jferio

Doing the proprietary trick, yet using GPL code, would be my guaranteed line in the sand, the guaranteed "I'm NOT buying it, nor anything in the future." If they go proprietary, with no GPL? I'd need to see what the product can actually do. But it would have to be pretty stellar and on track out of the gate for me to get one in lieu of my combination of Real Hardware and RetroPie here.

They don't want to release the code with their changes, which the newer version mandates by license. They probably want to keep people from doing their own firmware changes (signed updates like they did with the Retron 5), which the newer version disallows by license. They probably want to lock you into using actual cartridges, which the two aforementioned things would make harder by preventing the security around firmware changes and providing enough code that some people could figure out how to get a different emulator on it that allows one to, say, run ROMs off SD card or internal memory rather than the cartridge dump. Basically, they learned the lesson from the Retron 5, and decided out of the options of obey the terms of Gnu Public License, or go with an older base that would require work to upgrade but not have the licensing entanglements, they would prefer to go with the older base that they can proceed with the specific business model they did with the Retron 5. Or it could just be a smokescreen; get the license from the developer of the pre-GPL version, and just use the GPL version anyway. That would definitely fall into "no sale for me" territory. And I'm waiting for reviews on units "in the wild" before I make the determination if that's the case.

Yes, the best choice indeed. The problem with some of these "multi game" power supplies is that they're meant to get a quick buck from people who don't know any better. A big problem when they're light is that they're likely not designed for longevity... and might even burn your house down when they fail. http://www.righto.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb-chargers-in-lab-apple-is.html Granted, that's USB chargers, but considering that they're just scaled down and miniatured-to-the-point-of-pain versions of what we plug into our consoles... buyer beware.

Regarding an earlier comment about "toxic repurcussions" to what Hyperkin has done... I would agree, when one takes in the issue of the Neo Geo X, which also used an emulator in direct violation of the licensing terms of said emulator. Granted, licenses got pulled before that could publicly go very far, but people do still remember it. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice... even if it is an unrelated company doing it. There's probably going to be a slice of the retro gaming market that will now actively distrust any commercial emulation product that the company isn't absolutely completely transparent about what they're doing. In other words, wait and see, likely never buy anyway just in case. And some of those will join those who are vocally anti-emulation in trying to convince everyone else to go original hardware, or those who are vocally against paid emulation. For some, this will even extend to apply to software compilations, which would be even more of a shame. Again, we're not losing sleep over here over having bought the Retron 5. But we are disappointed in Hyperkin, regardless of how active they were (whether they did the software fork in-house or farm it out). And we will probably be in the "silent waiters" category for any future product.

We're not losing sleep over it over here... but Hyperkin had better be prepared to release all the source code (my understanding of the GPL3 legal "design" is that they'd have to basically do a clean room redesign of the front end to avoid releasing the source code if they started with RetroArch), as well as update to replace two important emulators inside it (the guy behind RetroArch has made it rather clear that, because they didn't ask in the first place, he won't grant a license exemption for SNES9x NEXT), and to remove any locked patching mechanism (basically, allow you to load your own firmware choice). It is disappointing that they seem to have been forced to do something only because it's become public that they've done this thing. Will I buy another one to supplement/replace the one we have here? Probably not. Will I get rid of the one we have? Pretty much keeping it, it's already been purchased, water under the bridge. Plus, overall it's still an excellent meld of hardware support and emulation, especially now that we can load ROM patch files and even Nintendo would have a hard time telling us we're doing it wrong in the legal sense. Also, this, plus the NeoGeoX having a similar issue, should be fair warning to be aware that a great commercial emulation system, particularly if made by a third party, may be coming with a less than clean boardroom pedigree. We'll probably hold off on such devices in the future. I'm pretty sure that there are some out there in the "emulation is free, you should never pay money for it ever ever ever" camp that are gleefully jumping up and down with this "proof" that they're right.

Less screen blur on Sonic. It's literally a night and day difference, because of the improvements in LCD tech between the original and the Majesco unit.

