My epic retro gaming adventure

A few weekends ago I had a sudden desire to hunt down and play retro games. Perhaps the coverage My Retro Game Box received made me nostalgic, but the result was a question posted to Twitter. Essentially I wanted an all-in-one retro gaming solution, but I didn't know why. Possibly because I'm old. Maybe because I sold all the retro stuff I had just before Christmas. Most likely I was bored. Whatever the reason, I was obsessed.

Despite my all-in-one dream, old consoles are the most obvious solution, I thought to myself, imagining rolling up to a boot sale to find boxes full of mint in box treasures from the 80s and 90s. I'd hit a few sales and come back with all I needed for under £50. The trouble is that, in winter, no fool is going to stand around in the cold while David Dickinson tries to haggle a copy of Joe & Mac Caveman Ninja on the SNES down to £1.50 from its £2 asking price.

But we live in a different, modern world, one not suited to old consoles. For one, I own a big TV – honestly, it's massive. It's designed to receive lovely 1080p signals through HDMI. Plug in a SNES, Mega Drive, or something older via an RF cable and you're in for a world of low-res, poor signal quality badness. If you were a kid of the 80s you were lucky to have a TV growing up, and if you did have one the screen was about the same size as an Atari Jaguar controller – with about as many buttons.

Younger folk might find it hard to believe, but ‘back in the day' we had to tune our TVs in to the signal from the console. Imagine having to spin your iPad around a random number of times before you see the screen, only for the screen to look like a misprinted newspaper, and you'll get the idea. TV manufacturers frankly couldn't give a shit about how good your Master System looks running on a flatscreen OLED that's perceptually bigger than a cinema screen.

Another issue is how I'd even set the consoles up. As my fans (Hi Matt and Steve) might know, I had enough trouble recently finding the space for an Xbox One, so a collection of at least four retro consoles simply wasn't happening – not unless I could make some sort of remote-controlled rotating storage device that concealed the unused consoles inside a chest of drawers on a vertical conveyor belt. I couldn't. It was a stupid idea.

Emulation appeared to be the easiest route seeing as buying original was pooh-poohed so quickly by my inadequate housing arrangement. Software like Retroarch lets you emulate pretty much every old console of note, and you can play them all on fairly low-end PC hardware – something I can easily plug into my TV. There is the legal and moral grey area that is downloading ROMs, but considering buying old carts from car boot sales wouldn't line developers' pockets with my cash either, I didn't feel too bad about this option.

And then it hit me. I want to build a physical collection of classic games that I can one day play with my son or allow him to buy old second hand games he's excited to play when he gets home. He's a couple of years away yet, but I want him to get a thrill out of receiving a new game – not simply selecting one of thousands on an emulator screen. I also want to make sure I can play these games so I'm not embarrassed by a four-year-old when he asks me to get past the green spiky centipede boss on Planet X in Taz in Escape from Mars. Video games should be the one area I'm able to impress him easily. The fact I know nothing about Pokemon is something that keeps me awake at night. I know one day he'll ask me about a gym leader and his eyes will show pure disappointment as I look back sheepishly, my mind blank.

The RetroN 5 was suggested as a solution by numerous Twitterers, allowing the use of original carts (both PAL and NTSC), but using emulation software to run the games at 720p and with various filters for the not so small price of £130. It also connects to TVs using HDMI and comes with a wireless controller. It seemed like the perfect retro console. It doesn't support the N64, but I'd live with it as the benefits it would offer over the original consoles would be worth the trade – namely save states and a small surface area. Oh, how my adult life is filled with such mundane wishes.

Essentially, with the RetroN 5 I'd be getting all the benefits of emulation with the warm feeling of actually using the original carts and none of the initial set-up issues. And I wouldn't have to touch a PC. PCs make everything extremely annoying. Fact. It doesn't matter what you're trying to do, they will always make you hate yourself and suck all enjoyment out of what you wanted to do in the first place.

It seemed like everything was fitting into place. In the space of about two hours I'd gone on a magnificent journey of retro discovery. I could feel a new, old world of gaming goodness edging ever nearer. It was going to be good.

At this point, to assist in this feature, UK retailer Funstock.co.uk agreed to send us a RetroN 5.

The Pursuit of Happysnes

A RetroN 5 was on its way, but there was a small problem: I had no games. Just like the PS3 circa 2007/2008, this wasn't an insurmountable issue, but it would take some effort. The games I was after have been on this earth for over 20 years, so there must be plenty around if you look in the right places. And they couldn't be that expensive considering you can pick up second hand PS4 games for under £15. Oh, how wrong I was.

