Folks,
I'm seeing this question a lot when people talk about the Retron 5 and there's a lot of misinformation and speculation out there that I want to put to rest. Folks talk about it being just because of piracy or because Hyperkin is too lazy. Let me tell you reality.
First lets get some general information out there.
How the Retron 5 worksThe Retron 5 uses a RockChip RK3066 ARM 9 processor and runs a Hyperkin customized version of the Android Operating System.
The cartridge connectors exist for the sole purpose of dumping the cartridges rom contents to system memory where the roms are played under emulation via a Hyperkin customized version of Retroarch.
What this means:Once the contents of the cartridges memory is dumped the game cart itself is only monitored for being present.
After the initial rom dump nothing else on the cart is actually used. Not even the SNES SFX chip. It's all being emulated on the ARM 9.
If you don't believe me...
1) turn your system on.
2) Attach an NES Game Genie to one of your nes games
3) insert the game and genie into your system
4) choose "play"
5) while playing the game unplug the cart from the game genie
You can continue to play the game for as long as you want regardless of the cart and any of it's special chips being missing.
So why does the Power Base Mini and Power Base Converter work but not the Super GameBoy, everdrive, etc. ?
Simply put the Power Base adapters allow direct access to the game ROM you want to play.
The others don't.
To better illustrate I opened my SGB and Power Base Mini:
On the outside they look quite similar. They are carts that let you plug in another cart.
But if we take a deeper look inside...
we see the Power Base Mini is a straight passthrough. No special chips. Just some re-wiring of which pins connect to what.
So the Retron 5 can see the second cart. Grab it's rom and load it into the emulator.
Looking inside the Super GameBoy is a different story...
The Super Game Boy has it's own rom. And the Retron 5 can see and download that.
But accessing the rom of the game boy game game is a different matter. Notice that the SGB has an entire GameBoy CPU onboard and a rom of it's own which does the heavy lifting and provides the Super GameBoy functionality.
Everdrives and many other flash carts are similar, often having their own roms and CPUs to add features like cheats, save states, game selection menus, etc.
These devices are far more complex than simply dumping the rom and emulating. They require constant and complex interaction between the console and the cart rather than simply dumping the rom contents. It's this extra level of cartridge interaction the current Retron 5 simply isn't designed for.
Perhaps it will change in a future update. But for now I hope this helps folks understand why <insert flashcart/special cartridge peripheral here> doesn't work.
For a complete teardown of the Retron 5 with pictures check out this link:
http://retrorgb.com/teardown.htmlFor more information on the RockChip that powers it's magic check out this one:
http://www.rock-chips.com/a/en/products/RK30_Series/2013/0808/312.htmlLastly, I'm not perfect and there is much I don't know. If you know for a fact that anything I've posted above is incorrect, please let me know so I can correct it.