So my partner struck out at the Centennial location... but lo and behold, our friend Mike snagged one of the Colecos for me... and reported to me that, at the TRU up his way (Thornton/Westminster), they did indeed sell him the product (he picked up the complete pair for himself as well), but then went to stuff the remaining quantity into the back room to await the street date.

Yeah, with modern flat panel televisions, any internal upscaling they do is really only meant for you to hook up, say, an old VCR or DVD. Live action video playback has VERY different needs compared to retro gaming, and sadly retro gaming is a considerably more "niche" market than the video playback is. Your only real two options are to take an old, barely compliant system to your local electronics place and test until you find a television that makes you happy, or buy a higher grade external upscaler. We have a MiniXRGB/Framemeister here right now, currently connected to one television in the living room. It's a pretty nice piece of kit. Although to warn, like all specialist hardware, it can be mildly finicky depending on your source.

I snagged one tonight at the Lakewood CO TRU. My partner's going to go check over at the Centennial location for me tomorrow to see if we can get the Colecovision one. Yes, I'll admit, I'm a vulture. The guy who came over to look was "wow, that's a far out date there" with regards to the "not supposed to sell" message that popped up on the terminal, but they sold it to me anyway.

OK, applied the update. Super Street Righter II for the Genesis now works. It is finicky, two attempts, the first didn't load, the second did, so it's certainly not perfect, but it's also a good sign when I can set off Chun-Li's fireball without too much hassle. Yes, I'm going into training for Street Fighter, so learning the special moves, and how to execute them consistently, is a big part of that. Also, verified that Sonic 2 with Knuckles the Echinda works. I did download the latest cheat database, but in Sonic 1, and SSFII, the cheats caused it to fail with an orange screen. Haven't tested it with anything else.

For the record, as of Sunday, to my knowledge the Broomfield, CO 2nd & Charles location had "more than 3" Retron 5 units. No specifics on count, but my friend Mike got himself a unit there. When we went Saturday, the Aurora, CO location had 3 units on hand. And yeah, elbart, we were looking online, definitely scalper pricing going on. $200-250 easy on parts of Amazon and eBay. I agree with my friends on TG256, not really worth that sort of money.

It depends entirely on the inks, and the coating, and where the coating was applied or not applied. In this case, I think it's because the faded area would have been printed in what is called "spot color", where a mixed color ink is loaded into the press. This was probably done because of sheer coverage of ink, some colors look better than others in solid "four color" than others (because of the dot patterns of the builds), and running it as a spot would have fixed it. Plus, it might have ultimately been cheaper to do that, the yellow, and the black, than to try to do a four color build of the whole label.

We were fine on the first try here with the Kirby games. And yes, we've had some carts take 2-3 inserts to actually "read" correctly. No, we don't blow on them between insertions, that's generally not a good idea anyway. Regarding "UNKNOWN CART" and still being playable, I suspect it's just dirty carts not being read 100% correctly. One can probably wind up with minor single-bit errors in non-vital areas, enough to throw off the identification via checksum, but not enough to fatally break the game. We did see some black Retrons in the wild today when we were out trading some DVDs for other stuff. Mild temptation to buy one at $140 and "flip" it online for $240, but we came to our senses pretty quickly.

Also, we did something a little crazy, just to test it. We plugged a Famicom adapter into the NES slot, a Famicom game into that, and let it rip. It played the cart just fine, complete with recognizing it. But it did display that the NES part was active. Not really surprised it worked, but always worth trying out.

Well, on the other hand, that wasn't why I was arguing about copyright. Copyright is merely the reason they don't want to allow ROM file loading via SD card. SD card in the system's own built in slot. This is the point I thought we were discussing earlier. And regarding that, the ATGames Sega Genesis was mentioned for allowing load from SD. As I recall, that system was actually licensed by Sega as an "official" product, so it does get to follow different rules. The Retron 5 isn't licensed by anybody, so they have to take a much more careful path. Regarding older style multicarts, we've seen that it has trouble with bankswitching schemes if it doesn't know WHAT those schemes are. Newer style multicarts, like the Everdrive, would probably be a lot more difficult, and would certainly relate to how isolated the loading system is. And shall I assume that your beef is specific to design decisions that specifically affect the Everdrive?