The easiest, laziest, option is to buy online, either through eBay or from a number of dedicated online stores that specialise in retro games. It's worth stopping here to briefly mention the PAL/NTSC issue. While modern games are essentially the same no matter whether they’re bought in the UK, US or wherever, back in the dark ages us PAL gamers had to suffer games that ran slower than US versions and had horrible black borders at the top and bottom of the screen. It was accepted because, well, there wasn't anything we could do about it, and pre-internet, Twitter and NeoGAF, the relatively better deal gamers had in America and Japan wasn't obvious to everyone.

It's fair to say that I had no clue poor PAL conversions were even a thing until I read about it in Mean Machines, and only have a memory of hating it when playing Mario Kart 64. But it was really bad. As far as I can tell almost all 16-bit games suffered from a slower game speed and bordered display. To put it into a hastily thought out visual analogy, imagine being an athlete from the UK. You are tall for a kid and fast, better than all your friends, and assume you could compete with anyone your age. But then you go on an international athletics trip (I doubt any school does this, but go with it) to the US, and walk out onto the field. The kids there make you look like Gimli the dwarf, and they are faster, having a natural extra nippiness that you can't hope to compete with. And to make things worse, when the starter's gun goes it's only for them. You've got your own gun and it fires months later, after you've read about the result in an imported copy of EGM. Yes.

Anyway, the RetroN 5 can handle both formats, so NTSC is preferable but understandably trickier to come by. To get an idea of prices and availability I did some searching for Super Mario All-Stars on SNES, Ristar on Mega Drive, and Metroid: Zero Mission on the GBA. The results were eye-opening.

First up, Super Mario All-Stars. Retrogames.co.uk listed the game for between £15 and £80 depending on condition, but had no stock. Retrogamebase.co.uk had a cart in stock, priced £19.99, whereas eBay has plenty of carts availalbe for around £15, with boxed copies going for just under £30.

Ristar, a game our own David Scammell talks about on a regular basis, was harder to find. Retrogames listed it (cart only) for £20 but had none in stock, Retrogamebase didn't list it, and eBay sold carts for just under £15 and boxed copies for about £25. It was a similar story with Metroid: Zero Mission: out of stock at Retrogames, not listed at Retrogamebase, and around £20 for just a cart on eBay. Perhaps retro gaming wasn't going to be the treasure trove of bargains I expected.

I was left downhearted. As a new-old twist on my hobby I was hoping things wouldn't be too expensive, but £20 a game (or there abouts) isn't exactly pocket change. For top titles, availability is sketchy and you'll have to choose between paying more than you think for just a cartridge or a lot more than you think for a boxed copy – and you've got to be well flush to afford mint in box. It was time to hit a car boot sale.

To be honest, my hopes were low. I wasn't going to be able to get there until about two hours after it started, it was going to be cold, and from what I'd read online, most booters are well aware of the value of retro games these days. Was finding a box full of SNES and Mega Drive games, whole thing a tenner, really too much to ask for?

I was right: car boot sales in the winter are bloody cold. And they're muddy too. Ambling around stalls early in the morning doesn't exactly get your heart pumping, and sadly neither did the games on offer. While there were plenty of sellers trying to offload PS2 games, this was sadly two generations ahead of what I was after. Also of note were two grubby, unboxed, yellowing, well-used old PlayStations, which the guy wanted a rather steep £50 a pop for (as if), and at least six (I counted) copies of PES 2011 on PS3 at different sellers. What is it about that year's version that meant it was so readily available? I expect the spring and summer months would prove to be more fruitful, but that wasn't helping me.

Look, it's that close!

Over the previous two weeks I'd been dabbling with eBay, bidding on various games, from Super Mario Kart on SNES to Ristar on the Mega Drive, but desperate to snag a bargain I'd bid low and inevitably miss out by at least £5 having been winning with moments to spare. The famous auction site plays a cruel game with your heart, and ironically the thrill of the bid could well be more entertaining than the games I was trying to buy. But that's besides the point. The RetroN 5 had arrived and I had no games to play on the thing. I ventured over the road to PlayNation Games, a local indie game store so close to the VG office I can see it from my window. I probably should have looked there sooner.

A lunchtime perusal of PlayNation's wares, with the goal to get at least three for under £10, was good fun. Browsing in game stores is something I used to love as a kid, wandering around the numerous shops in Crawley (Electronics Boutique, GAME, Virgin Megastores, Gamleys, a strange open-fronted place beneath the food court that had a massive spinning shelf full of Mega Drive games, and an electronics store outside of County Mall called Capital Camera) for hours until my brother and I had decided what to buy. For 20 minutes I'd been transported back to that more innocent, hopeful time.

Having never owned a NES or SNES it really did feel like I was a kid again, flicking through carts and wondering if what I picked up would be as good as the artwork suggested. Of course I was aware of the big hitters, but I'd never played some of them – Starwing and Donkey Kong Country to name two. But others were as foreign to me as pensions and mortgages are to 10-year-olds. It felt strange but exciting, and a long way from normal adult life.

