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The Gratuitous Rainbow Spectrum

Hyperkin Retron Sq Overview

Hyperkin Retron Sq Overview

Kris Randazzo
10 minute read

For as long as the Game Boy has been around, people have been trying to figure out the best way to play its games on the television. Well, the fine folks over at Hyperkin have come up with The Retron Sq, and it plays Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance games on your TV in a cute, affordable package that connects via an HDMI cable. Let's take a look.

Get yours here: Hyperkin RetroN Sq: HD Gaming Console for Game Boy / Color / Advance - Hyper Beach: https://stoneagegamer.com/hyperkin-retron-sq-hd-gaming-console-for-game-boy-color-advance-hyper-beach.html/?afmc=marketing

Hyperkin RetroN Sq: HD Gaming Console for Game Boy / Color / Advance - Black Gold: https://stoneagegamer.com/hyperkin-retron-sq-hd-gaming-console-for-game-boy-color-advance-black-gold.html/?afmc=marketing

Background music by RoccoW: https://roccow.bandcamp.com/

Transcript of the video: 

Hi, everyone. Kris, from Stone Age gamer here, this is the noble game boy. It's a fantastic handheld system with a fantastic game library. Same goes for the Gameboy color and the Gameboy Advance. Wonderful, wonderful games. But for as long as this thing's been around, people like me have always trying to figure out the best way to play its games on the television. Well, the fine folks over at Hyperkin have come up with this doodad. This is the Retron Sq, and it plays Gameboy, Gameboy Color and Gameboy Advance games on your television and a cute, affordable package that connects via an HDMI cable. Let's take a look. 

[00:00:41] OK, here is the Retron Sq HD gaming console from Hyperkin. And let's see what is inside the box. We're going to lift this up here and here is the unit itself, and it is quite tubular. Look at this thing. Grab out of this. Look at this thing. It's very neat. I like the color scheme. Power button clicks in a reset press button as your controller put it down here. This is where your game cards go. And then on the back, we've got memory. Looks like and an SD card in here. Look at that. A micro SD card. 512 megabytes. Yeah. And then you've got your USB Type C here, your HDMI output, and this is your aspect ratio change. You can set it to four by three or 16 by nine, which is pretty neat. [

[00:01:31] Size wise, just to kind of give you a little bit of a comparison for this little cube. Here is a game cube by comparison. So it is. It's actually pretty tall. It's almost as tall as a game cube, which is pretty wild. But it is, you know, it's not quite a quarter of a game to you, but there's your there's your size reference for your little tubular reference SKU here. All right. Let's see what else is in this box. 

[00:01:54] This here is our power supply. Nothing special there, but let's let's take a let's take a closer look at this guy here. This is going to be the controller I bet about feels it's got some weight to it. All right. So here we go. Here is a close look at the controller. You can see this matches the unit here. Oh my goodness. Here's your HDMI cable is in there with the controller. That's why they had the extra weight. And here's the controller itself, which is very super Nintendo style. Oh, this feels really nice. The D-pad feels really good. The buttons have a really good feel to them, too. Wow. This is a this is a really nice, really nice controller. It's pretty wild looking, too. I like the the crazy bluish look to all this stuff. It seems like it's got a nice, decent sized cable. And then all, let's see foam and a sticker and a thank you thing and your instruction manual, which is also a square kit that's almost the same size as the unit. Well, they put some real thought into this stuff. Well, there you go. There's the there's what's inside the box, so let's go see this sucker in action. 

[00:03:01] As you can see, the console is already on, and that's because this guy actually supports hot swapping. You can you don't have to turn the system on and off to take your games in and out. So that's kind of cool. So we're just going to leave this on and we're going to start with something simple. This is kid Icarus of myths and monsters for Game Boy. This is a regular game boy game. Nothing fancy or special about it. Let's see how it reacts. We're just going to toss this right into the top here. Pick up our trusty controller, which is right here. And as you can see, it does take a minute to load, so it's doing its thing there. It's thinking like the Dreamcast, it's thinking there we go. And here we are. Kid Icarus of myths and monsters playing. It looks pretty nice. Controls are nice and responsive, this I really do you like this controller? 

[00:03:55] And one thing that I will point out about this is that the the visuals are not really something that you can mess with, like on a Gameboy color or something. You have an option when the screen starts up to adjust the colors to the way you want them to be. Different color sets. This does not have that option. It's just playing. However you plug them in, that's the way they're going to look. And categories of myths and monsters you got to say doesn't look too bad. Looks looks pretty decent. So that is how it handles a regular black and white Gameboy game. 

