Pretty much every American NES has a terrible cartridge connector that needs replacement, and sometimes you have to jam another cartridge on top of it, or hit reset a few dozen times, or try to plug your cartridge in through a Game Genie, or wiggle the RF adapter, or something else to get it to work. Unlike a real vintage console, though, you're a lot less likely to have failures. Maybe you won't ever notice! But the uncertainty is there. The RetroN line has purportedly improved NES performance, to the point that Castlevania 3 works, but the point is that it's not 100% perfect. These don't quite play the full range of NES games perfectly most are famously incompatible with games like Castlevania 3 which use extra chips on the cartridge. Most new retro consoles use modified versions of the original hardware – the so-called 'NES-on-a-chip' that allows for inexpensive NES compatibility. One issue that is a little easier to come to a decision about is compatibility. Whether this is a good thing to you, or whether you think it waters down games unnecessarily, is a matter of your personal convictions. But it also supports save states and other emulator-style functions, and outputs in HDMI. And it uses the real controllers for those (except for Game Boy, naturally).

The RetroN 5 plays real, vintage game cartridges, and lots of them – NES, Famicom, Genesis, Mega Drive, SNES, Super Famicom, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance. These are the people who, hypothetically speaking, stuff a Twin Famicom in their suitcase while on a business trip to Tokyo. On the other side, there are people who strive for absolute authenticity: real cartridges on real consoles, played on CRT televisions with real controllers. These are the people who like emulation the most, either through downloading ROMs or official downloadable re-releases of games. On one side, there are people who want all the modern conveniences, both in-game and out: save states, fast-forward and rewind in the games, and wireless controllers, high definition output, and non-finicky hardware to play them with. Let's call it two for the sake of argument. There are at least two schools of thought when it comes to playing retro games.

Play game genie on retron 5