Hyperkin RetroN 1 HD - Reviews

(3.7)

6 reviews

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10.12.2019

I didn’t have a NES as a kid, but my friend did, and I spent many happy hours at his house playing Mario, Zelda, Megaman, Kid Icarus and Blades of Steel. I’ve lost count of the amount of devices in my house that have an emulated version of these games on. Some of them are official products and others are not, but I’ve found that none of them really have scratched the nostalgia itch all that well. As this was selling for £20 and has a hardware implemented NOAC (NES On A Chip) instead of a ROM dump emulation system, I decided to give it a shot… although my wife did remark “So, exactly how many things do we need to play Mario on?”.I watched a ton of reviews of this on Youtube before buying and there are some specific issues raised which I’ll go over.For reference, I was using a PAL cartridge of Mario Bros/Duck Hunt, the Retron was in 4:3 / PAL mode, my TV is a HiSense 4k screen and I was using HDMI input 1 which apparently can do a HDR 4k signal at 60 frames… which sounds posh.Onto the negatives:“The colours are wrong” - Check. As most reviewers on Youtube point out and as Hyperkin have confirmed, the palette on the HDMI output is ‘wrong’. However (and as a disclaimer I should say I am colourblind), the colours on my TV were not as bad as those on the captured footage I had viewed on Youtube. I am guessing that if you fiddle with your settings you would probably be able to brighten up the image to a reasonable picture and correct it a bit with manually adjusting your settings. For me, it seemed fine and didn’t adversely affect my game.“The sound is too high pitched” - Check. The sound output on the HDMI connection is pitched up and as a result, any sound effect or note that was highly pitched to start with ends up distorted (“That noise isn’t at all annoying,” said the wife while I was thumping one of those blocks that drops about 10 coins in a row). However, using the HDMI output does not switch off the composite output and if you happen to have a stereo amp and a pair of speakers as part of your AV set-up like I do, you can mute your TV volume and enjoy the better output through composite. I run everything I can through my amp and speakers to avoid using the main TV sound anyway.“It’s blurry” - Check. You are not going to get perfectly represented square pixels out of this thing. I believe it is upscaling the original 240p to 480i for the composite output and then re-upscaling that to 720p and either that process creates the blur or that process has just been implemented badly. However, how close are you going to be sat to your screen? The controller has a 10ft cord so I was able to sit pretty far back (on my big comfy beanbag) and at that distance, what I saw was pretty much inline with my magical childhood memories of what NES over RF through an antenna splitter into a Sony Trinitron CRT looked like. Far better than any scanline or retro filter I’ve seen. Far better, in fact, than modern pixel perfect brilliance. So personally, I’m pretty cool with the blur, if you don’t have magical childhood memories like me then maybe you won’t be.“Laggy controls” - Hmmmm. I didn’t notice any lag at all to start with, but other reviewers have noted that lag is introduced as the session progressed. I think I can probably confirm this. On my first go, all my jumps were executed perfectly up to about 30 minutes from switching on the console. I then had to pause the game to have an extremely long and increasing complicated discussion with my wife (punctuated throughout with “If you can’t be bothered to talk about this now just play your game. It’s FINE” - “Aha!”, thinks I… “I can hear you’re pronouncing the word ‘fine’ as ‘FINE’ in that special way that means it’s actually the opposite of ‘fine’ so I’m not falling for that one,”) and the game was on pause for about an hour. When I started playing again (“Oh, so you’re playing it now?”) I noticed that my jump presses were not registering as immediately as before and that the game timing seemed to be a little floaty, particularly noticeable with running with Mario suddenly bursting into high speed without his usual build-up. However, all this was resolved (much like 99% of all technical difficulties) with turning it off and on again. This may be a bit of a deal breaker for you if you are intending to play the same game for longer than an hour and the game doesn’t have a save function before you power off, but, I’m guessing any game that takes longer than an hour to finish would probably be something RPG based anyway with saves or passwords, so it’s not going to be that much of an issue.“Cartridges are hard to remove” - Well, yes, they are snugly held. As it’s a top loader I am assuming this is probably a good thing and as a parent of twin toddlers who touch everything, it’s an especially good thing, because it means they can't get the cartridge out and put Weetabix inside it instead. I didn’t find it that difficult to remove the cartridge, maybe I’m getting stronger… I have been eating more in the run up to Christmas!