Retro Freak is the new home for my old games ⊟.
There are people for whom the Cyber Gadget Retro Freak is totally pointless, on two different extremes. On one end, there is the contingent who relies entirely on original hardware, buying vintage RGB monitors for the cleanest signal from their retro game consoles and maintaining beautiful shelves full of cartridges.
On the other end, emulation hobbyists who build special tiny computers to output their ROMS over HDMI, with painstakingly simulated scanlines and chains of upscalers to produce just the right resolution.
In the middle of those two extremes: me, and this thing. I love it.
The Retro Freak, my first Cyber Gadget product despite years of covering Gachapin/Mukku DS accessories, is basically an HDMI-out Android device loaded with a bunch of emulators, convenient for using in a living room. The thing that makes it special is that, unlike the laptop I could plug in to my TV or a RetroPIE thingy I could build, it has for-real cartridge slots. A lot of cartridge slots, in fact: the Retro Freak can accept Famicom, Super Famicom/SNES, Mega Drive/Genesis, Game Boy/Color/Advance, and even PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 cartridges. The rare TG16 support is what pushed me to choose this device over similar retro consoles: if I want to play those cartridges, my choices are vintage hardware (which apparently has reliability problems) or one of these.
Unfortunately, American NES cartridges are not among those supported out of the box. Some users have had luck with their existing NES/Famicom converters, but I did not. Cyber Gadget will release its own in September, and also has an adapter for SG1000, Master System, and Sega My Card games. I assumed my NES games would work with my existing converter, and it's a disappointment to have to wait and maybe spend more money.
This is the actual console, by the way. The thing with all the cartridges is an adapter that it fits into.
Operating it is as simple as operating a real console. Turn it on, put a cartridge in, and you can start playing. Or, if you'd prefer – and boy howdy, do I prefer, you can put the cartridge in and back the game up to a MicroSD card with a single button press. I got a 32gb card and it's going to archive every game I own, and every old game I pick up from eBay, Game Over, yard sales, or anywhere else for the rest of my life. The thing even backed up any saves that were on the cartridges, some of which dated back to my childhood! In addition, the PC Genesis collection I got on sale years ago turned out to be full of ROMs, which all worked (when the extension was changed to .smd). What a delight to be able to get those games off my PC and onto a console with my other Genesis games!
ROMs downloaded from the internet work too, according to other reports I've read– even Famicom Disk System games, provided you find and add the FDS BIOS. But for me, the point of this thing is that I actually own the games, even if there's no functional difference between my personally dumped games and those downloaded from the internet. There's still a difference to me, and it involves not obsessively worrying about ending up in prison.
The Retro Freak bundle I bought included a USB controller adapter that accepts NES, SNES, Genesis, and PC Engine controllers, all fully customizable and remappable in the software. But the included controller, though it feels light and cheap, totally works well enough that I don't feel the need to get out my old stuff.
Being an emulation-based system, the Retro Freak offers many of the advantages of PC-based emulators, like save states, customizable visual filters to be totally ignored, scanlines, cheats, and fast forward. I have had to fiddle a bit with the cheats to get them to work – the cheat file on the Cyber Gadget website has Japanese titles for everything, so nothing matches up and the system can't find the cheats for my games, so then I downloaded the one from the Retron 5 site and changed the file names to match, and it still doesn't work for everything because I guess some of my games have differently formatted titles, etc. At the very least, I got to play Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow today with all the soul abilities unlocked. It was grand.
There are definitely compromises involved with using this thing. The pixel-perfect presentation is not accurate to the way these games looked on CRT televisions. All the extra functionality makes it almost impossible to have a truly authentic experience – it takes incredible willpower not to use save states when they are available. The menus can be annoying to navigate, especially when trying to remap controls. Applying cheats and patches can take some extra work.
But I don't really care about CRT-accurate graphics. I like the razor-sharp pixels. I like the cheat menu. I love having all of my games available under my TV at all times. And yes, I'm going to play the dad card, again– it's valuable to me to be able to share a variety of my favorite games with my kids without having to switch out systems or deal with a pile of cartridges.
My tastes can vary widely across systems and eras, to say nothing of the mercurial nature of small children. I don't spend a lot of time playing games with Catherine and Emily, but when I do, I want that time to be spent playing games, not putting away the SNES and hooking up the NES, or trying to remember which of my TG16 games are on my Japanese PSN account and which are on the Wii Mode menu of my Wii U. I want something that Just Works to play my old games, and so far, the Retro Freak does that.
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