 So if you're like me, you may be a little tired of AAA developers releasing broken or subpar games over and over again. Often with DLC that, officially or not, fixes the experience. This phenomenon has pushed myself and a number of my friends back to the retro gaming crowd, but managing a collection of old consoles and managing the space required for old-school TVs can be frustrating. Enter the RetroN 5 from Hyperkin. Also, I will be hopefully reviewing the Makey Makey or the Kano fairly soon, so stay tuned for that. From December 13th to 20th, 2014, you can save on select Intel CPUs, NUCs, and SSDs with special holiday rebates from select retailers. Click now to learn more. First off, we have the actual physical unit. On the front, we're greeted by Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance slot, and the power button, which takes a kind of surprisingly long time to engage, but does feel quite solid and has a satisfying click to it. On each side, we have a controller port for NES, SNES, and Genesis, which totals to six controller ports in all for a two-player gaming experience on any one of the consoles. On the back, we have an HDMI port, USB Mini for the included controller, an AC power jack, and an SD card slot, which you can use for things like updating the system, cheat codes, and screenshots along with save state files. Speaking of the included controller, it's garbage, and I don't recommend using it for absolutely anything. The quality control seems to be more than a little rough. Two seemingly identical buttons in the top corners of the controller feel completely different. One has a nice tactile audible feedback, and the other one feels mushy and dampened. The shoulder buttons are similar. Again, the left side shoulder button has a satisfying tactile and audible feedback, while the right one is mushy and sometimes leaves you wondering if you even press the button at all. The best word I could use for the other buttons on the controller is acceptable. But then it comes to the eight-way thumbstick, which is straight-up puke-worthy. It squeaks when you spin it, which will happen while playing from time to time. And while most of the lower directions work fine, I guess, there's some sort of obstruction in the top, which grinds against the stick, creating an unpleasant noise and a horrible feeling. I wish Hyperkin would have ditched this abysmal excuse for a controller and just lowered the price. Unfortunately, they didn't, so we're stuck paying full price and ditching the controller ourselves. But wait! Luke, it has a redeeming feature. Wireless? Really? Wireless. You wanted to add more latency to this setup. We're playing retro games. With a wireless controller, there's more latency between your controller input and your character's movement, and it's noticeable in this case. This will stack on top of the input lag on most modern TVs compared to old CRTs, and you're going to have a bad time. Speaking of latency, it's a shame that the only output option is HDMI, so this pretty much precludes the use of a CRT TV, so forget about light guns and super scopes. If you don't need those, you can have a TV with game mode, which turns off the image processing, or a low-latency PC monitor, and that would help a lot. In fact, having it next to your PC monitor seems like a really cool use case for the RetroN 5. If you're concerned about the legality of PC emulators, and we'll talk about that more later on, simply plug the RetroN 5 into an alternate input on one of your monitors and switch your input to it whenever you'd like to play. And with that, we'll jump back to the top of the unit. In the back, there's a slot to hold the controller, but we just use it to hold games, and just ahead of that, we have the glossy finish, something I wish manufacturers would stop using for fairly obvious reasons. Slotted into that glossy finish is your ports for Genesis, SNES, NES, and Famicom cartridges. Other reviews are complaining that on this RetroN 5, the slots are too tight to actually remove the game from, and sure, the first time you use it, it might be a little bit tight, but even after a moderate amount of use, it becomes quite easy to just swap games in and out. In front of these slots, we have the logo for the RetroN 5 and an LED indicator system letting you know which game is inserted. The LED would have been much nicer if it was possible to have more than one game inserted at a time anyways. If you insert more than one game, instead of just choosing which one you want to play, you are served an error message until you remove all the game cartridges that you don't want to use. When you boot up the RetroN 5, you're greeted by a simple yet surprisingly, or not, Android-based gaming system. Within the settings menu, you will be able to find various video and audio settings included but not limited to image filters, scan lines, and sound enhancement, which actually sounds pretty good. You also have options like controller remapping, when to load save states, and where to save things for those that wish to use maybe an SD