“Everdrives don’t work” - Can’t check this as I don’t have one. Frankly, I don’t know why you’d bother to run ROM files on this. Surely the point is having something that runs the original game cartridges?So that’s the negatives, in principle I have to agree with most of the comments from Youtubers, but in practice they really were not that problematic for me. Fancy some positives? Well hang onto your hats then:The build quality is great, both on the console and the controller. Made of solid plastic with a nice feel, grippy rubber feet to prevent it from sliding around, nice power/reset buttons and mode switches, the console also has a cool little light on the cut away corner when you switch it on, which is cool. (My wife confirmed this saying “Ooo! That light is cool on the corner!”). The controller is comfy to hold, has a long cable, clicky click buttons and a nice D-Pad.You can put actual cartridges in it and it just boots into the game in just ever so slightly longer than the original NES took, and this delay is probably caused due to the TV being slow to recognise a HDMI signal is being received. There’s no menus. No OS. No ROM selection menu. Why is this so great?1 - You can put actual cartridges in it. Did I mention that? This fully activates magical childhood memories. It is astoundingly satisfying.2 - All my other devices have libraries of various sizes of ROMs that I dip in and out of without bothering to fully get into the games. This “kid in a candy store” (When did I become so Americanised? Sorry, I mean "child in a sweet shop") mentality is absent with this because you can only have access to the games you own copies of (which for me is one cartridge) so I am fully invested into the game. I can’t just have one go and then switch games when I lose all my lives. I play it properly. I have several goes. I don’t rage quit. I get better. I get to world 8-3 before my wife says “Are you, at any point, intending to come to bed tonight?” and I concede defeat.Finally, bearing in mind I own official Nintendo products that run official emulations of their official ROM’s, this is the absolute closest thing to playing the NES since playing the actual NES. I felt good at playing Mario. Like, almost as good as I was when I was nine years old (which for those of you not in the know, is the age of peak gaming ability in human males) and I wasn’t even using an official controller. With the exception of the increasing lag later in the play session, I didn’t fall in pits. I didn’t run into Koopas. I could do that thing where you kick a shell, then time your jump on top to stop it perfectly. Three Goombas in a row? HA! FEEL MY WRATH LATIKU BECAUSE I STILL HAVE THE FIRE FLOWER FROM 1-1 AND YOUR SPINIES ARE POWERLESS AGAINST ME!I arrived at 8-1 flushed with breathless excitement, still in fire-mario mode, 6 extra lives and swiftly realised that I hadn’t managed to get there since 1992 when me and my friends were seduced by 16-bit era gaming. And the reason why was because this felt like I was actually playing Mario instead of playing a grotesque facsimile of what Mario should be. Is this because it’s the proper cartridge running on a vaguely proper hardware, or is it because of the fact you can put actual cartridges in it (did I mention that?) and activate your magical childhood memories of when you were the ultimate master of playing Mario? Do I care? Do you care?To sum up: buy this. It’s £20. Stop complaining about the funny colour and tinny sound and blurry pixels. The original TV you played this on had probably had a far worse picture anyway. What are you gonna do instead? Buy an Analogue NT? Don’t make me laugh. You can’t afford it. If you could, you wouldn’t be looking at this. Then, get a copy of Mario. Mine cost me about £5.80. It’s the only way I’ve ever found to fully activate magical childhood memories and get to Word 8-1 in fire mode with 6 extra Mario’s.I don’t know if this will work if you don’t have any pre-existing magical childhood memories. If you were not born in the time before Euros’s, safe-spaces and emotional support peacocks were commonplace, this may just be a sub-standard shonky chinese rip-off with poor visuals and grating distorted sound, albeit a well made one. Even still, you should still buy it. Then you can post an entitled sounding rant on a some forum somewhere about how upset you are with your purchase, which might get you some likes or karma or whatever it is that makes kids feel like that hollow pit inside them has been filled up with something they think is happiness, but is actually just the temporary appeasement of their fear of rejection. Woah. That got dark at the end there. I should delete this, but I can’t think of another way to end this review....Eyyyyyy, just kidding. You kids are alright, it’s not your fault some jerk invented social media. Tell you what, switch off your phone, plug this thing in and invite your friends round and then take turns “having a go,” for 3 hours on a Saturday afternoon. Temporarily argue about “whose go it is next,” and whether “a go” is just three lives or until all your lives run out. Et voila - magical childhood memories!