Rumor confirmed!! The RetroN5 will be fully playable at SRGE 2013!!
July 13-14 at the Seattle Center, see you all there!!

Gerald

Take some pics for us!

The problem is if the game isn't in their ROM database, it won't start at all.  New homebrews, demos, prototypes, custom or LE carts, all will have to wait for a firmware update before you can play the game.  

If you are just sticking to the common games and the standard controllers it will work fine.  Assuming they fix the lag the quality will be good like all software emulators for many years.  Once you get beyond that it will start having issues.  

"Calling all trolls! Come take your "constructive" comments and say it to our faces. Ask everything you ever wanted to ask; we dare you to ask for a release date. Take a picture with our red hippo. Talk smack on high school students while begging for a RetroN 5. Play us in a round of retro gaming - just don't be a noob. But above all else, give yourself a reason to come out of that garage or your mom's basement. Oh, and please, take a shower first."

Looks like Hyperkin is getting a tad butthurt lol

http://hyperkin.com/showlist...

It's great to see there's still demand for the games we all love, but I don't understand the appeal of these clone systems at all. There are still plenty of original consoles out there (plus flash carts), and playing 8/16-bit games on a 42" LED just feels wrong somehow. Whatever floats your boat I guess

Super excited for this! Last I heard release in april or did they push it back again? I would pay $100 just to play my Gameboy games, let alone everything else it has to offer whoooo! One thing that might be an issue, I guess you won't be able to play multi player on any of the gameboy games...

I'm still going to get one, but I'm over it at this point. I'll wait until it's released and if it's too backlogged I'll just keep waiting. Not like I haven't waited long enough!

I am still going to get my preorder. Either I will keep in CIB/sealed, or flip it if the demand is high.

Depending on the reviews, maybe it would be good as a spare for the living room so me and my wife can play games together? Of course there's no replacing the real systems in my little "man cave" of course.

Link to my interview last summer where they talked about release dates a little.

Sad news: I was thinking the same until I heard about them recently adding HDCP to the R5. Why they'd do that is beyond me. For movies I can understand the copy protection, but with games that where from the 80s and 90s?

I guess I'll have to find a work-around to bypass the HDCP because like I said way back at the beginning of this thread, I still want to record and compare to other clone consoles.

1:36 "whuuuuuut"

Haha, yeah. Could've edited it out, didn't.

Friend of mine has the Retron 3 and hates it and says it's glitchy.  You think the 5 will be perfect?

I don't know about perfect, but I was kinda impressed with it. When I did the interview, I knew nothing about it, so my reactions are genuine. I do think the save feature is cool. I liked the cheats, which seemed to include anything you could possible think of. The Retron 5 they had at Too Many Games was an early prototype, and I know it had changed some when I saw them again at PRGE, but it was looking good last summer.

Now, that goes without talking about the hardware and stuff. But if I were a casual gamer, like someone who just happened to keep some of his games from when they were a kid, then I think something like this is perfect. I had a Retro Duo, and at the time, it was the perfect thing. My NES from when I was a kid had gone kaput and I didn't know about changing out the pins and stuff back in the day. So something like this would be great, I think, for someone who wants to play their old stuff.

I know everyone is maybe not so thrilled because of their delays, but I think they did the right thing. If the pins were messed up on the consoles, which to me seems like it would be a manufacturing defect, then I think waiting was the right move. Shoot, they may add some stuff in the meantime, haha!

I gotcha. I've never owned one just going by reviews I've read and my one friend who bought the retron 3. I guess we'll have to wait until release and see what people say about it. I'm sure a lot of guys in here will be on the pre-order

I've got my preorder at StoneAgeGamer.com

The design of the 5 (software emulators on android) is a completely different concept than the 3 (hardware system on a chips) so the quality of one doesn't really mean anything for the other.