We just did here. No noticeable slowdown.

Yeah, I think you've made up your mind about this. Let me sum up your view: "They don't want multicarts to work because they don't want to be potentially responsible if someone's $130 SD multicart blows up in their system. They're just using 'copyright legality' as a smokescreen." And yes, while loading files onto a device is arguably legal, I can, again, see the whole "How can we completely avoid being sued" having the answer of "don't allow it at all, regardless." If only because making backup copies of your own media isn't quite as cut and dried with games as it is with music, at least as Nintendo implies. The odds of BEING sued are so low as to be nonexistant (easier to go after ROM sites, really), but when asked about avoidance, lawyers don't necessarily think with what we consider a "normal" risk assessment method (read: paranoid). Now, yes, it's definitely a thing where the architecture of the system doesn't allow carts like the Everdrive to work. I don't think that was necessarily as conscious as the ROM file issue, actually, but definitely a result of the way they decided to build the system in the first place. I am keeping something of an eye on things out there, because I'm curious as to when (not if) someone cracks the software open to allow it to be used as a proper ROM dumper and/or run actual ROM files on it. The question will be whether it can eventually be done using a modified form of their software, or if one basically has to load a more basic version of Android and deal with several different interfaces for apps. We probably won't modify ours for a while, though, we have a softmodded Wii for running ROM files.

On the other hand, I'm willing to bet they checked with the staff lawyer specializing in copyright law as to the safest setup, and this was the answer. Dumps temporarily, doesn't retain, does not allow one to load ROM files of unknown origin onto an SD card. Probably the only company that would still consider this to be illegal would be Nintendo, but we know their distinctly anti-emulation stance quite well by now. To a certain extent, I do agree that it's unlikely they'd get pinched for allowing it (entirely too little return on investment for the people filing the copyright suit), but on the other hand, I can also see Hyperkin trying to do the maximum amount of risk avoidance. And that, among other things, means sitting down for an all-day meeting with the specializing lawyer to go over the finer points of what you want to do, and where you might get into trouble, and what you can do to minimize it. Witness the discussion on this very board a few months ago regarding "where can I find cart dumpers for these systems, I wanna set up an emulation machine in the company lunch room, but the company lawyers want all carts on site, and specifically ROM files are to be dumped from those carts, not of downloaded from the internet." And that was for employee recreation, not for resale. Is it a business decision that doesn't sit well with some. Yes. Is it a business decision that is costing them sales? Yes. However, don't blame Hyperkin, blame our overextended unrealistic copyright law and the over-litigious business environment we have to put up with. They're being logical in choosing not to challenge copyright holders by allowing unknown ROM files, especially knowing full well that, even if it's a poor return on investment for the one that does it, any of the companies most likely to file a copyright suit would flatten Hyperkin into bankrupt paste in short order.

It is called "Covering Their Asses" in a legal sense. Nintendo is on record about believing 100% of emulation and ROM dumping being illegal, so they're making an effort to be legal at least on paper. Otherwise, they might either get sued for making ROM dumping easy or encouraging piracy, or an order could be put into U.S. Customs to seize shipments (you think that's not true, look up SparkFun and the issue they had a few months back with a multimeter shipment, and people who have had orders for Dreamcast serial cables sent back). Am I disappointed by the lack of ROM file loading? Of course I am, it is deliberately crippled funtionality. Am I really all that upset, in all actuality? Not really, especially given the potential for problems and the need to be a good corporate neighbor "on paper". I have a soft-modded Wii if I want to run the emulators with ROM files, anyway. The Retron is just a really nice way to run with the carts we have here, WITH the save files from those same carts. In fact, we do plan on using it as a form of "Dex Drive" to compile some of our cart saves. Unless copyright laws change significantly, I really don't think we'll see a plug 'n' play solution like this that supports ROM files. At least, that won't get seized with some regularity at the borders, or stores raided that carry it.

