The Retron 5 is a console that plays old cartridges from the NES, Famicom, Super Nintendo, Sega Mega Drive, Genesis, and Nintendo Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance. With an adaptor you can also play original Master System cards and carts and Game Gear carts too. It released a few years ago, but is it still a good option if you want to play your original cartridges in the era of HD, 4K and beyond? Let’s put it to the test!
If you want to play old video games, there are a lot of ways to do so these days. Companies re-release old games all the time on PC and consoles. This either comes in the form of downloads of individual games, remasters or remakes, some of which let you flick back and forth between the original graphics and updated visuals, compilations, or virtual consoles. The Nintendo Switch has Nintendo’s online service which lets you access a selection of older titles from the likes of the NES, Super NES, Game Boy, Sega Mega Drive and Nintendo 64.
But as is the case with all of these options, the companies will charge you if you want to play these games. That’s understandable. That’s how business works. But many players will still have copies of their favourite games on their shelves or in their lofts and they may want to crack them out every so often for another spin of Super Mario Kart or Sonic the Hedgehog.
The Retron 5 was something of a revolutionary idea when I first discovered it a few years ago. The plus side of the console was obvious to me. It would allow me to connect the machine to a modern HDTV and get an image that didn’t look awful which is what happens when you connect something like a Super Nintendo to an HDTV. That was a big plus, but the bigger plus was the promise that I could have one magic box under my TV that would accept cartridges from the NES, SNES, Mega Drive and Game Boy all in one device. Think how much space that would save?!
For some retro collectors, they may want to boast that they have evert console under the sun under their TV, but for some people, just one console that you can plug any cartridge into has real appeal. In my case, I then had to try to figure out how I’d fit the Retron 5 next to the SNES and Mega Drive which kinda defeats the purpose of that benefit.
The next major benefit is that it lets you use carts from any region. I’d never had a way to play Famicom games so this opened up a whole new line of games I could look out for. My next trip to Super Potato in Japan would be all the more exciting. And not just because I could try Famicom games and finally get a physical copy of Sweet Home, the game that inspired the Resident Evil series. Now I could get Japanese exclusive games for any of these systems, or get American carts too.
There are a lot of cool possibilities with a device like the Retron 5. And the fun doesn’t end there. The system also allows you to use save states, which to do so with your original cartridges felt like you suddenly discovered a superpower. No longer would I get to the credit roll of Donkey Kong Country and get taken by surprise by King K. Rool again. A cheeky save state means I could pick straight back up to kick some kremlin ass.
And then of course there are options to change the look of the display. Things that smooth out pixels and add scan lines etc. Depending on the game, the console you’re playing a game from and the size of the screen you’re watching on, you may prefer to tinker with these settings, but if me I always want to see the game with its sharp pixels. I don’t like the smoothed out look. I’ve also never really liked the look of scan lines and to me it doesn’t look like the old CRT TVs as I remember them.
Oh, and the last major thing I’ve not mentioned about the Retron 5 is that as well as letting you use your original cartridges, you can also use your original controllers from your SNES, Mega Drive and NES. The Retron 5 does come with its own wireless controller, and there are some pluses and minuses to this, but we’ll get into that shortly.
So, now we’ve covered everything it does, let’s cover the good and the bad of the Retron 5.
Firstly, is game compatibility. For the best bet at most compatibility, make sure you’ve updated your console. I’ve had my console for a couple of years but hadn’t bothered to update it. I recently got the adaptor to play Master System and Game Gear games on it and was confused to find that it didn’t seem to work at all! But this was my fault. It’s right on the front of the adaptor box that you need to update your Retron 5 for it to work. The process wasn’t as simple as updating some things, but painless enough. You’ll need an SD card, and there is a little back and forth between doing things on the console and doing things on your PC to get it working. The biggest issue was that the first Retron 5 website that came up on google had a dead link and I thought I wouldn’t be able to update at all. But they still sell this console so figured there must be an up-to-date way to do it and there is. I may make a second video about this, so if you have a Retron 5 and need to update it in 2024 or beyond, check out my channel for the how to.
But coming back to game compatibility, for the most part everything I put in the console worked. There were some exceptions but allow me to explain. One important thing to remember is that the NES came out in the mid-80s and the SNES came out in the early 1990s. The chances are that some carts may not work as well as you remember them working when you were a kid. I found that some SNES games needed me to take them out and insert them a half dozen times to get the system to read the cartridge. In the case of Super Street Fighter 2 I ended up giving up even though the menu of the system gave a brief flash of the game’s title as being the inserted cart. This tells me the game can still be read, but that it wasn’t loading well. I had played it on my actual SNES just a few months ago, so think this may have been a Retron issue.
More amusingly was that I had to wriggle a couple of NES game carts about to get them to be read. This felt like the actual experience of using an original NES which was front loaded. I remember as a kid, I’d use a pencil to change the angle of the carts to get them to be held in place better and actually load. It was funny but disappointing to have to do something similar with a top loading device to get Bart vs the Space Mutants to load.
Over the years I’ve heard a lot of people complain about the tightness of the Retron 5 cart slots and I definitely agree with this. SNES wasn’t too terrible, but NES and Mega Drive are particularly tight and it makes you feel you may damage the games or the system to get the games out. Personally, I half wonder if this is causing some of the issues with getting some games to load straight away.