Fixing their issues is not the problem, the problem is they hyped the thing way too early.  Even without the pin issue people were already starting to lose interest because it took them so long.  Then, of course there is the problem that they didn't catch the issue until so late in the process.  They also are handling all the little things with the system completely wrong imho.. They won't answer any questions, and those that do they are intentionally vague and deceptive..  they require a secret firmware update to map new games to mappers instead of just letting you do it which is garbage..  All I wanted to know since day 1 is are they going to let me apply translation patches or not..  I'm guessing not since they refuse to answer, but I'm sure they could allow this no problem if they wanted and they refuse to answer everything so who knows.


Of course fixing the issue is better than not fixing it, but those are not the only possibilities here.  You could, you know, have fixed the issue way back when, never have caused the issue in the first place, or simply not have started hyping up way way way before you are ready (even disregarding the pin issue)..   Then even after they fuck all that up, they could give a proper estimate and say "this issue will probably delay us a year" or whatever, instead of saying every month "any day now.."lol

They did say in my interview last summer they were looking at a release... last summer. Gotta be careful with that hype!  

Well, I did cancel my preorder... twice! Mainly because I was short on cash but also because I don't like to have money invested into a product which may or may not release. I reordered recently and did get a nice 15% discount coupon from Stone Age Gamer and applied it towards the Retron5 + the mini SMS converter. If I cancel again, I'll lose the nice discount so I'm in it for the long haul this time around.

That said, a lot of gamers are going to give up on this system. The Retro Tri is also coming, and assuming the NES portion doesn't have weird audio issues (for instance, on my Yobo and other swapped duty cycle NOACs, Mario says "whump" instead of "oiee" when he jumps), I may pick it up as it seems to be a far better fabricated clone than the Retron3 or FC3. The Tri system uses legacy analog output and should also have no problems playing homebrews either.

I just wish someone could also produce a clone for N64 or Atari. N64 especially would benefit from HD graphics (think 1440x1080p effective resolution plus sidebars), and a proper NTSC Atari 2600/7800 clone would help with display issues with Atari's malformed RF signal.

I would love to be able to play my Atari games without relying on RF. The ability to play the 2600 and 7800 on a modern TV without the games looking like garbage would be fantastic.

For intellivision, I have found that finding the correct RF adapter (one of the direct ones ended up working perfectly, but not all of them did) was essential to getting a great picture on modern tvs. Not sure if the atari is any different

I'm currently using a direct adapter, which is giving me better picture quality than the old switchbox did, but the picture still isn't very good. A friend of mine is having a couple of 2600s modded and will be sending me one, so that will solve the problem, at least as far as my old SDTV is concerned. I'd still like to be able to play my Atari games on an HDTV and have them look great, eventually.

N64 just begs for the HD treatment.

As for Atari, I have a USB capture card (Hauppauge) that works flawlessly with NES, SNES, and Genesis, but spits grayscale puke (with extremely fine vertical bars) whenever it is connected to a demodulated Atari (using VCR as middleman). Even if I use the VCR trick, the modulated/demodulated signals form my 3rd and 4th generation retro systems work, albeit with a slight amount of bleed added by the modulation compared to native composite. Somehow I believe the Atari NTSC video signal is just whacked up or otherwise off spec, even when spitting out the proper scanline count. Somehow, even if composite modding a system would provide a clearer picture on CRT TVs, I don't thinkthe mod would help with the internal signal timings, which I suspect are slightly off. I really whis someone created an Atari 2600/7800 compatible FPGA clone to address display issues, similar to Brian's HDMI NES project. Excecution speed could even be accelerated during the V-blank period and them halted until the beginning of the next frame, to ensure all games finished excecuting their code and ran a clean NTSC/PAL compatible scanline count regardless of how many lines the game nominally put out (some games don't always output a proper or consistent number of scanlines, causing major sync issues on various retro and modern displays). A toggle switch could be used to force 262 (NTSC), 312 (PAL), or allow native timing. Either way, with as timing critical as Atari is, no SOAC clone (Flashback II, for instance) would likely work properly, especially with homebrews. And the Asian manufacturers obviously aren't interested in fabricating an Atari clone because being an American system it was practically nonexistent to them.