Good morning friends. I am still very much not feeling amazing, but I still largely think it is allergies. Ragweed has always been one of my worst issues and we are officially in the season when that starts to give me trouble. I am still taking my temperature daily just to make sure it isn’t something more serious, and I am also distancing myself from folks just in case. Seeing as I don’t have much in the way of burning issues that I feel like I need to discuss with you all, I figured I would spend this morning giving a bit of an update on my Retro Freak console experience.
If you want more information about the whole thing and why I wound up getting one you can check out the original post I made a few weeks back. For reference this is the specific bundle that I ordered from Play Asia as it is a Japanese import. I’ve now lived with the console for a number of weeks and feel like I have a bit better of an understanding of the strong points and the weak points. The strong bits are obviously that you can play a whole bunch of systems on a single console, and also dump those games to an SD Card so you don’t have to have the cartridge handy in order to play it. This also means that you can load up the SD Card with roms from other sources and it will work just fine as well.
One of the biggest issues that I have run into is the fact that not all games are going to play perfectly. The problem that I am encountering for example with Contra III The Alien Wars is at the end of stage 4 when you fight the flying artillery ship “Dodriguez”, at the end of the battle the screen just hard locks. I am not sure if it is a specific issue with the rom image that I am using, so I am exploring that possibility. The other possibility is that the game is just doing something that the emulator the Retro Freak is using cannot support. I know there are some issues with this game specifically on emulators, but most of it was surrounding the fire effects early on in the levels.
Another issue I have run into is that wireless controllers that CAN be used over USB seem to have some issues with the console. For starters the controller that the unit ships with was not amazing, and since then I have been trying to settle on a controller that I liked the most and that would support the most titles. I had ordered this Bluetooth Sega Saturn controller and was having a great time with it for a few days. Then I noticed that the console itself was overheating significantly… to the point of locking up completely.
My working theory is that the power draw of this controller from the console is just too much. I might end up getting a powered hub and try seeing if that helps, since in theory the controller would be drawing power from the hub and not the console itself. The sad part about this is that I really like the layout of a saturn controller, and this one in particular had 10 mappable buttons which came in extremely handy. I have another Sega Saturn USB controller, but I am guessing it is X Input because I cannot get it to work with the console in any fashion.
This has lead me to fall back on the 8BitDo SN30 Pro+ which is in itself a phenomenal controller. The only real negative is the fact that it doesn’t have six face buttons, which means I am not likely going to be playing any fighting games on it. However that said… in truth I was probably not really likely to play many fighting games in the first place since why bother with a console port of Street Fighter 2 when I could just be playing the original Arcade game through Mame. This controller still has some issues, like for some reason the console will not boot with it connected. I am not sure if this is a power draw issue, because it does not cause the same overheating issues but stalls out on the loading screen while it is connected.
All of this said… I have figured out what I can and cannot do with the Retro Freak and am still loving having easy access to all of these games. Sure I could just be running them from Retro Arch, but there is something special about using them with a console that I can’t quantify. The only negative of this experiment is that I find myself wanting to dig out all of my old consoles and get them up and running again. There are a bunch of mods for the Dreamcast and the Neo Geo CD that I am starting to look into that would replace the CD mechanisms with SD Card emulators. I’ve opened up a vault of memories and I am sorta afraid I am going down this weird path now.
At the end of the day… all I know for certain is that I will probably always use Scanlines because it just makes the games feel more like I remember them.