Amazing new Retro Freak Review

[Gingerzilla]

Hello all,

I know it is not an arcade machine but I just picked up the Retro Freak multi console system.
I have to say I wasn't too impressed with the way it looked, as it almost looked like a prototype,
but once I turned it on and got it working, I realised it was an amazing system.

The Retro Freak really answers all of your old cartridge based console needs all in one box.
SNES (JAP/US/EUROPE), FC, GBA, PC ENGINE, MD, GENESIS, CBC and GB.
The only missing cartridge currently is the US NES but I'm sure they will bring out a converter for it as a converter will come in Feb that will do Sega MS, SGG and SG 1000.

When it comes to functionality the whole machine is modular which is great also small.
All games and saves can be dumped to onboard storage or a MSD card which is cool.

When it comes to graphics, the console pumps out at 720 which is more than enough for an HD TV.
I saw no lag I could notice but it has options to negate it within the menus I saw. Handy!
Loads of settings with filters and interlacing to give you the CRT look you want,
which is the best I have seen to be honest on such a system.

The sound is literally amazing. I was so blown away with the difference.
PC Engine games have always sounded naff but now they have a totally new licence on life.

In game menus let you do heaps, from save states to enabling cheat codes and graphics.
The controller is very good but you also have the option to use any controller you want which is great.

I tried a heap of my games from different systems and not one failure. In-fact a great example of how well this system worked was with the MD game Forgotten Worlds. It usually can't play with a six button controller and resets itself if one is plugged in. The Retro Freak had no issues.

Finally new updates can come from a MSD card that hopefully be on the web in the near future.

So in conclusion as a retro gamer, the Retro Freak is finally the all in one solution for all my cartridge based systems, saving me loads of space and adding some cool modern features. I totally recommend this system to any collector who is concerned about depleting the life of their old systems. Or a collector who wants to clean things up a bit.

Now if they can release a CDRom drive attachment, I'm good to go for all my 32 bit systems

Last note, the only thing I want to do now is to stick it within my Egret 2 - but I'm still not too sure how to go from HD to SCART on my Viletim yet. Anyone know how to do this I'm eternally grateful.

Here is the link to the manufacturers site.
http://www.cybergadget.co.jp/retrofreak/

Cheers

[BuckoA51]

Eurogamer have a much more sober review, looks like they messed up the scanlines again, also seems likely it's ripping off emulators and disregarding their GPL like the Retron 5 does.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digit ... eak-review

[BONKERS]

I really wish people would stop giving money to these asshats.

[Fudoh]

looks like they messed up the scanlines again,

same as on the R5. If you set the scaling to 1:3 (instead of forced fullscreen), the scanlines will align properly.

[Guspaz]

Sigh, another illegal profit-grab that steals the hard work of emulator developers to make a buck.

[Fudoh]

you sound as you if you didn't remember that you posted the same comment in the original thread last year already

[mikejmoffitt]

Ha ha, "negates lag"? Pretty cool for something that doesn't really make sense! If it's an option that reduces un-needed processing to reduce latency, why even allow it to be any other way? Running at 720 only will also imply a bit of lag on any 1080p TV, as that signal must be sampled and scaled. I doubt any consumer TV will do that scaling in under one frame using a short line buffer.

Another system that looks like somebody tripped and accidentally hit their head on the mouse while SolidWorks happened to be running on the computer.

[Fudoh]

I doubt any consumer TV will do that scaling in under one frame using a short line buffer.

almost every consumer TV these days has identical lag for 480p/720p/1080p inputs. They are run through the same processing path, so feeding 1080p and disabling any overscan don't give you and advantage when it comes to lag.

[mikejmoffitt]

I doubt any consumer TV will do that scaling in under one frame using a short line buffer.

almost every consumer TV these days has identical lag for 480p/720p/1080p inputs. They are run through the same processing path, so feeding 1080p and disabling any overscan don't give you and advantage when it comes to lag.

I'm imagining the scenario for a "best-case" TV, or monitor, really. There are <16ms processing lag 1080p monitors frequently used for modern fighting game tournaments and the like. For a consumer TV that has the same processing and latency, that's good to keep in mind, though.

[Guspaz]

you sound as you if you didn't remember that you posted the same comment in the original thread last year already

Well, it's a new thread, but my opinion hasn't changed

[Gingerzilla]

Well it has been a while since I posted the original thread and I have had a good amount of time with the RF now.
My opinion hasn't changed. It really is a good little system. I have hundreds of games and not one has been rejected, pretty cool.
Even my Retron had issues with a few games. I have noticed no lag, well none that would ruin my game.

