I'm still wondering if the Retron5 will use some sort of heuristics to detect the mapper hardware of new or unknown games. Specifically homebrews and hacks which share common mappers with known games. It may take a couple seconds longer for retron5 to probe such titles but it may be able to get a lot of new games running whether they are in the database or not. At the very least there is absolutely no reason whatsoever that any NROM NES game should not load automatically.
And really the mapper hell should only be an issue for NES/Famicom. Most Genesis, SNES, and GBA titles don't rely on bankswitching so they may be able to run normally without checksums. I'm not familiar with how Gameboy /Color bankswapping works so I'm not sure on those.
It won't because that means emulating the cart hardware better externally, something they put 0 work in to since it loads a ROM in an emulator virtually. I don't think it'll do much besides read 32KB of PRG-ROM, and take an educated guess.
I can't think of any reliable way to detect any mapper really. What they MIGHT do is fall back on nrom (although bunnyboy's comment about it not seeing the cart at all begs to differ).
I still don't see why they couldn't just run it off the damn cart. They could have easily recreated all those systems with 100% compatibility using an FPGA chip and a USB port to patch it with updates; instead they try to make a cart dumper that runs Android. If the compatibility issues piss me off too much I may end up selling mine.
However I'm definitely picking up BunnyBoy's upcoming HDMI NES when it comes out, provided it's not ludicrously expensive. Hopefully it will be under $200.
Does anyone know if the Retron5 will work with accessory controllers like the NES Arkanoid or the SNES mouse? Light guns are obviously out of the question with HDMI only output but Mouse and Vaus support would be cool.
I'm still wondering if the Retron5 will use some sort of heuristics to detect the mapper hardware of new or unknown games.
The homebrew was plain UNROM, so their heuristics must be horribly broken.
Originally posted by: stardust4ever
And really the mapper hell should only be an issue for NES/Famicom. Most Genesis, SNES, and GBA titles don't rely on bankswitching so they may be able to run normally without checksums.
There are fewer mappers, but not none. SNES has multiple versions of lo/hi/ex, plus SRAM locations and sizes. Genesis sucks.
Originally posted by: stardust4ever
I still don't see why they couldn't just run it off the damn cart. They could have easily recreated all those systems with 100% compatibility using an FPGA chip and a USB port to patch it with updates.
FPGA is far more expensive, and much longer development time. They also wouldn't have a decade of emulators to use as reference materials. Many of their features like save states cannot be done on real hardware without also emulating the cart. ARM/Android already handles bluetooth/usb/sd/hdmi without them needing to do any significant work.
Stick with the real deal. Clones suck, apparently even this one. How I love my NES. And Genesis. And Atari VCS. And Atari 5200. They play whatever I throw at 'em perfectly, without complaining.
Stick with the real deal. Clones suck, apparently even this one. How I love my NES. And Genesis. And Atari VCS. And Atari 5200. They play whatever I throw at 'em perfectly, without complaining.
The thing for me is to play the games without flickering, using filters, going through EB0's battles without thinking about shooting myself every minute (turbo button).
And come on Though it's bad, it's not like Hyperkin can't do anything about it...
I don't get the hate I really don't. At this rate it's just blind group mentality hatred. Why not let it hit the market finalized first and tested by reputable sources who will produce print and video reviews and then base assertions on that.
Damn right, clones suck, almost all of them do. There have been select cases of them where the quality is so high small shortcomings can be forgiven. That K2 thing that's a copy of the GBA SP does it very well, nothing much to complain about, and as I recall improved a few things too. The Supaboy v2 while it bitches and moans about 3 FX chip games and both SDD1 titles, the rest of the games work correctly and it doubles as a console with legit snes ports for controllers and a handheld but it does the audio/visuals right. NOAC stuff has always been shoddy because it was developed poorly and people just kept cloning crap while this thing may suck too, or maybe the angle they're taking will work out. It just gets old with all this more or less baseless grand standing and bitching over an unreleased product.
I don't get the hate I really don't. At this rate it's just blind group mentality hatred. Why not let it hit the market finalized first and tested by reputable sources who will produce print and video reviews and then base assertions on that.
Damn right, clones suck, almost all of them do. There have been select cases of them where the quality is so high small shortcomings can be forgiven. That K2 thing that's a copy of the GBA SP does it very well, nothing much to complain about, and as I recall improved a few things too. The Supaboy v2 while it bitches and moans about 3 FX chip games and both SDD1 titles, the rest of the games work correctly and it doubles as a console with legit snes ports for controllers and a handheld but it does the audio/visuals right. NOAC stuff has always been shoddy because it was developed poorly and people just kept cloning crap while this thing may suck too, or maybe the angle they're taking will work out. It just gets old with all this more or less baseless grand standing and bitching over an unreleased product.
