A easy way to preserve your cartrigdes? The Retrode!
As a Videogame-Collector, there is nothing that beats that glorious feeling when you got another unique Item!
Another rare gem for your collection. You already know the proper place for it on your shelve for years to come! All digital future? Ha, screw that all digital future!
Well, that´s what many of us think. Myself included. On the other hand, we all know that our physical media probably won’t last forever. cartridges stop working, save-files get lost because of empty batteries and CDs “die” because of the infamous disk rot. As a collector myself, I know that this is a topic most of us want to avoid. The cartridge “itself” won’t “go away” anytime soon. It will forever stay in my collection, but if I can´t play the game anymore, whats the point of owning it? (This is the moment when the Retrode comes into play)
So thinking about preserving your stuff isn´t that far fetched. You remember the magnetic tapes from the 1950s–70s? Neither do I, but they existed, trust me on that. And if you want to play music from one of these tapes today, well, good luck. So long story short, buy a Retrode! It won’t play music, but it manages to let you preserve your games. Sounds good? Damn right, it is!
How does the Retrode work?
Out of the box, that mighty fine device plays SNES / Super Famicom & Megadrive / Genesis.
The Retrode makes it pretty easy to preserve your games. You plug it in your PC via USB and you´re pretty much good to go. Of course, you need to have the right emulator for the job, but I guess you already knew that. The main unit comes with everything you need. You even have the option to stick the original controllers in it, which is pretty neat! You know, nothing beats the original. Because I´m a curious person, I tried my new wireless TechKen controller in combinationwith the Retrode, and, as expected, it worked pretty fine too. After making a backup of the game on your computer, you can start playing right away, the process is very simple. There are a lot if you´re unsure how to do it, there are plenty of tutorials on Youtube, but trust me, that thing is pretty much self-explanatory. Maybe the hardest thing about the Retrode is where to get it. You won’t see this thing on eBay very often. So probably the best place to get one of those is www.dragonbox.de. While you can play SNES & Megadrive with the Retrode base-unit, there is more…
The Retrode plugins for Gameboy, Mastersystem & N64
And a few DIY solutions if you like to tinker.
As stated before, there are more consoles the Retrode can play. Three prebuild plugins are already available on dragonbox.de, even one N64 adapter, which is pretty amazing. The Retrode is practically able to do even more consoles, but you have to “craft” this plugin by yourself, which is easier said than done. If you want to try it nevertheless, you can find the blueprints here. I recommend doing this only if you really know what you are doing.
So I hope my little article provided you with everything you need to start preserving your games. In my opinion, getting the Retrode is a very good starting point for this.