In the end I walked out of the store with three games, but I'd spent about £12. A boxed PAL copy of Super WrestleMania on the Mega Drive (no instructions), a cart-only PAL copy of Pilotwings on SNES, and a US GBA cart for Donkey Kong Country 2. Not bad, I thought, and seeing resident WWE nut Simon Miller's reaction to Wrestlemania was probably going to be worth the price alone. That's the thing about retro games: memories. Even if a game hasn't aged well, nostalgia will, more often than not, pull it through.

The RetroN 5 answers my prayers

Weeks of research after this grand adventure began, it was time to test out the RetroN 5. The console is large compared to the original machines it emulates, but it's got a look that certainly wouldn't have been out of place in the early 90s: black with purple lettering, with cartridge slots on the top for SNES, Mega Drive and NES, and Game Boy/GBA on the front (Master System games need that converter you could plug into your Mega Drive). It's a functional beast that isn't going to win any beauty pageants, but retro gaming isn't about beauty anyway. It's an easy console to set up, although the software update method is a little long winded and requires an SD card. The wireless controller (huge, lightweight and shocking in its aesthetics) synced easily, too, and everything was set.

Pilotwings was first in, the cartridge fitting tightly into the slot. Once inserted the RetroN 5 downloads the rom into internal storage and then displays the title of the game. You're then good to launch and let the old-school gaming begin. If you haven't dabbled with emulation on a big TV, the first time you see an old cartridge game load is quite the eye-opener. Rendered in 720p through the included HDMI cable, the clarity of the image is lovely. While some of you are no doubt wondering why it's not 1080p, I doubt it would make too much of a difference here. The lines are clean and crisp, something that certainly isn't the case if you plug an old console into any modern TV.

All three of my purchases worked and played fine, although DKC2 wasn't recognised so the console didn't display the game's name. There are options to apply filters (smoothing out the pixels) or add scanlines to ape the look of gaming on old CRT displays, but the bog standard out of the box look was easily most pleasing to my eyes. Donkey Kong Country 2 on GBA looked the worst, with the game's art style and low resolution suffering the most in the move to the big screen, but even so it was great to see it outside the confines of the handheld. Other titles would certainly fare better, too, no doubt.

When I was a young lad, probably no older than 10 or 11, I remember going to my cousin's house to play. He had all the new consoles and games which made me jealous, but I wasn't stupid enough to let that get in the way of fun. Sonic 2 was one weekend’s game of choice, but as kids we struggled to get through it. We finally managed to get to the final level but the curse of being an 80's child was about to strike. It was bedtime.

Back then, a lot of games didn’t feature checkpoints or saves, and there was no way we were turning the Mega Drive off. But my cousin's mum insisted. It was terrible. Imagine slogging your way through to the final five minutes of post-apocalyptic depression-maker Threads only for the DVD to reset and force you to watch from the start for no good reason. The Mega Drive was turned off. Things went nuclear.

Thankfully the RetroN’s ability to save the state of your game means this nightmarish scenario needn't happen ever again. Save where you are and you'll be able to start from that exact point the next time you play, like Xbox One's resume feature but for more than one game. It's the past but in the future and changes the way you play old games.

Everything about the RetroN 5 is great, then, apart from the controller. The included pad is wireless, which is nice, but it's ugly, feels cheap, and makes odd springy noises when you press the buttons in a certain way. It is in no way as good as the original pads for each supported console, so it's good news that you can plug in SNES, NES or Mega Drive pads. The downside is that you lose wireless play, but buy some extension cables and you're sorted.

Whether or not the RetroN 5 is for you, though, really depends on a few factors. If you've already got a lot of old games, the £130 price tag won't seem too extortionate and will likely breathe new life into your collection. For people like me, who are starting a collection from scratch, it's a harder sell, but still very enticing. The day after I'd bought my starting collection of three games I was back in PlayNation looking for other cheap blasts of nostalgia. Bubsy The Bobcat on the Mega Drive was bought for £3 and my itch was scratched.

Casually interested parties may be better off dabbling with emulation now and again, but it won't beat the thrill of buying and playing the original carts. If you fancy collecting classic games, or just want to experience buying the unknown once again, and want to play them with ease on your modern TV, the RetroN 5 is great. For younger players it's a great way to give them a taste of gaming history, while old fogeys will get a kick out of seeing classics looking better than ever before.

With the current state of video games feeling more and more like a warzone, the RetroN 5 opened up a world of gaming that isn't bothered with the nonsense. It's about fast hedgehogs, overhead adventures, and talking with friends. It's a world that's more accessible than you might think.

The RetroN 5 is available in the UK at Funstock.co.uk.

Funstock.co.uk has been kind enough to give VideoGamer.com readers 5% off all orders, whether it be for a RetroN 5, retro book or gaming handheld. Simply use discount code VIDEOGAMER at checkout.