Retro Freak: Japan’s Ultimate Classic Console
There is now a game console announced for Japan that accepts carts and cards from Famicom, Super Famicom, Mega Drive, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, TurboGrafx-16, Genesis, SNES, PC Engine and Supergrafx. It plays them all, from all regions (except, for unexplained reasons, NES in America). It’s called the Retro Freak, and it will bring every imaginable 8 and 16-bit game to you in HDMI.
There’s more: it takes any controller, and I do mean ANY controller: there is a USB slot in the device that will accept anything you can plug into it, and since there are USB adapters for every console controller in existence, you can use them all. Even PS4 controllers will work with the Retro Freak.
If this all sounds too good to be true, it sort of is. The Retron series of consoles released by Hyperkin in the US also work in a similar way: through emulation, not from custom chips. The machine copies the ROM onto temporary memory and runs the game through a program. This is why there has never been an N64 slot in any Retron model — the emulation is still too spotty to work.
The Retro Freak, however, differs from the Retron in one distinct way: it’ll let you install the games onto an SD card and keep them there, so you can just turn the RF on and use them. You still have to own the cartridge to do this, but it’s a gray area that may keep the Retro Freak out of US stores for now.