine radically differently than if they think it's a $5 bottle of cheap piss. Repeated tests have born this truth out. Perception is key. Likewise, I think the intangible nature and free cost of roms contributes to the perception of their undesirability to many retro gaming purists. Just as a wine purist truly does enjoy the $24 glass of wine more than the $4 one (regardless of if they are the SAME wine), the purist, also, enjoys the cartridge game more. I think our subjectivity is thrown way further out of wack than wine snobs because we have nostalgia thrown into the equation, as well, which affects our perception even greater.

Here is an article (there are many on the interwebs) about wine and perception:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/katiebel...pensive-wines/

Interesting, so a virtual console game via the online store and emulated on the Wii is fine but modding a wii for emulation and playing that exact same game is different?

Not to be a bastard by jumping on the "that's inconsistent bandwagon," but yeah... Apart from clicking a video game's channel/square/whatever on the Wii home screen rather than scrolling through a list of game names on a Wiibrew emulator, how is there any difference? I actually prefer Wiibrew as it affords me more options with most emulators than is available with the official Wii emulation: multiple save states, filters, remapping buttons, etc.

Retron5 exists for the exact same reasons why vinyl records are making a comeback. Sure they're big and fugly, but there's something about watching a 12" LP spin around and around on a turntable, just like there's something about the whole "insert cartridge into system and play" vibe.

I agree. All of the superfluous ruffles and lace heighten the perception of the experience but don't change the actual experience. Regardless, we're tactile, sensory creatures (for now. Hurry up, Singularity :P ), so if watching a record spin makes Johnny Be Good sound better than when you listen to it on your mp3 player, relish it, but don't look too far down your nose at those who don't share your enthusiasm for the "authentic" experience, okay?

[Satoshi_Matrix]

All I can say is that I hope there will always be people who think like stardust does, so when comes time to shed my collection of hundreds and hundreds of physical games, I can at least break even if not make a small profit.

[Gameguy]

Despite this, when I decided to sell the cart six months later, I fully disclosed that the cart was refurbished and the methods used. I likely took a pay hit due to my honesty as there were several interested buyers who changed their mind after reading the "Unminty PR" thread. I wasn't gonna have somebody buy it and then examine the board with a magnifying glass and notice some bull shit discrepancy like tiny inconsistencies with the solder/flux, simply because the mask ROMs, while 100% authentic, had to be hand soldered.

I'm not sure if there's anything wrong with not mentioning the repair, as long as the cart is working properly. You used a proper original Nintendo board to repair it, the same version as the original board. It's not like there's serial numbers which are meant to match. Unless it's some really rare cart like a Nintendo World Championships or something similar, then I can understand mentioning it. Even carts produced on the same manufacturing lines would have slight differences to them with how the solder flows. Nobody hates it when batteries are replaced in carts with battery holders, it's kind of the same thing with this type of repair.

It's different with replacement labels(I don't think you replaced the label from what I read). It's not like the new labels are old spares made by Nintendo, they're just made by some guy like any bootlegs. If they're not made by original manufacturer, they're fake.

Retron5 exists for the exact same reasons why vinyl records are making a comeback. Sure they're big and fugly, but there's something about watching a 12" LP spin around and around on a turntable, just like there's something about the whole "insert cartridge into system and play" vibe.

It depends on the type of vinyl collector. The collectors spending hundreds or thousands on individual records are doing so for better sound quality, they won't be using them for looks. They'll be using high quality players and styluses, not cheap players for convenience. There are plenty of all-in-one turntables which are more convenient to use and save space, these aren't the ones serious collectors would use.

The collectors you're talking about are mostly hipsters, or just casual collectors. They want the popular music and would be happy playing them on any cheap player that's still working. They won't be spending much on each album. This is the same type of collector who would go for the Retron5, just someone interested in convenience but still liking the feel of using older technology.


Using emulation has it's place. I remember emulating games while at school and having free time, it's not like I could bring a console to school to play with. Plus there's the odd translation, prototype, or import that's easiest to play using emulation. It's been ages since I've done any of this. I get using flashcarts on real consoles, the games all play the same as they should on real hardware. Playing real carts on a 3rd party system doesn't make much sense to me outside of for kicks or just trying to save money compared to buying real systems at retail pricing. You've got the right games but they're not running 100% like on authentic hardware, this isn't even a portable clone so it's not that much more convenient than real systems. It's not as convenient as pure emulation on a computer or laptop. This isn't something I'd ever be interested in owning.