GG adaptor for Retron 5!

[David J.]

Just buy a raspberry pi, setup retropie and call it a day...

[Guntz]

most people do NOT care if a game runs emulated or on "real hardware". Heck, even Genesis 3 cannot be considered "real hardware".

On the other side, my 5+ year old netbook does all the Retron 5 does and much better and with a lot of other options like having all the games for all the systems stored in it (I don't, but I could). Even a Raspberry Pi can do this without hassle. But I get people want convenience and getting the feeling that they are reviving their old cartridges, and that ultimately feels real, and probably feels more real than using an everdrive on a MD 1 (like I do) even if the latter is supposed to be more real.

In the end it's just code being interpreted and people who buy Retrons want something more solid, something they can touch. I don't like giving money to people benefiting of others work but I understand people doing it and thinking "hell, that's how the real world works anyway"

*sigh*, you're really misinformed. Most people don't care, but they should.

Old games are code, cartridge or ROM file, same thing. They are literally instructions for hardware. It ALL comes down to the hardware whether the game plays correctly! Real hardware ensures the game will run properly, no slowdown, no bullshit. Like everything in life, there's good and bad real hardware, Genesis has lots of that.

Now things like software emulators are very different. It's a completely unrelated CPU having to interpret code it doesn't normally understand. Trying to replicate like this down to the transistor would require a massive ton of processing power, to the point that remaking the original console chipset makes more sense.

Shouldn't the most important part of a game be how it runs? They best option is real hardware, because it's transistor accurate. Software emulators, just by their nature alone, can't be 100% identical. The key part here is consoles like the RetroN5 have underpowered hardware, so the emulation sucks.

[Thierry Henry]

I'm ok with it. The feature where it applies a translation patch in-game is also neat.

[Raijin Z]

Just buy a raspberry pi

Don't support Raspberry Pi in any capacity. If you see it in the road, you must kill it. If it is burning to death, you may beat the fire out with a tire iron.

Anyway, best thing you can do if you love video games is to support the current projects of those who haven't turned traitor like Con-Man did.

[chilled]

*sigh*, you're really misinformed. Most people don't care, but they should.

I'm not disinformed... people are.

And the are more differences between revisions of a rom than there are (gameplay wise) between playing on a real MD and a PC (I do both), and most people in this forum don't seem to care about this. There are also way more differences graphically in outputting from not recoded RGB source than compositing, s-videoing, etc (and that, people in this forum really care about, as they should) than from outputting the same video between RGB from a PC or the real deal.

I don't know. It all comes down to playing games/carts with on/off buttons, pads, cords, etc and launching it with a mouse and your skype/browser/gmail in the background

[Lastcallhall]

I'm not disinformed... people are.

And the are more differences between revisions of a rom than there are (gameplay wise) between playing on a real MD and a PC (I do both), and most people in this forum don't seem to care about this. There are also way more differences graphically in outputting from not recoded RGB source than compositing, s-videoing, etc (and that, people in this forum really care about, as they should) than from outputting the same video between RGB from a PC or the real deal.

I don't know. It all comes down to playing games/carts with on/off buttons, pads, cords, etc and launching it with a mouse and your skype/browser/gmail in the background

This might be the biggest load of bullshit I've read all day. If you really think that playing a ROM on a PC is the same experience/different method as playing on a custom chipset designed to run the code - regardless of revision - that's supplied on a cartridge -

Wait. You're trolling, aren't you? You have to be.

[Raijin Z]

Nothing wrong with emulation if that's all you have access to, or if you don't want to drop a few thousand dollars on systems that will just start collecting dust after a few hours on each.

[chilled]

This might be the biggest load of bullshit I've read all day. If you really think that playing a ROM on a PC is the same experience/different method as playing on a custom chipset designed to run the code - regardless of revision - that's supplied on a cartridge -

Wait. You're trolling, aren't you? You have to be.

Maybe it's time to state that I own 5 Megadrives and no other console, and I use them. I was saying that there's not as much as differences as there is between playing rev00 and rev02 of some games (you know which one I'm thinking about). There you have obvious differences you can comment on. Between playing with a usb MD pad on a PC connected to a 120" projected image on a wall and an old 15" CRT which sole merit is being so bad it blends pixels and avoids dithering in RGB, and and a VA1.8 MD2 (one of the most common models at least in Europe) with "awesome" stock sound, well, no, I don't think there's too much difference from a gamer point of view. And if there is some, it is to the advantage of, safly, emulation.

It's not me who is saying image quality is much better in Fusion than in its original hardware. But, oh well, if you still think I'm advocating for emulation, be it, read what you want from what I'm saying. I'm just trying to state the obvious: 99% people can't tell if a video output s being emulated or produced by real hardware and, if they can, it's just because image quality is poorer on real hardware. That's the sad truth you don't seem to like to acknowledge just because it looks cooler to advocate for the real thing. Well, I advocate for the real thing (did you forget the part where I say using the Everdrive vs real carts doesn't feel real?), but that doesn't mean I have to say everything but crappy video re-encoded in realtime (except for RGB) by a crappy encoder inside some hardware that was produced to be the cheapest possible, and then upscaled by a framemeister and whatnot, is the only way to go.

