ldeveraux wrote:darcagn wrote:I just sold my Framemeister off for $700 last month.
Yeah? I call BS
Somehow missed this reply earlier.
Really? Who would lie about this?
Okay, here you go:
XRGB-mini Framemeister with Box, English remote, component/SCART adapters with my username on it
Anyway, I just got the RetroTINK5X-Pro in the mail this morning. I've had a little bit of time to play with it. This is my first time using a RetroTINK product, but I've followed the company's offerings for a while and have almost bought one several times. Here are my thoughts on it for those interested.
What has been sorely needed is a cheap-ish box that that quickly and easily takes any common consumer standard-def/analog TV input from yesteryear and convert it for modern displays properly. Every RetroTINK product until now, from my perspective, has had a compromises (lacking one port or another) preventing it from fulfilling that role. The RetroTINK5X-Pro is still not that device.... but it only falls short because it's not cheap: $300, the price going forward, is still a lot to ask for this kind of device for your average person. So, while there are still obstacles to using retro hardware easily these days, it's just price, not technical knowledge, with the RetroTINK5X-Pro.
Previously the closest thing for me was the Framemeister, so I really wanted to know if this was a good upgrade from that. Hardware-wise, it's thicker than a Framemeister, but has a slightly smaller footprint. While not the sleekest or prettiest design, it's appealingly practical. All the ports are built in so no need for RGB and d-terminal adapters as was the case with the Framemeister. Big plus. The SCART plug is "backwards" depending on how you look at it, but I prefer it this way because I usually keep my upscaler in place and hook up my analog consoles in front of it.
It uses microUSB for power. I prefer USB-C these days, but no big deal. It doesn't include a power adapter, though. I don't like this trend of not including power adapters with devices just because they take USB power. I don't actually have a bunch of USB power adapters laying around as some believe everyone must. I can dig one up easily, sure, but I'm usually taking away from something else in the mean time. A microUSB cable is included (I wonder why include one, but not the other? [edit: see about plugging into TVs
here]), but with mine it was a white braided cable that doesn't match the black RetroTINK5X-Pro. It's short, too, so I immediately swapped it out with a long black cable, something I do already have a lot of laying around luckily.
The remote is a generic remote, so the buttons of course have symbols that don't represent what they actually do, but it's a remote that has just the right amount of buttons for what you need. Definitely beats the Framemeister/OSSC remotes. 2 AAA batteries not included. It would have been nice, though, for HDMI CEC control to be included. I have enough remotes to keep track of, and I'm starting to appreciate HDMI CEC functionality more as a result. The manual is PDF download only, but they include a nice postcard-size starter instructions that tells you what you need to know -- important because you might want to reference it real quick again to recall which remote buttons do what.
The options are limited, but in a good way: I see the most relevant settings, and I don't see all of the extras. If you're the type that gets caught messing with 1000 settings on your video equipment only to realize you no longer have any time to actually play the games, this will be refreshing, because by default the picture is fantastic and there's not much you can mess with.
The "sharp" interpolation setting is softer compared to what I remember from the Framemeister, and at first I assumed it was on the soft setting. But I honestly could barely tell when I sat on the couch where I would be sitting during regular gameplay, and it looked quite sharp once scanlines were applied. Soft looks pretty decent if you're one of those types who hates getting your eyes cut on the edges of the pixels. There's only three settings for scanlines, and you can't finely adjust the intensity, but the settings chosen all look great to me, so again, it's another one of those things that you won't waste time adjusting back and forth, but you will probably find it just works here.
And that seems to be the type of device this is: sort of a "it just works" device. Its name is a misnomer; it's quite non-Pro, to be honest, and that's not knocking it; its simplicity is actually the device's biggest strength. It operates so simply that, after having used it, it blows my mind that somehow it hadn't been created sooner. That being said, with the "Pro" name I would expect some more configurability... but I'm honestly not missing it very much. A horizontal crop would be nice, for example, as certain consoles have annoying overscan garbage still even with the RT5X-Pro in 1080 OVER mode.
A lot of photos have been shared on twitter and the like of RT5XPro excelling at processing composite, so much so that I wondered if somehow the RetroTINK could end up doing such a great job that it would nearly render RGB modding pointless. Well, while RT5XPro does do a fantastic job, don't sell off those RGB cables and modded consoles just yet. Seeing the device in action, composite is still shit, even if the RetroTINK does do a great job trying to polish the turd.
A year warranty is included which is practically more than enough for this type of device, unless there's some kind of flaw. RetroTINK is basically just Mike and his wife, so if you have to deal with support in any way, that's who you'll be communicating with. While Mike has a great reputation and seems like a genuinely good guy, he has a "zero tolerance policy for rude or hostile behavior" which translates into him sometimes posting screenshots of negative customer interactions on Twitter. While I am definitely not the type of person who thinks the customer is always right, and Mike is within his legal right to do so, I frankly find it distasteful to do that, especially as it's made worse by the fact that Mike has a twitter following. They, too, seem like genuinely good people usually but twitter can sometimes foster extremely toxic hivemind mentality in otherwise good people. Speaking of poor support decisions, all of the RetroTINK products including the RT5X-Pro only support updating the firmware using proprietary software on Microsoft Windows. Mike makes it clear that trying to avoid using his proprietary software on Microsoft Windows will very likely result in your RetroTINK being bricked. The manual (and previous twitter drama) implies that he doesn't want to hear your input about it, which really makes you wonder why he didn't just include a microSD port for updates to avoid the issue altogether like almost every other device does these days.
Truth be told, this is the reason I never purchased any RetroTINK products in the past when I almost did, because I have a pretty firm stance not to buy products that unnecessarily require "the cloud" or proprietary software for no good reason, which outweighs any desire to purchase a product in support of a small business. I wanted to permanently mount the RT5X-Pro but I don't own a Windows laptop so that's a no-go as I'll have to take it into the office to connect to a virtual machine for updates. Still, the RT5X-Pro is so much better of a solution even with that flaw that I did overlook it for this purchase, especially if it meant being able to offload my Framemeister sooner than later while its value was high.
All in all, it's a great device, and right now is by far the best general solution to playing nearly any vintage home console hardware on modern televisions. If RetroTINK can manage to keep pumping out batches of the RT5X-Pro they will most definitely continue selling out and being the leader in this market niche, at least until the PixelFX Morph, with a bigger set of features in the same price bracket, makes it to market later this year.