I’ll briefly touch on the Master System and Game Gear adaptor, as I will deep dive into that device another time, but after I’d updated the Retron I found it worked just fine, but a couple of games gave issues. The Terminator loaded, but the Sega logo looked mangled at first which I was able to capture when recording video for this video, and then a couple of other games didn’t want to work at all. This is where things can get frustrating as there are too many suspects as to why it may not have worked. With a SNES game I can wonder if the cart is bad or the system is bad. With the games you play through the adaptor, you now have to consider that the game may not be in the adaptor properly, or that the game is fine, but you didn’t insert the adaptor itself correctly.
If you’re wondering if you can use the SD card slot to load roms and play on the console the answer is yes and no. No, you can’t do that with the system as it comes from the shop, but yes you can do it if you hack the system. Now, personally speaking, I don’t have intention to use this to play roms as I have a lot of different ways to do this, but if you were interested in using your Retron 5 for this purpose, there are guides out there that will teach you how. The Retro Freak may be a better option for this kind of thing if you want a similar device that lets you use your own carts and play roms and also dump your roms so you can back them up. There are ways to use the Retron for this same thing, but to do so, once you’ve done that hack you’re no longer using the Retron as the Retron and it’ll be like installing Windows onto a Mac.
The system as it works does just load or dump the rom as soon as you insert the cart and then you’re basically just playing the game like you would on an emulator. This means certain games and carts won’t work. Stuff like the Game Boy Camera, Super Game Boy, and Game Genies won’t work. This is because the rom is loaded from the start and the machine doesn’t continually access the carts. So, the Game Boy Camera software could load in theory (although for me it doesn’t) but once it’s loaded the machine ignores the cart and wouldn’t be able to get a continual camera feed anyway. Likewise, the console can load a Game Genie, but wouldn’t be able to then load the game you want to add cheat codes to because that would be like loading a game within a game.
Almost forgot a big one. You can’t use the 32X on the Retron to play 32X games. The Mega CD can’t be connected and as far as I understand you won’t be able to use Everdrive carts on it.
Still, as far as game compatibility is concerned, I’m more pleased with the amount it does load rather than worry over the few it doesn’t load. The bigger issue to me is that I feel I notice some lag and slowdown at times. This is something that affects my ability to enjoy the games I have put into the console and this is a bit more of a pain. I can cope with it, but some games like Sonic and Donkey Kong Country felt off at moments. Not always, but enough to make me feel like I was losing lives to errors that weren’t my fault. This could be down to input latency though. This brings me to the controllers.
So, mine is but a humble review and isn’t intended to be a complete playtest of every game and controller combo. At times I tested games with original SNES, Mega Drive and NES controllers and these all worked great. But the console also comes with a wireless controller which is something of a monstrosity. I think they were going for a one controller to be useful for every system approach and it’s just horrible to hold and looks weird. It has a home button which is useful to access the menu for save states and settings, but otherwise, you’ll want to stick with original controllers I’m sure.
It’s nice that it has a six button layout for Mega Drive games, but is oddly labelled with four direction symbols that start in the middle and then a plus and minus which aren’t used as start and select. The shoulder buttons are maybe the worst I’ve ever used. They make a horrible clunk like click and are just two flat thin slabs of plastic. Again…It’s functional enough to use the controller, but you’ll want to stick with the original controllers if you can.
For some reason the design of the console has a weird space which I think is just an extension of plastic for you to place the controller in. An odd retro design choice which is a call back to how you could store the wired controllers of the Famicom or Intellivision in the console itself.
So, should you get the Retron 5 these days? It’s still a decent option in my opinion, but this will depend on what you’re looking for. Cost wise these can still be found for between £150-200 but aren’t as available as they once were. They can still be found on Amazon and ebay always has them, but it’s more common to see the Retron 3 in 1 consoles and the Retrons that just play the NES games.
If you want a way to play your old cartridges the Retron 5 will certainly open up an avenue for you to play them in HD on your modern TV, and be able to use save states and is a handy all in one device. The poor controller is a shame, but if you have an alternative you’ll be ok. Input lag and slowdown are the biggest issues which would make me say you need to stop and consider, but if you have the chance to get a Retron 5 I’d say to go for it.
There are alternatives like the Analogue range of consoles like the Super Nt, Mega Sg and Analogue Pocket which between them will let you play old SNES, Mega Drive and Game Boy games, and like the Retron 5, you can also get adaptors for the Pocket to open things up to Game Gear. These are all costly and less easy to come by as they’re frequently sold out and I’m not sure if the Nt and Sg will get more units made with their current focus being on the Analogue Pocket and Duo. The benefit of the Analogue consoles is they are FPGA based which means you get better results in terms of performance and compatibility compared to something like the Retron which just dumps the roms and doesn’t emulate the original hardware the way the Analogue devices do.
The Retron is slightly older now, but still a useful device and a great way to play your old carts, bring them onto modern TVs and capture footage and stream games via HDMI…if that’s the type of thing you’re into.
What would you rate the Retron 5?
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