The build quality is honestly better than the original controllers I have and way better than anything the retron can offer.
Scanlines take a little time to set up and find the one you like. But as somebody who owns an Egret2 and 3, they have done an an amazing job for an HD TV.

So as a system to play all my old carts it is a very good solution, not the only one but pretty good for the price.

On the fact that RF broke GPL, I would think that would not be possible here in Japan or very hard at least. They would never let it come to market here on Amazon as they did.

And as for taking away the hard work of people who make emulators, I think you could be having a little misguided outrage moment?

People who make emulators always make the argument that they are preserving video game history. So their data should be open source right? They are just doing it for history sake and they shouldn't worry about their work being copied by other people, or companies.

Let's be honest and tell it like it is when it comes to Emulation. Most people use emulators to play games they never owned, as I have in the past and I'm honestly not proud of it. So about 5 years back I got rid of my roms and started to collect games for real. I believe at least in buying the original games. As somebody who works in the creative business it urks me that somebody can just steal my hard earned work, no matter how long ago I made it. So if RF gets the capital together to take Emulator soft and make a new hardware based on that so be it. Kind of the tail wagging the dog.

Anyway, just my POV for a system it seems a lot of people seem to know all about, but haven't tried.
It deserves a second look. Unlike the Neo-GEO X which was sent back after a day.

[Guspaz]

Emulators are perfectly legal, at least in the US. Which, despite not being American, I'm often more familiar with their law than my own country's because of the Internet and our proximity to them.

Anyhow, emulation is legal so long as clean-room reverse engineering was used (so no copyright infringement for stealing a bios or bootrom or whatever). There is actual legal precedent about this, most notably when Connectix (best known for various macintosh utilities, VirtualPC before Microsoft bought it from them, and inventing the webcam) produced a Playstation emulator called Virtual Game Station. It let you play original PS1 discs on a PC (it didn't support ISOs and had protections against pirated games), and importantly, it did this during the PS1 era (as in, the PS1 was still Sony's only game console and the PS1 wasn't out yet).

Sony, predictably, sued them. Sony lost. They then simply bought Virtual Game Station from Connectix and buried it. Sony also sued the company behind Bleem, another commercial PS1 emulator released before the PS2 was out, and while Sony essentially lost that case too, the legal fees bankrupt Bleem.

Anyhow, point is, emulation is legal and now protected by precedent.

But back to the subject at hand: emulators are legally protected copyrightable works, and their creators are entitled to all the protections that copyright law has to offer. If an emulator author chooses to make their emulator available under a non-commercial-use license, then it is not something that is open to debate, there's no "emulators should be free and public domain", that's not how copyright law works. The author gets to pick the license conditions, not the user.

Hyperkin, for their part, chose to violate that license. They essentially got away with it, although they did at least release the source code to the opensource parts of their product as they were required to. That's kind of in the past now: the RetroN 5 is still for sale, but it doesn't look like the authors whose work they stole have any plans to sue them for it.

As for the RetroFreak, they're in a similar position. What I've read is that they're essentially using the same software as the RetroN 5, although it's not clear to me what connection the two devices have from a business standpoint. They have also released the source to opensource projects that they use, and they explicitly state that they are using emulators such as SNES9x (http://www.cybergadget.co.jp/support/re ... tware.html) that have non-commercial-use-only licenses. So it's also completely clear that the RetroFreak console is infringing on copyright. Not Nintendo's copyright, but Snes9X's copyright.

This trend of companies taking opensource emulators and building products around them without a dime going back to the people actually doing all the work is not going to bode well for emulation development in the future: it will discourage people from working on opensource emulators if they know that some company is just going to take all their hard work and sell it for a profit while they'll get nothing.

[BONKERS]

Emulators are perfectly legal, at least in the US. Which, despite not being American, I'm often more familiar with their law than my own country's because of the Internet and our proximity to them.

Anyhow, emulation is legal so long as clean-room reverse engineering was used (so no copyright infringement for stealing a bios or bootrom or whatever). There is actual legal precedent about this, most notably when Connectix (best known for various macintosh utilities, VirtualPC before Microsoft bought it from them, and inventing the webcam) produced a Playstation emulator called Virtual Game Station. It let you play original PS1 discs on a PC (it didn't support ISOs and had protections against pirated games), and importantly, it did this during the PS1 era (as in, the PS1 was still Sony's only game console and the PS1 wasn't out yet).

Sony, predictably, sued them. Sony lost. They then simply bought Virtual Game Station from Connectix and buried it. Sony also sued the company behind Bleem, another commercial PS1 emulator released before the PS2 was out, and while Sony essentially lost that case too, the legal fees bankrupt Bleem.

