I have an agreement with hyperkin for the kick starter reward, and I'm facing the same problem for the snes pcb. The multicart will be the only one done with 5 volts chips, I'm working on a new board with still in production parts and we have to do the converter method if not the carts can get fried at any moment.
If you know what you're getting, this could be a somewhat reasonable product. But what you are getting is a "Retrode" type cartridge reading device with a computer of unknown performance likely using open source emulators ported at an unknown level of quality. So sure you can plug in your Mario game cartridge and play it on a mini computer designed to be hooked up to your TV. But this is just an emulator being sold to you along with a cartridge reader which presents various problems. Flash cartridges are very unlikely to work. Why? Because the real system communicates with the cartridge *constantly*. This device almost certainly will probe the cartridge, dump it to memory, and try to emulate the resulting ROM image. Why is this bad? Original cartridges obviously won't have a problem mostly because they contain a ROM chip and maybe a RAM chip and can certainly be emulated once dumped. But a Flash Cartridge or a Copier contains extra hardware functions either to load FlashROM, DRAM, or perform memory bank switching functions. These won't work on this device. NES and Famicom cartridges will be a huge problem. Unlike SNES and Genesis which are mostly standard, NES and Famicom particularly have very unique hardware sometimes only present in 1 cartridge! And it will be difficult to really implement an effective way of detecting the mapper hardware in each game. The easiest thing to do is to take every single NES game and generate a checksum (CRC32) of portions of ROM. You could then have a database to help you narrow down what mapper is being used. But right away that means games not in the database will have problems being detected correctly. Famicom has tons of unlicensed cartridges too. And crazy mappers for them. So it will never compare to a real system. The NES alone is actually quite a bit easier to do something like this with. If you limited it to just play licensed NES titles and had no official support for unlicensed cartridges you could probably achieve 100% compatibility. Now the SNES poses a few problems with Super FX, SA-1, SDD-1, etc. These games can be read though and as long as the emulator supports these games you can overcome the issue. Genesis only has a few odd titles but same thing they can be overcome. GBA is easy but again I wouldn't expect any multi-cart type flash carts to work. A basic FlashROM Cartridge that holds 1 game might work. Back to the Famicom, I wouldn't expect the Famicom Disk System to work at all. You could problem make your own, better, emulator box which isn't limited to cartridges you have on hand. But I can see the gimmick of having something like this. Finally, the #1 thing everyone should understand is this is *not* a clone system. It is *not* "hardware emulation". It's a computer with software emulators and cartridge readers. Clones like the Yobo are actual hardware clones. The RetroDuo is a clone. I think that RetroN 3 or whatever it is that does NES, SNES, and Genesis is a hardware clone. They are copies of the Integrated Circuits inside the original systems.
I think it's great. I got to demo it at their booth and it ran Street Fighter 2 well an the upscaling looked good. The colors were vibrant and popped out with great clarity. The audio sounded good too but it was loud in the area so I didn't get to listen closely. As for the wireless controllers, they seemed to work well and are Bluetooth. I didn't notice any lag, but the buttons felt stiff to me. I think this is a mini PC honestly. I think it just emulates them. If you guys have some questions then ask away.
If this is an emulator box and you wanna use flash carts on it then you've missed the point. You buy one of these to play original cartridges on new hardware. You buy a flash cart to play ROMs on original hardware. To stick an everdrive into this thing is a bloody expensive way to play a rom in an emulator. Grab a soft modded Xbox instead.
The Retroduo is actually really good. I got it before I got my SNES and NES. I might get this, if only because getting a Famicom is a pain in the butt, and the HDMI could be good.
This sounds interesting. I may look into it if I ever get a HD TV set. Not fully convinced yet since I am technically one of those "old gamer farts" that stick to original hardware. Guess you stick to what you grew up with... I'm only 23 too...
If the compatibility was comparable to the original and, more importantly, it was accurate enough to not have sound that sounds "off" to me I might bite. But considering I have original consoles already sitting around I'm not too concerned.
The Genesis sound emulation will be the real test of this thing at least for me. How many clone systems have emulated the genesis/megadrive correctly in terms of sound reproduction? The insides I'm really curious about. If its a low end PC (like a rasberry pi) then its running emulation software to run the carts. I wonder if we'll see a repeat of Neo Geo X where it used Final Burn Alpha.
I will agree with you that HyperKin is moving towards software emulation with Retron 5 and away from Hardware emulation such as the Retron 3. But is moving towards software emulation with physical cartridge slot the right direction to resolve incompatibility issues? To me its like buying a mini computer and running the games roms (carts) on the TV. I rather Hyperkin focuses on enhancing the NES,SNES,GENESIS hardware chipset to be as accurate and true to the originial consoles which is the harder way instead of going the easier software emulation way of running off an ARM processor~
If they REALLY wanted to get the cloning right with modern hardware FPGA is the way to go. Different firmwares for the consoles being run at the time. 1 or 2 chips to mimic original hardware and allow for better integration with the HD upscaler for the HDMI output. Software emulation is nice but takes away from the "original feel" it needs to have. Now knowing it is software on ARM based makes me think I won't like it...
There's no need to think about it, we know it is, then even told us that it is. It's an ARM based computer that will be running open source emulators that they ported to it. Through software emulation you can definitely achieve high quality sound emulation for the Genesis. As I said before, as long as you know what it is you can make the decision if you want to buy it. It's a dedicated computer system with cartridge readers and emulators. Emulation quality will be a big concern. But I can see people that would find this appealing. You have to bear in mind for a long time plenty of people thought emulators like Nesticle and ZSNES were very accurate. So as long as the emulator plays the most popular games very well, the majority of people will think it's great. It'll look good on their digital TV which the original consoles certainly wouldn't. It's also easier for certain people to just buy a box like this than to find computer hardware and set it up. That's pretty much what you're getting is a plug and play emulator computer that accepts original cartridges. It's not a bad idea. But it really matters about the emulation quality. The technology exists to make a pretty good product based on this idea. But it will never be equal to the original consoles.
You wont be able to play snes special chip games, like MottZilla mentioned - the rom is not accessible via the cart slot.
According to a guy on this french retrogaming forum, who visited their factory in Shenzen while it was still at prototype stage, it is indeed ARM chip (like on smartphones) running emulators and special chips/mappers are emulated as well. Cartridges are only used to get the ROM. They are probably reusing sligthly modified versions of existing open-source emulators for ARM based handleds, like picodrive or pocketsnes, it should be interesting to hack it or compare the compatibilities. Here is the link (in french): http://www.grospixels.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?topic=14500&forum=1&start=3
