Gadgetory

so if you're like me you may be a little tired of triple-a developers releasing broken or subpar games over and over again often with DLC that officially or not fixes the experience this phenomenon has pushed myself and a number of my friends back to the retro gaming crowd but managing a collection of old consoles and managing the space required for old-school TVs can be frustrating enter the retron 5 from hyper Ken also I will be hopefully reviewing the Mickey Mickey or the Kano fairly soon so stay tuned for that from December 13th to 20th 2014 you can save on select Intel CPUs knucks and SSDs with special holiday rebates from select retailers click now to learn more first off we have the actual physical unit on the front were greeted by Game Boy Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance slot and the power button which takes a kind of surprisingly long time to engage but does feel quite solid and has a satisfying click to it on each side we have a controller port for NES SNES and Genesis which totals to 6 controller ports in all for a two-player gaming experience on any one of the consoles on the back we have an HDMI port USB mini for the included controller an AC power jack and an SD card slot which you can use for things like updating the system cheat codes and screenshots along with savestate files speaking of the included controller it's garbage and I don't recommend using for absolutely anything the quality control seems to be more than a little rough to seemingly identical buttons in the top corners of the controller feel completely different one has a nice tactile audible feedback and the other one feels mushy and dampened the shoulder buttons are similar again the left side shoulder button has a satisfying tactile inaudible feedback while the right one is mushy and sometimes leaves you wondering if you even press the button at all the best word I could use for the other buttons on the controller is acceptable but then it comes to the 8 way thumb stick we is straight-up puke worthy it squeaks when you spin it which will happen while playing from time to time and while most of the lower directions work fine I guess there's some sort of obstruction in the top which grinds against the stick creating an unpleasant noise and a horrible feeling I wish hyper can what have ditched this abysmal excuse for a controller and just lowered the price unfortunately they didn't so we're stuck paying full price and dish in the controller ourselves but wait Luke it has a redeeming feature Wireless really wireless you wanted to add more latency to this setup we're playing retro games with a wireless controller there's more latency between your controller input and your character's movement and it's noticeable in this case this will stack on top of the input leg on most modern TVs compared to old CRTs and you're going to have a bad time speaking of latency it's a shame that the only output option is HDMI so this pretty much precludes the use of a CRT TV so forget about light guns and super scopes if you don't need those you can have a TV with game mode which turns off the image processing or a low latency PC monitor and that would help a lot in fact having it next to your PC monitor seems like a really cool use case for the retron 5 if you're concerned about the legality of PC emulators and we'll talk about that more later on simply plug the retron 5 into an alternate input on one of your monitors and switch your input to it whenever you'd like to play and with that we'll jump back to the top of the unit in the back there's a slot to hold the controller but we just use it to hold games and just the head of that we have the glossy finish something I wish manufacturers would stop using for fairly obvious reasons slotted into that glossy finish is your ports for Genesis SNES NES and Famicom cartridges other reviews are complaining that on this retron 5 the slots are too tight to actually remove the game from and sure the first time you use it it might be a little bit tight but even after all moderate amount of use it becomes quite easy to just swap games in and out in front of these slots we have the logo for the retron 5 and an LED indicator system letting you know which game is inserted the LED would have been much nicer if it was possible to have more than one game inserted at a time anyways if you insert more than one game instead of just choosing which one you want to play you are served an error message until you remove all the game cartridges that you don't want to use when you boot up the retron 5 you're greeted by a simple yet surprisingly or not Android based gaming system within the settings menu or you will be able to find various video and audio settings included but not limited to image filters scan lines and sound enhancement which actually sounds pretty good you also have options like controller remapping win to load save States and where to save things for those that wish to use maybe an SD card there are loads of options and overall this menu system is a good experience even with its overall kind of cheesy menu sounds and a little bit tedious software and firmware updating process which really isn't that bad if you watch their video on how to do it you can even access quick menu within the game for stuff like save States and other various quick menu options simply by pressing down and start at the same time now loading games