The Ultimate Retro Console? - Retron 5 Review

Consoles like the Retron 5 are important for people that have massive old collections of retro video games. Our modern TVs are pretty much incapable of playing those games the way we remember them. A modern HDTV has the unfortunate ability to make older consoles look muddied and blurry. This is due to the standard definition nature of the older televisions and some of the technology that went behind making those televisions display images on the screen. An older TV will make an older console look a lot clearer and a lot sharper, but on a modern TV that has high definition resolutions it’s upscaling the image in a dirty way that just doesn't look as good as it used to.

The Retron 5 can play a number of different consoles like the NES, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, and even the Gameboy line up. What's very important about this system though is it’s ability to upscale older video games into 720p. The way the Retron 5 actually does this is by taking the video game cartridge you insert and importing all the information into the system. You're not actually running the game directly from its cartridge. What this system is actually doing is converting that game into a ROM file on the system itself, but it doesn't keep the ROM file on there forever. As soon as you unplug the cartridge the file is deleted from the system waiting for you to reinsert the game again. This was done for piracy reasons so that people wouldn’t take a bunch of games and pirate the games with the help of the console. Despite the fact that this system is capable of running ROMs it has no way of running ROMs directly from files, you always need to insert a cartridge.

(There is a way around this by using an SD card in the system that has been loaded with translation files that can be converted into ROMs. It's not officially supported by the manufacturers of the Retron 5 however.)

The system has a bunch of good features but it also has a couple of negatives as well. For instance while the console does a good job of running games it's also bundled with a controller that is incredibly bad. In our video we list a ton of the positives and negatives while testing different games that you can run with the console. Not every single game is going to run on the Retron 5 for a multitude of reasons but you will be able to get most of games in your collection to work.