Cheapest option from Amazon sellers: 230 freakin´ bucks.
eh more like 7 consoles as they double up for the japanese version
I’m inclined to agree, but if you wanted to play Famicom games outside of Japan you would need a separate console. The GBA/GBC/GB compatibility is where I would tend to pick nits since the GBA hardware plays all of these formats.
2 to 3 hundred bucks is probably about right for this kind of specialized thingee. No problem there, but I’d want intellivision support, and maybe Atari 2600, with controller ports to jump in. As is, a little to Nintendo-centric (with evidently the Genesis being the only exception).
Seems like this would only be useful if you really, really want to play games on more than 2 vintage consoles, while still lacking the technical acumen to get an old PC (or a Ouya), install a bunch of emulators and ROMS, and connect it to your TV.
I think that’s kind of a narrow market.
Technical acumen? Or different priorities re: time/pita vs money?
Forgive me, but I often see the world through the lens of xkcd, so this particular cartoon came to mind.
With such a price tag I guess I will stick to my Raspberry Pi as emulation station --> RetroPi
So it’s an emulator box, only overpriced and with copyright lockdown? I guess it might be nice if you’ve already got an extensive multiplatform cartridge collection, but serious collectors are generally purists about accuracy, and not into emulation. I’m sure this thing has a market, but it can’t be very large.
Related, the link to the fancy $400 composite-to-HDMI converter is a little weird. Those things can easily be found for $10-$40, depending on features.
I could see it taking off a bit if it dropped $100 and it turns out there’s a simple hack to use pirated ROMs…
MSRP is $150. The current Amazon reseller prices are just the result of perceived demand.
Final panel could’ve been:
‘Wait, I want you take 45 seconds to come through the door’
Okay, if there’s such perceived demand I guess there must be a simple DRM hack.
Unless Amazon’s perceptions are bullshit?
It’s not Amazon, it’s 3rd party resellers. Think of it as being like scalpers.
Does not include Virtual Boy support. 0/10. Will not buy.
I watched a review on Gamebag on this console and they had a real problem with the quality of assembly with theirs. The games had to be really forced in and they bent tines on the SNES port the first time they tried to use it. Could be a fluke or could be their QC is shit.
In other words, if it became an OUYA?
I’ve also read about niggles with respect to games with battery-backed saves. Because the system rips a ROM and runs that on software, there were complications with people using the built-in save features of the game (rather than using the console’s own emulation-based save state functions), as the Retron would try to write the saved game back into the battery-backed cartridge prior to ejection, but instead tended to mangle or erase save data. Or fail to access the battery-backed saves in the first place, making it impossible to resume games started on the original hardware.