Its not an exact replica of an nes or any of the other systems it "clones" so you cant nit pick all the minor flaws it has. What you are paying for is the accessability of the retron in the sense of not having to hook up 5 consoles to a tv and mess with a/v and r/f switchers. The colors arent the exact same as the nes and the sound is off too. But man does it help when you already have the clutter of all of your games in a room. Im not a spokes person for clone systems but it makes life a lot easier in my eyes.
I'm definitely snatching up a Retron 5 when it comes. The ability to pop in GBA games and play them fullscreen through HDMI is a system-seller for me alone.
The Retron 3 I guess had issues with some chip games like Super FX2, but they are saying that's supposed to be rectified and I've heard 100% compatibility is possible. Anything that's not compatible should be updateable using the USB port, or so I've heard. Guess fence-sitters will need to just check the forums after release to see if R5 turns out to be a great buy or a folly when it comes to homebrews and repros.
So here is something I haven't seen discussed and really concerns me.there are two reasons I would consider getting this. 1 is to use the original controller with the bonus of save states and up scaling. The second is being able to play my original carts with their saved progress from way back when.. but will the Retron5 even be able to interface with the saved data? If not then it's not worth the money in my opinion. I really want to be excited for this console but it's getting harder.
So here is something I haven't seen discussed and really concerns me.there are two reasons I would consider getting this. 1 is to use the original controller with the bonus of save states and up scaling. The second is being able to play my original carts with their saved progress from way back when.. but will the Retron5 even be able to interface with the saved data? If not then it's not worth the money in my opinion. I really want to be excited for this console but it's getting harder.
My best guess is that it dumps the game save into the Retron then stores it on the SD card from then on. Most games it is possible to write save files directly back to the cart, but this actually has me concerned that the save game could get overwritten if the gamer switches between original hardware and Retron. Even if it gives you the option of selecting cart or SD card for saves, this could be problematic. A bigger issue for many gamers is whether the 20 year old batteries still work. Not everyone has the skills to replace them.
My primary concern is getting unrecognised NES/FC games to play on it. Surely they don't expect to have CRC32 checksums to detect every game ever made, US, Jap, PAL, unlicensed, pirate, homebrew, hack, or repro?
So here is something I haven't seen discussed and really concerns me.there are two reasons I would consider getting this. 1 is to use the original controller with the bonus of save states and up scaling. The second is being able to play my original carts with their saved progress from way back when.. but will the Retron5 even be able to interface with the saved data? If not then it's not worth the money in my opinion. I really want to be excited for this console but it's getting harder.
When was this not covered last year? 1 -- You an use the original controller if you have it, there's ports on the system for them and the system does have load/save states for games. 2 -- It claims to run stuf as it would on real hardware, so yes if you have a 20 year old Zelda save, it will pick that up right where you left it just like it would if you saved a GBA game 5min ago on that and took it to the retron.
Supposedly the system is setup to dump (copy) your cart contents into the storage within the system before starting the game. Once that is done it will run things as normal. If the game has a battery it will pull the data off it to continue the game, and if you save it will write back to the cart. Beyond that I can't say if it stores an added save copy into the system, but it does copy the game itself into memory so you can do save/load states. As a bonus I'd think if you had a game with a dead battery you could now complete it dead because you could just use load/save states on the Retron.
They claim 100% compatibility with all games released with valid checksums and I'd imagine anything else unlicensed from back in the era that existed too as the data is out there. Your problem will lie with bootleg piracy stuff like chinese stuff and the perpetuated lie of the reproduction sold here, ebay, elsewhere which is just a stolen game in a new shell usually with an english translation slapped on it. Those won't fire up, neither will homebrew unless they're submitted to hyperkin to have it added. The system is android based and they said it's open, so it is possible to imagine anyone wanting to could just add the game into the library so it works. They even said the system will allow for the patching of translations to Japanese games, so I'm thinking if someone did a quick hack you could have ROMS loaded to it through the SD card too.
Retron5 has a Famicom slot. Do you honestly believe it will play every freakking Famicom game? Say I put in Lagrange Point. That is a licensed game, but will I get the VRC7 audio with it? There are literally thousands of Famicom ROMs out there. Will all of them really work? What about Super Mario RPG, and Kirby All Stars / Dreamland 3.