It does seem like there is a bit of a "miss" for some people with getting units that have at least one slot effectively "nerfed" out the gate. In other news, a couple of my friends decided to review the unit as their inaugural video.

It's always possible that they needed to do it in a way that prevented some form of "workaround" for SD-card equipped multicarts, or other odd ways of loading "pirated" ROM files onto the system. Regarding the update issue, yeah, it would be nice if their two websites would actually spell out updates. Instead, you really need to bookmark the link from their Facebook page. :/ Speaking of, hopefully this is the long-term permalink: http://retron5.in/node/2

I expect it's because of the ways it masks that game, versus Sonic 3. Reports are also that you still can't do the "other game to access ball worlds" trick. Everything I see implies that SSFII is larger than the "safe" addressable space on the Genesis. Technically, it can access 10MB, but apparently that assumes you don't have a SegaCD or 32X connected up. It's quite possible that the 4MB address safety limit is in part because of accommodation for accessories, which might occupy part of that address area in the same way the Commodore 64 overlaid ROM addresses on top of RAM addresses to get around the addressing limits of the processor. I'm not sure which version of SSFII I have for the Genesis. I did pop it open with a gamebit, but there wasn't a lot of enlightenment, and I don't have time this morning to look up PCB code information.

Nice. I found out tonight that they got the Sonic 3/Sonic & Knuckles lock-on combination working in one of the updates. This is a fairly important game for some people out there, and it's nice that it does work, even if "Knuckles in Sonic 2" doesn't yet work. It did take me two tries to get it to load as the combination, though. I also found out that Super Street Fighter II for the Genesis is so large that it uses bankswitching in the cart, the only one that apparently does. The Genesis effectively only safely addresses 4MB of data, SSFII is 5MB. The orange screen is actually the cart software failing the checksum, apparently the Retron 5 doesn't (yet) support the bankswitching, and can't get to at least 20% of the ROM.

It's the same thing here. A few of the thrifts still have CRTs from time to time, but even those really don't want to take them because they don't really move well anymore. The classic videogamer that only wants a CRT and turns up noses at flatpanels are really too much of a niche. And even Grandma now has a nice second flatscreen to show the latest Disney flicks on to keep the grandbabies entertained. Honestly, my back THANKED ME for dumping out the CRT once I got a flat panel. Light gun games aren't worth the incredible weight and space considerations for me, which was the only reason I even considered keeping the tube. I traded in a considerable armory of lightguns and games when I made the choice. That's what makes the Retron 5 such a wonderful piece of tech here. All in one, plug 'n' play. Yes, we actually HAVE an upscaler (Framemeister), but it's nice to have a piece of tech "ready to go" almost instantly. Plus, to be bluntly honest, even for the "purists", the days of being able to pick up a cheap CRT at a thrift are incredibly numbered. Inside of five years, I'm expecting they won't even bother putting them onto the sale floor, even when they're basically forced to take them by people who "don't want to lug them elsewhere." And no, we don't have the space to keep around that many CRTs worth gaming with, so please don't suggest it. There's barely enough room for our two flat panels and over 70 gaming systems. Oh, and further advantages to this HDMI only device: Save States. Ability to copy off most save files for posterity. You can actually use that excellent first-party controller on the competitor's titles. Or get into using that obscure third party arcade controller.

The database at Google Docs says what we were getting - nothing but an orange screen. Either there's more than one version, or there's something else going on if you've verified a Retron 5 actually running the game. Yes, the cart has been cleaned. We also tested it on an actual Genesis and it runs flawlessly. Now, we do have TWO versions of SSF2, the other one is for the SNES, and that's been working for us the whole time. I wonder if that's the one you've been seeing as running.