can be a little funky with no official compatibility list as far as I know it's a bit of a gamble plugging a game in it will probably work and you'll mainly just find issues with multi game cartridges or multi cartridge setups but there will be the odd game that should probably work but totally doesn't another frustrating issue with this is that sometimes a ROM may load and it may be able to run the game making it playable but it won't actually recognize the game meaning that it won't load any of your save States and of the cheats will actually function properly one really cool thing the retron lets you do however is to utilize old carts that have dead batteries much more effectively than you could have otherwise if the battery is dead in your cartridge and you don't go through the process of replacing it you won't actually be able to save anything properly but if you use savestates on the red you can essentially replace this functionality which is great as it can breathe life back into some old beloved games those are problems I can look past however as honestly the vast majority of games will work just fine you just have to be careful about keeping things like the contacts on your cards clean enough for the console bill to read it as well as possible every time to get a good load and a good detection whenever you insert it what does get on my nerves however is moving the save data from the game to the retron and from the retron to the game it feels like moving the save data to the retron works essentially every time but I can't really be all that sure that moving the save data from the retron back to the Kart actually ever worked it didn't actually ever work it seems like it would be able to sometimes work but it would wipe part of the data that was on there and then not load the new data which is essentially destroying your save file I had that happen to my Pokemon blue cart rest in peace Pokemon blue save game rest in peace early on I mentioned that this is a cool way to play your old games through emulation in order to utilize things like save States while doing it more legally than emulating roms on something like a PC or a phone and while being able to use your badass original cards at the save time unfortunately it seems that high Perkin may be using other developers code for a lot of their emulator support without asking or contacting those people at all all of this is under a code license of gplv3 which forbids incorporating the software into something like for example a locked-down piece of hardware which is then sold so ah there's a bunch of legal mumbo-jumbo going on which i don't fully understand on the situation is kind of a mess so if you want to learn more I suggest you just google retro art versus retro on or retro art versus hyper canon you'll find more information there in conclusion is this the end-all replacement to old-school console clutter no latency issues that you will most likely have to deal with at some degree do the inclusion of HDMI will be frustrating and it has its quirks with features like moving saves on and off the retron totally not working and in some cases even breaking what is already there and it comes with a controller which will just add mass to landfills but in a lot of cases the actual unit can get the job done I personally think it would be pretty neat accessory for someone's PC setup when configured as an alternate input to their monitor but at its current price of 160 dollars I see most people looking the other way let me know what you guys think in the comments down below things that are worth their price tag however are free things especially Intel CPUs and today we're giving you a chance to win one for free if you head over to the giveaway page on our forum using the link in the video description down below you can view full entry details and sign up for a chance to win one of two i7 5820k s from Intel we running this contest from December 19th to December 26 so just consider this an opportunity to get a very cool belated Christmas present from Intel we've covered these chips quite a bit since launch and I bet you'll be pretty impressed if you get your hands on them yourself especially if you're someone who does a lot of multitasking or whatever so head over to Linus tech tips forum and enter for a chance to upgrade your rig to a haswell-e processor alright guys don't forget to comment down below what you think about the retron 5 and all the funky stuff that's going on with that if you don't like commenting on youtube just before you jump over to the forum don't forget to like or dislike and subscribe share all those various nice things that you do for us and jump over the forum and then comment there if you don't like the ads on the forum you can get rid of those ads by becoming a forum contributor if you want to see how the new office campaign is going go to new office dot Linus tech tips calm and we'll screw that one up and you'll be able to see our progress there where we update our value you can see all the stretch goals and all that kind of stuff if you click on the support us banner which is on Linus detectives comm kind of front page you can change your Amazon link and do other various things to support us also in the video description down below you can see a link to buy a shirt we always have some kind of cool shirts going on thank you guys for watching nice doorbell and I'll see you next time