They won't test every cart, they only need to download a ROM pack from bit torrent and run them all through a checksum generator. We did the same thing for Scoreboard years ago to generate it's database. Even their Facebook posts say they haven't even tested every NES game, which is a small fraction of the games the console can play: https://www.facebook.com/HyperkinGames/posts/628110440557389 I guess if it actually came out on the release date they wouldn't have done any significant testing if they are only starting now?
So will homebrew developers have the option to send Hyperkin their ROMs to get the games added to the checksum database? That would suck ass otherwise. I still don't see why it isn't possible to probe the mapper chips for unsupported games. For example, write a bunch of registers on the cart and check for changes in the ROM data. I'd bet the mapper type could be narrowed down fairly quickly that way.
Blindly probing will never work, far too many memory locations and combinations of reads/writes needed. "Write a bunch of registers" is ~49000 possible locations, possibly multiple writes in a row needed, and many reads of every bank in both PRG and CHR to check if anything changed.
Narrowing down to common mappers using heuristics would work for some games. 5-10 mappers covers most of the USA set. But those games are the ones already likely to be supported from ROMs.
Homebrews with new mappers are just screwed until a system update comes out.
Homebrews won't work on it. We have already proven that. Most repros won't either.
I sent this to Dain, but I uploaded the interview I did with them at Too Many Games recently. Posted this in another thread, but they comment on how they can update their system in this interview.
Interview was from June last year. I had a family memeber pass away and the whole trip back ended up taking two weeks because I traded in my Philly to Dallas ticket for Philly to Omaha. By the time I got back, I just didn't have any free moments to edit the footage. Film stuff is usually slow in the winter/holiday times.
Comments
However, both could theoretically be affected. (although eb zero is a common romhack...so they might've just included it)
And really the mapper hell should only be an issue for NES/Famicom. Most Genesis, SNES, and GBA titles don't rely on bankswitching so they may be able to run normally without checksums. I'm not familiar with how Gameboy /Color bankswapping works so I'm not sure on those.
However I'm definitely picking up BunnyBoy's upcoming HDMI NES when it comes out, provided it's not ludicrously expensive. Hopefully it will be under $200.
Originally posted by: stardust4ever
I'm still wondering if the Retron5 will use some sort of heuristics to detect the mapper hardware of new or unknown games.
The homebrew was plain UNROM, so their heuristics must be horribly broken.
Originally posted by: stardust4ever
And really the mapper hell should only be an issue for NES/Famicom. Most Genesis, SNES, and GBA titles don't rely on bankswitching so they may be able to run normally without checksums.
There are fewer mappers, but not none. SNES has multiple versions of lo/hi/ex, plus SRAM locations and sizes. Genesis sucks.
Originally posted by: stardust4ever
I still don't see why they couldn't just run it off the damn cart. They could have easily recreated all those systems with 100% compatibility using an FPGA chip and a USB port to patch it with updates.
FPGA is far more expensive, and much longer development time. They also wouldn't have a decade of emulators to use as reference materials. Many of their features like save states cannot be done on real hardware without also emulating the cart. ARM/Android already handles bluetooth/usb/sd/hdmi without them needing to do any significant work.
Originally posted by: WaverBoy
Stick with the real deal. Clones suck, apparently even this one. How I love my NES. And Genesis. And Atari VCS. And Atari 5200. They play whatever I throw at 'em perfectly, without complaining.
The thing for me is to play the games without flickering, using filters, going through EB0's battles without thinking about shooting myself every minute (turbo button).
And come on Though it's bad, it's not like Hyperkin can't do anything about it...
Damn right, clones suck, almost all of them do. There have been select cases of them where the quality is so high small shortcomings can be forgiven. That K2 thing that's a copy of the GBA SP does it very well, nothing much to complain about, and as I recall improved a few things too. The Supaboy v2 while it bitches and moans about 3 FX chip games and both SDD1 titles, the rest of the games work correctly and it doubles as a console with legit snes ports for controllers and a handheld but it does the audio/visuals right. NOAC stuff has always been shoddy because it was developed poorly and people just kept cloning crap while this thing may suck too, or maybe the angle they're taking will work out. It just gets old with all this more or less baseless grand standing and bitching over an unreleased product.
Originally posted by: Tanooki
I don't get the hate I really don't. At this rate it's just blind group mentality hatred. Why not let it hit the market finalized first and tested by reputable sources who will produce print and video reviews and then base assertions on that.
Damn right, clones suck, almost all of them do. There have been select cases of them where the quality is so high small shortcomings can be forgiven. That K2 thing that's a copy of the GBA SP does it very well, nothing much to complain about, and as I recall improved a few things too. The Supaboy v2 while it bitches and moans about 3 FX chip games and both SDD1 titles, the rest of the games work correctly and it doubles as a console with legit snes ports for controllers and a handheld but it does the audio/visuals right. NOAC stuff has always been shoddy because it was developed poorly and people just kept cloning crap while this thing may suck too, or maybe the angle they're taking will work out. It just gets old with all this more or less baseless grand standing and bitching over an unreleased product.
