BoneSnapDeez wrote:The cart slots do indeed suck. This is my biggest complaint overall. I say once a game has been installed there's no reason to insert that particular cart ever again.
Totally agree. Once it's on the system, I'm good. My wife kept cringing when I would pull the cart out and put it back because it sounded terrible. I was getting a bit concerned, but my SNES carts didn't seem to be getting wear and tear from it.
Other than that, I can't get over how awesome this system is. I'm expecting my first child in May and I had to pack up my game room to make way for my little girl. So having the ability to still play these games without having to dig them out when I want to play is going to be great.
Just finished both my SNES, TG16, and Genesis carts. I forgot the final count, but it was around 130-ish. Out of those games the following did not load:
Terranigma (repro) Fievel Goes West West (Super Famicom)
I loaded them even though they were not recognized and neither of them played. I figured that Terranigma may be an issue, but was really surprised that Fievel wasn't recognized as it is an official Super Famicom release. The only other repro I own is Super Back to the Future II and it was recognized and loaded just fine. As I said in my previous post, Bonk's Revenge wasn't recognized, but it does play once I dumped it on the SD card. Really no rhyme or reason to why any of these were not recognized. All of them are pretty clean, but after it loaded my terrible Phantom 2040 cart (no amount of cleaning will do for this cart) I was baffled as to how anything else didn't get recognized haha! I also ran the latest firmware update, but it didn't recognize either of them after I loaded it. All in all, an excellent ratio.
I also loaded one of the few Gameboy games I care about owning: Quarth. I played through the first stage like I was a kid again in the backseat on a long road trip. That game is an underrated gem. And it looked great on my 55" 4K TV. I was actually quite impressed. I may get more Gameboy games to be honest because it looked so good.
Anyway, I still have to get my NES carts in, but that will have to wait until my Famicom to NES converter comes in. That will finish it up.
That's awesome man. Try DLing the ROM for those 2 and see if they load up. It may just have an issue dumping them for whatever reason. I'd be interested to see if they work.
I was about to ask why not just DL the entire ROM set, but I just ripped about 60 of my PS2 games for HDD loading so I understand
Jagosaurus wrote:That's awesome man. Try DLing the ROM for those 2 and see if they load up. It may just have an issue dumping them for whatever reason. I'd be interested to see if they work.
I was about to ask why not just DL the entire ROM set, but I just ripped about 60 of my PS2 games for HDD loading so I understand
It took a while haha! I'll try them again a bit later. Like I said, not a bad ratio. Some of them did take a couple of times to take, but out of that many games to only have two not recognize is pretty good. I will say, the Genesis port does seem to have better pins. I think I had one or two out of the whole batch that wasn't recognized right off.
Sad thing is the company that I ordered the Famicom Adapter from sent me the wrong product. Was hoping to get my NES carts loaded this weekend, but it will have to wait until they send me the adapter.
There is an official NES adapter for the RetroFreak, but I used one I already had and it worked okay. The connection wasn't fantastic though, so I found it easier to just download NES games and load 'em up.
Interesting that FDS is "officially" supported - the console even displays a little disk icon when a game is selected.
Tanooki wrote:The only thing that makes me a little nervous is the pin slot on that thing. Everything else makes the R5 seem kind of weak in many ways.
That is really my only negative comment on the system, but like Bone said, if you get them dumped then there is really no reason to ever use them again.
I have a Retron 5 and I have no complaint for that system either, but the Retro Freak's ability to save roms to an SD really puts the Retron 5 at a big disadvantage. I'm keeping mine as a back up, but I don't know if I'll ever use it again unless the Retro Freak goes out. I know there are ways to hack the R5 to do what the RF does, and I looked into it, but it was a bit above my head to even try. I would rather have a fully functioning machine on the bench then try to hack it and mess it up.
I'm probably going to end up just selling the R5 once the RF bundle with the NES adapter+controller module are all bundled in one their website notes as coming soon.
The SD card thing is big for me. My games are aging, there's no way around that, so if I can just throw the ROMs on a card dumping my own titles and just store the away I'd be fine. Something like handheld games I'd still use those in real systems, but you can always copy saves to-from the original unit (like the R5 copy feature) so it's not an issue.
It's nice you can just throw ROMs at it too, finally could enjoy the TG16 again after a 15 years without being put in the poor house.
The only problem I find with using roms (yours that you backed up or 'otherwise') is one that is more psychological and probably different for everyone....it's that sometimes I feel like well if i'm essentially just going to play roms why not just do it on my PC or Shield TV. The shield/RetroArch in particular is no less convenient and it's got the capability for much better looking filters and a slightly more accurate experience along with using much the same controllers I am now. Again like i said I'm sure this feeling can differ from person to person but that's why I would be careful about in the end...maybe just buying it as a rom machine. Primarily because there are better and even cheaper alternatives for that.
That's why sometimes even though I easily could just load up on of the many roms/games I've got on the RetroFreak's SD card i'll pop the cartridge instead to remember that it wasn't a waste of money from that particularly front.
Fair enough argument. Truth be told if I got one and even bothered, I'd probably just throw a few on there. I have a known problem of placing too many roms on flash kits and then using nothing more than usually once or twice for a few minutes before moving on permanently. I have no value in the game, so I have no value to put time into it either.
The only exceptions I can think of would be grossly expensive systems with a library that's so limited it's just collectors only to pay the ugly prices, invent time travel, or get a ROM runner while using legit or semi-legit hardware (say RF vs a NGPC with a flash kit.)