I'm sorry but I'll never buy a DS to play remakes or buy HD versions of 16-bit games, but I get why people do that instead of (re)purchasing real old hardware, CRTs, etc: if people just want to feel they are using an old console they go buy a Retron which just seems to work, video is outputted & upscaled anywhere without hassle (I guess) and they still get the feel that they are using real hardware (meaning a physical object they have to turn on, has pads, accepts their old cartridges, etc): do you really think people care if their car is being loaded on some flash memory before launch and then the hardware is being emulated instead of "reconstructed" inside the console?

[Guntz]

I take it you don't know that today's software emulators must approximate the interpretation of the target platform for speed? If a Genesis emulator were to do transistor-accurate emulation (functional equivalent to real hardware), it would run like a slideshow, if at all, even on top of the line consumer PC hardware. There exists a transistor-level emulator for Pong and it requires a massive ton of computing power and that game didn't even have a CPU, it was all discrete logic.

At that point, why bother wasting so much computing power over something that is better replaced by real hardware, good single chip clones or FPGAs?

I for one am not a fan of approximations when it comes to games. The hardware is what really matters, because it determines how the game works. The ROM really doesn't matter by comparison, They're just instructions. A ROM is a ROM regardless of container.

In fact, there are still instances of games not working in emulators, even recent ones. Nestopia is the most popular NES emulator now and it doesn't play Hard Drivin' correctly. That's not the fault of the game, it works perfectly as intended on a real NES. The problem is the emulator.

Hell, emulators have even contributed to the butchering of perfectly good ROMs. When Earth Bound, that unreleased NES prototype translation for Mother 1, was made available online back in the late 90s, the best emulator around was Nesticle. Earth Bound wouldn't work with Nesticle as is, so fans decided to hack the game to make it work on Nesticle, rather than admit that Nesticle was a piece of shit. In the end, they had to remove the copy protection routines from the ROM. This is the hack that also adds "Zero" to the title screen (EarthBound Zero). It's interesting to note that the original Earth Bound prototype works perfectly on real hardware and the copy protection never trips during play. Thanks a lot Nesticle...

[David J.]

Don't support Raspberry Pi in any capacity. If you see it in the road, you must kill it. If it is burning to death, you may beat the fire out with a tire iron.

Anyway, best thing you can do if you love video games is to support the current projects of those who haven't turned traitor like Con-Man did.

The Retron 5 uses Retroarch, you can save a few bucks and get a Raspberry Pi, install Retropie which also uses Retroarch. Unless you really want to use cartridges...

[djtwok]

GG Support on Retron is Great, no need to turn on my blurry gg screen and loosing battery life in the middle of the game.

[PixelPedant]

The Retron 5 uses Retroarch, you can save a few bucks and get a Raspberry Pi, install Retropie which also uses Retroarch. Unless you really want to use cartridges...

More than a few bucks, too. I mean, from where I'm standing, a Retron 5 + Game Gear add-on would cost $210CAD, and a complete Raspberry Pi Zero kit perfectly capable of handling Game Gear emulation is $20CAD. So over 10 times as much, for a much poorer solution.

[roadkill]

All of the emulators on the Retron 5 I've had on my Nintendo Wii since 2011, and I spent half the amount of money on that console ATT than what a Retron 5 still costs today. Along with all those emulators for my softmodded Wii, I have real hardware GameCube backwards compatibility to go with it too. I can't stand that the Retron 5 forces you to use cartridges for emulators (which were stolen as already pointed out in previous posts), it's the only product on the planet that does that and it's stupid as ****. For those of you who want to buy a Retron 5, do yourselves a favor and just get a softmodded Wii, a softmodded/modchipped Original Xbox, or a raspberry pi fitted out as a retro pi. You can still keep/collect your carts and just keep them on display or store them and I suppose you can tell yourselves "oh hey, I'm not stealing this specific game's ROM because I bought the cartridge". I hear the Retron 5 is one of if not the laggiest way to play retro games as well, I'm talking about controller input lag. Retron 5s are also notorious for having their voltage regulator flash chips go bad, and they're impossible to repair unless you just simply take the power board from another working Retron 5.

However, if you really must have the Retron 5, I actually highly recommend the Retro Freak over it. It lets you load ROMs off of SD cards as well as letting you dump your own carts onto SD cards, and it's build quality is better. If you're not into that sorta thing, yes it lets you simply play games off of carts with emulators. They're sold in Japan.

[StuOhQ]

I've been wondering about this myself, as I'd like to use original carts. Is there any lag and how accurately do the games play?

The Behar Bros. have an awesome consolized Game Gear but it's pricey!

[Black_Tiger]

I've been wondering about this myself, as I'd like to use original carts. Is there any lag and how accurately do the games play?

The Behar Bros. have an awesome consolized Game Gear but it's pricey!

I believe that the Retron 5 like many clones doesn't actually play your carts. It only rips the rom and then your cart continues to sit their unused. So you could get a retropie setup or some other (potentially lag free) device capable of emulation and just stick your cart on top of it, so you can look down at it from time to time and have the same experience.