[00:04:24] Next, let's see how it handles this. This is the absolutely spectacular Donkey Kong 94 for Game Boy. This was super Gameboy enhanced, so this not only has function like a regular black and white Gameboy game, but it also has Super Gameboy support for special borders and stuff. If you were to play it on a Super Nintendo with a Super Gameboy. So let's see how this unit reacts to this game. Again, we've got a little loading time, and here we are, you know? Yeah, it's just running it just like a regular Gameboy color would, which again, that, you know, there's certainly worse ways to run Gameboy games. We oops, I missed that last jump. And there we are. That's how it handles a super Gameboy compatible game just runs it just like a regular Gameboy color would. 

[00:05:09] Speaking of Gameboy color, next up, let's try this. This is another one of my absolute favorite Gameboy games. This is Space Invaders, and this particular one is a black cartridge, which means that this is my Gameboy and Gameboy color compatible. So let's see how it reads it. Will it show up in color or will it show up like black and white Gameboy game? Let's find out. All right, so this one here is running just like it would on a Gameboy color. It looks great. It sounds great. I'm really, really impressed by the the picture here. So you don't have you don't seem to have the option to play this in. It's black and white format, which, you know, that's that's something I don't know why you would want to. This game looks totally awesome the way it is, but that is how it reacts to a Gameboy color compatible cartridge. It plays it like a Gameboy color would in color. 

[00:05:59] Next, let's take a look at one of these these cool, clear cartridges. These were the Gameboy color exclusive cartridges, and they only work for Gameboy color. This is my copy of Street Fighter Alpha for Gameboy Color, which is a pretty wild part of this game. In all honesty, let's see how it plays. All right, here is some street fighter alpha for Gameboy Color. Here it is up and running and well, I got to say it looks fantastic. I mean, seriously, the fact that this game even works at all for Gameboy color is nuts. But this is a playing this on a TV with a proper controller in my hand like I played streetfighter on Super Nintendo. That's how I learned. So this is actually really, really cool getting to play this on a TV with this controller, which is working like a champ. This looks great. This is playing great and it's a functioning great. See if I can do a super move and look at that. I mean, he blocked it, but still, it's a that is a functional experience right there. So there's a there's your Gameboy color game. Looks like a champ. 

[00:06:58] Now on the topic of Gameboy color, I do have to say that I did try this, and while the does boot up, you can't control it, which is kind of a bummer. I was kind of half hoping that I could pick up the pick up the unit and just kind of twist it around and play Kirby tilt and tumble like a crazy person. But unfortunately, no, this didn't actually work at all. The motion controls did not register at all with the with the unit over there, so that's kind of a bummer. 

[00:07:25] OK, let's polish things off with Gameboy Advance now. When this unit launched earlier this year, or yeah, it was earlier this year, Gameboy Advance was still in beta. There's been a big update that supposedly helps Gameboy advance games work a lot better, so let's see how this one reacts. All right. We got Mega Man & bass. Here it is. It's it's doing its thing, although you don't remember those lines being there. Oh yeah, that's a little strange. Uh oh. Let's see. Let's see what actual gameplay works like. Kind of got some visual glitches here on the menu, but let's see what the actual game goes like. Oh, here we go. There we go. Everything looks pretty normal right here. And yeah, here we go. Plan some playing, some Gameboy advance version of Mega and based on on my television, it looks pretty nice. 

[00:08:14] So from what I've gathered, I messed around with this a couple of other games earlier and they worked just fine. So what I've come to understand about the Gameboy Advance support on this thing is that it's not 100 percent, but it's way better than it was when the unit launched, and they're probably just going to keep making updates for it. There's a seems to be every chance that that is a possibility. And in the meantime, the you know where it seems to work, where it counts. I mean, it's it's running at a nice, steady clip and nice frame rate, no big drops or anything like that. I mean, it's still Mega Man and base for Gameboy Advance. It's not. Spectacular, but it's running as intended on a TV, which is pretty nice. So there you go. 

[00:08:56] The Retron Sq from hyperkin is available now at Stone Age Gamer in this color and a fancy black one as well, so you can play all of your old Gameboy games blowing up on your big old TV with giant chunky pixels the way Nintendo never intended. Hey, I think they look great. Thanks for watching everybody. If you liked what you saw here today, please follow comment. Like Subscribe? Let us know what games you want to play on a retron Sq. Do you have one of these things? Do you like where it's at? Do you hope that they eventually patch in support for motion control games like Yoshi Topsy-Turvy? I don't know. Let us know. We always like hearing from you. Thanks again for watching on behalf of all of us here at Stone Age Gamer, keep playing games. 

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