Anyhow, point is, emulation is legal and now protected by precedent.

But back to the subject at hand: emulators are legally protected copyrightable works, and their creators are entitled to all the protections that copyright law has to offer. If an emulator author chooses to make their emulator available under a non-commercial-use license, then it is not something that is open to debate, there's no "emulators should be free and public domain", that's not how copyright law works. The author gets to pick the license conditions, not the user.

Hyperkin, for their part, chose to violate that license. They essentially got away with it, although they did at least release the source code to the opensource parts of their product as they were required to. That's kind of in the past now: the RetroN 5 is still for sale, but it doesn't look like the authors whose work they stole have any plans to sue them for it.

As for the RetroFreak, they're in a similar position. What I've read is that they're essentially using the same software as the RetroN 5, although it's not clear to me what connection the two devices have from a business standpoint. They have also released the source to opensource projects that they use, and they explicitly state that they are using emulators such as SNES9x (http://www.cybergadget.co.jp/support/re ... tware.html) that have non-commercial-use-only licenses. So it's also completely clear that the RetroFreak console is infringing on copyright. Not Nintendo's copyright, but Snes9X's copyright.

This trend of companies taking opensource emulators and building products around them without a dime going back to the people actually doing all the work is not going to bode well for emulation development in the future: it will discourage people from working on opensource emulators if they know that some company is just going to take all their hard work and sell it for a profit while they'll get nothing.

Spoken like the god damned truth it is.
I wish these companies would get sued into next Tuesday.

Even if they were giving money back to the creators, how that money is distributed among all the people who worked on it, would be a nightmare.

AFIK, there is only one commercially available SNES emu to license. Higan. Of course, why pay money and then have to put in the work to get the framework working and then dumbing it down to work on low powered cheap potatoes when you can steal something else for free!


There is no way you can legally or morally justify stealing FOSS *for commercial use and financial gain* unless it is explicitly allowed.

[neorichieb1971]

But Emu's are not under lock and key. If you parade something out in the open it gets snatched, simple as that.

Even things that are much more illegal get snatched.

[narunetto]

But Emu's are not under lock and key. If you parade something out in the open it gets snatched, simple as that.

Even things that are much more illegal get snatched.

You say it as if it's okay to just do it and basically victim blaming them for having open source software. Nice. I absolutely hate it when people shit on the open source emulation community like the R5 and RF have. Who the hell is going to want to create/contribute to emulators in such an environment? We already have a problem with more complex systems not having enough man power thrown at them and this isn't going to help at all.

Plus, I just don't really see the attraction to playing physical copies of games through an emulator. That's like an oxymoron: "I like to collect physical copies of games but play them on a emulator!" It's cool for dumping your ROM for safe keeping if you're into that but outside of that, it doesn't make much sense to me, personally. If a fancy and easy to navigate display is what you seek RetroArch does that basically right now with a lot more emulators that are up to date and of course not stealing since it's fucking free.

[masqdgamer]

Hi TC
Have you tried to dump / run Lightening Force (US Genesis ver.)?
Thats the only cart I couldnt get the RF to recognize.
Cool little system for sure.

=)

[bobrocks95]

But Emu's are not under lock and key. If you parade something out in the open it gets snatched, simple as that.

This sounds like the "She was asking for it" defense when people victim blame rape victims.

[Zapf]

I'm not too keen on comparing copyright infringement to rape, but yes, you should be able to make and distribute code in an open fashion while still retaining rights for use in commercial work.

[Zapf]

also the retro freak is adorable where do I get one? I can get this direct from amazon japan now, right?

[bobrocks95]

I'm not too keen on comparing copyright infringement to rape, but yes, you should be able to make and distribute code in an open fashion while still retaining rights for use in commercial work.

It's absolutely nowhere near it at all whatsoever, of course, I'm just saying neorichieb's argument uses similar logic, i.e. poor logic. The developer licensed their software in a way that protects it from commercial use and thus they have an expectation that that will hold true.

Anyways this thread should probably not be weighed down when the Retron 5 thread had the same exact discussion happen over multiple pages. Or maybe it was even another Retro Freak thread, I don't remember.

also the retro freak is adorable where do I get one? I can get this direct from amazon japan now, right?

I didn't hear that you could import consoles now, but maybe. Here's the Amazon link- note that the version sold by Amazon (the only one that may be eligible for international shipping) is colored with Famicom colors and is more expensive

http://www.amazon.co.jp/LETRO-Controlle ... 2%E3%83%A0

[masqdgamer]

also the retro freak is adorable where do I get one? I can get this direct from amazon japan now, right?

Got mine from NCS, not sure if they have more or not.
Have also seen them on Play-Asia.