+1
The Retron 3 I guess had issues with some chip games like Super FX2, but they are saying that's supposed to be rectified and I've heard 100% compatibility is possible. Anything that's not compatible should be updateable using the USB port, or so I've heard. Guess fence-sitters will need to just check the forums after release to see if R5 turns out to be a great buy or a folly when it comes to homebrews and repros.
So here is something I haven't seen discussed and really concerns me.there are two reasons I would consider getting this. 1 is to use the original controller with the bonus of save states and up scaling. The second is being able to play my original carts with their saved progress from way back when.. but will the Retron5 even be able to interface with the saved data? If not then it's not worth the money in my opinion. I really want to be excited for this console but it's getting harder.
My best guess is that it dumps the game save into the Retron then stores it on the SD card from then on. Most games it is possible to write save files directly back to the cart, but this actually has me concerned that the save game could get overwritten if the gamer switches between original hardware and Retron. Even if it gives you the option of selecting cart or SD card for saves, this could be problematic. A bigger issue for many gamers is whether the 20 year old batteries still work. Not everyone has the skills to replace them.
My primary concern is getting unrecognised NES/FC games to play on it. Surely they don't expect to have CRC32 checksums to detect every game ever made, US, Jap, PAL, unlicensed, pirate, homebrew, hack, or repro?
And it would be infinitely useful if this lets us write saves from the Retron 5 back onto the physical carts.
Originally posted by: cirellio
My hopes are that it reads the save from the cart and automatically backs it up to internal memory/SD cards/USB drives.
And it would be infinitely useful if this lets us write saves from the Retron 5 back onto the physical carts.
I'm hoping this is exactly what it can do. Anything less and I'll be disappointed.
Although from the sounds of things, it won't use the cart at all after being dumped.
Originally posted by: Snake Eyes
So here is something I haven't seen discussed and really concerns me.there are two reasons I would consider getting this. 1 is to use the original controller with the bonus of save states and up scaling. The second is being able to play my original carts with their saved progress from way back when.. but will the Retron5 even be able to interface with the saved data? If not then it's not worth the money in my opinion. I really want to be excited for this console but it's getting harder.
When was this not covered last year? 1 -- You an use the original controller if you have it, there's ports on the system for them and the system does have load/save states for games. 2 -- It claims to run stuf as it would on real hardware, so yes if you have a 20 year old Zelda save, it will pick that up right where you left it just like it would if you saved a GBA game 5min ago on that and took it to the retron.
Supposedly the system is setup to dump (copy) your cart contents into the storage within the system before starting the game. Once that is done it will run things as normal. If the game has a battery it will pull the data off it to continue the game, and if you save it will write back to the cart. Beyond that I can't say if it stores an added save copy into the system, but it does copy the game itself into memory so you can do save/load states. As a bonus I'd think if you had a game with a dead battery you could now complete it dead because you could just use load/save states on the Retron.
They claim 100% compatibility with all games released with valid checksums and I'd imagine anything else unlicensed from back in the era that existed too as the data is out there. Your problem will lie with bootleg piracy stuff like chinese stuff and the perpetuated lie of the reproduction sold here, ebay, elsewhere which is just a stolen game in a new shell usually with an english translation slapped on it. Those won't fire up, neither will homebrew unless they're submitted to hyperkin to have it added. The system is android based and they said it's open, so it is possible to imagine anyone wanting to could just add the game into the library so it works. They even said the system will allow for the patching of translations to Japanese games, so I'm thinking if someone did a quick hack you could have ROMS loaded to it through the SD card too.
Narrowing down to common mappers using heuristics would work for some games. 5-10 mappers covers most of the USA set. But those games are the ones already likely to be supported from ROMs.
Homebrews with new mappers are just screwed until a system update comes out.
Originally posted by: Benihana
Homebrews won't work on it. We have already proven that. Most repros won't either.
I sent this to Dain, but I uploaded the interview I did with them at Too Many Games recently. Posted this in another thread, but they comment on how they can update their system in this interview.
Retron 5 Interview
Originally posted by: stardust4ever
When was this recorded btw?
Interview was from June last year. I had a family memeber pass away and the whole trip back ended up taking two weeks because I traded in my Philly to Dallas ticket for Philly to Omaha. By the time I got back, I just didn't have any free moments to edit the footage. Film stuff is usually slow in the winter/holiday times.