card. There are loads of options and overall this menu system is a good experience, even with its overall kind of cheesy menu sounds and a little bit tedious software and firmware updating process, which really isn't that bad if you watch their video on how to do it. You can even access quick menu within the game for stuff like save states and other various quick menu options, simply by pressing down and start at the same time. Now loading games can be a little funky, but with no official compatibility list as far as I know, it's a bit of a gamble plugging a game in. It will probably work and you'll mainly just find issues with multi-game cartridges or multi-cartridge setups, but there will be the odd game that should probably work, but totally doesn't. Another frustrating issue with this is that sometimes a ROM may load and it may be able to run the game, making it playable, but it won't actually recognize the game, meaning that it won't load any of your save states and none of the cheats will actually function properly. One really cool thing that the RetroN lets you do, however, is to utilize old carts that have dead batteries, much more effectively than you could have otherwise. If the battery is dead in your cartridge and you don't go through the process of replacing it, you won't actually be able to save anything properly, but if you use save states on the RetroN, you can essentially replace this functionality, which is great as it can breathe life back into some old beloved games. Those are problems I can look past, however, as honestly the vast majority of games will work just fine. You just have to be careful about keeping things like the contacts on your carts clean enough for the console to be able to read it, as well as possible every time, to get a good load and a good detection whenever you insert it. What does get on my nerves, however, is moving the save data from the game to the RetroN and from the RetroN to the game. It feels like moving the save data to the RetroN works essentially every time, but I can't really be all that sure that moving the save data from the RetroN back to the cart actually ever worked. It didn't actually ever work. It seems like it would be able to sometimes work, but it would wipe part of the data that was on there and then not load the new data, which is essentially destroying your save file. I had that happen to my Pokemon Blue cart. Rest in peace, Pokemon Blue save game. Rest in peace. Early on, I mentioned that this is a cool way to play your old games through emulation in order to utilize things like save states while doing it more legally than emulating ROMs on something like a PC or a phone, and while being able to use your badass original carts at the safe time. Unfortunately, it seems that Hyperkin may be using other developers' code for a lot of their emulator support without asking or contacting those people at all. All of this is under a code license of GPLv3, which forbids incorporating the software into something like, for example, a locked down piece of hardware, which is then sold. So, blah. There's a bunch of legal mumbo jumbo going on, which I don't fully understand, and the situation is kind of a mess. So, if you want to learn more, I suggest you just Google RetroArch versus Retron or RetroArch versus Hyperkin, and you'll find more information there. In conclusion, is this the end-all replacement to old-school console clutter? No. Latency issues that you will most likely have to deal with at some degree due to the inclusion of HDMI will be frustrating, and it has its quirks, with features like moving saves on and off the RetroArch, totally not working, and in some cases even breaking what is already there. And it comes with a controller, which will just add mass to landfills, but in a lot of cases, the actual unit can get the job done. I personally think it would be a pretty neat accessory for someone's PC setup when configured as an alternate input to their monitor, but at its current price of $160, I see most people looking the other way. Let me know what you guys think in the comments down below. Things that are worth their price tag, however, are free things, especially Intel CPUs, and today we're giving you a chance to win one for free. If you head over to the giveaway page on our forum using the link in the video description down below, you can view full entry details and sign up for a chance to win one of two i7-5820Ks from Intel. We'll be running this contest from December 19th to December 26th, so just consider this an opportunity to get a very cool belated Christmas present from Intel. We've covered these chips quite a bit since launch, and I bet you'll be pretty impressed if you get your hands on them yourself, especially if you're someone who does a lot of multitasking or whatever. So head over to LinusTechTips forum and enter for a chance to upgrade your rig to a Haswell E processor. 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We always have some kind of cool shirts going on. Thank you guys for watching, nice doorbell, and I'll see you next time.