• We saw Stella 6.6 working on the Retron 77, I only changed the SD Micro contents.
• The Stella that was pre-installed on the Retron-77 was 3.X. There seem to be big improvements.
• The main compatibility problems are NOT because of Stella 3.X
• The version of Stella that we ran looks much nicer than the one that came with the Square, although all the buttons have different uses.
• Comments from the Internet

The original designers have combined what we call PCB A (The board which contains the CPU which we usually call an SoC, the RAM etc.) and PCB-B (The part that reads the games with an MCU on board). There is nothing wrong with how they have done this.

The hardware seems capable enough of coping with Stella, although Online Documentation says that some enhancement chipset fails.

The original interface is quite poor. As you can see from this video below, it does very little.

I noticed that when I ran Space invaders with the original software, you could not see either your own missiles, or those of the invaders. This is obviously a sprite sharing issue. The latest Stella does not have this problem.

Don't change the H3 SoC or the Memory, You won't get anything cheaper than this configuration. An H3 and DDR3 RAM is the best price you are going to get.

There are a LOT of improvements and there is plenty of space for the new Stella.

Apart from the old version of Stella, this is the biggest compatibility issue. Once we find a game that exhibits this problem, This is a simple PCB change and a slight change to the Microcontroller code

The microcontrollers support some mappers, but not all. So they can't read the games properly.

The interface is too simplistic and limiting, the Stella interface is nice but too complicated. Something in between would be ideal.

Cheat codes are a valuable asset to emulators. Stella already has them built in to a degree and there is so little RAM and ROM that it is easy to write one.

There are atari 7800 emulators, I have just tried one 'prosystem' is the one I am trying. I will build and test it on the Retron 77 PCB soon. I think the Retron 77's H3 should be powerful enough to emulate it. If it is powerful enough, we will need a new PCB as the connector if you remember is larger. The case is however the correct size and needs no change. You can see from this drawing of the connectors.

The Atari 2600 is a subset of the 7800.

As you can see in this video, which was captured running on our H3 hardware (extra overhead for the video capture, of course), it looks acceptable. Centipede is probably not the most taxing of games, but it looks suitable.

The original Atari Joypads were indestructible, I don't know how they were made, but no matter how hard we played with them, they never broke (At least not while I was playing!). The Hyperkin one broke on me within 10 minutes! This is not an action for me of course, just a recomendation.

If I try the Sega Joypad on the original Retron 77 code, it actually crashes the entire machine! There is no reason that Sega 3 and 6 button pads can be made to work. the extra buttons can be used for things like Cheat codes.

There is actually a USB port already available on the current PCB as JP1, we could connect this to the side of the machine and allow support for your USB Joypads (We can exclude other manufacturers Joypads should you wish). This could be done without too much difficulty.

The Graphics Display Unit can be accelerated, the standard clock speed I believe is 408Mhz, but it can be speeded up to 480mhz or even 504Mhz. This unit failed and the reason that I saw on the internet is the RAM speed. I checked the speed of this NANYA RAM and it is 800mhz so a data rate of 1600Mb/s. If we use faster RAM, it might work at the higher GPU clock speed. We will try it when we get our PCB done.

As I mentioned, this is how RetroFreak works, users can play ROM's if they copy them onto the device, but if they read a game cartridge, it is encrypted to that machine itself. This is what I am implementing on the Square 2.0 and I suggest we do the same for the Retron 77. Some games are simply too difficult to get hold of, the 7800 games are very expensive by the looks of things!

It is much cheaper not to add any support for upgrading, it is very hard work to add Upgrade support, for example the Microcontrollers are re-programmable, some of the mappers could have been added via an upgrade, but the designers took every shortcut they could and Upgrading is an easy choice when getting rid of things that are hard work.

1. Don't change the components (Best value, and DDR3 RAM is less expensive than DDR4)
2. Use Stella 6.6
3. Fix the Pin 12-24 issue
4. Fix the missing mapper issues
5. Consider adding a USB connector.
6. Add support for 7800
7. Afterthought: Consider support for Atari 5200
8. Encrypt Cart reads so players cannot upload to the Internet
9. Allow Roms (from Internet) to play
10. Change interface, Current one too simple
11. Consider CPU/GPU speedup
12. Add Cheats
13. Support Sega Joypads
14. Add Upgrade feature

Schematics would be helpful, the Microcontroller code, even if not the source code would be helpful as well. Anything you can get would help us do the task faster and cheaper

Berzerk is an Atari 5200 title. Captured on the Retron 77 H3 hardware with in-device video capture (extra overhead, of course). As you can see gameplay seems perfectly smooth!

My question is how would Datapower make money from this? I can't see it working where you pay us a lump sum. I would suggest we produce a part of the product, probably the full PCB and we add a couple of dollars to the cost so that we make money back per unit. I know there is not a huge profit to be made on this. I can calculate a cost for the main PCB if you would accept that?

• And then you have the aspect ration switch. Now, by default it's set to 4×3; however, you can switch it to full-screen or 16×9 if you wish. Now, it's important to know, and we're gonna get into it a little bit more later on, but neither of those aspect ratios are actually the ratios used when programming the original games.
• It's because every Game Boy Advance game that I threw at it would load, but they ran terribly.
• Same thing with “Metroid: Zero Mission.” Again, the game is running, but it's running pretty bad. And I was kinda surprised by this. I was surprised because Hyperkin has had this working before. If you've had the RetroN 5, like I have for years, well, Game Boy Advance support on that has been flawless. I mean, it's been working on that for, like I said, years now. And the issue here is that they're not using the same software.
• He even compares the two!

• I mean, it's not the RetroN 5. And so (sighs) that's a huge bummer for me, because as much as I like original Game Boy and Game Boy Color games, honestly, I go back and play Game Boy Advance games way more often. So for me, with this device as it sits right now, I… Personally, I wouldn't use this very often.
• So the Retron 5, even after more than 10 years is superior! That is because we did it properly!

The previous one was extremely basic, it simply read the game and played it. I don't think there was anything else to it! At the moment it is fairly basic, but we can make it look nicer later.

We understand that your customers don't want to use these devices as copiers, plug a game in, read it, then take it back. However we can't escape the fact that every gameboy game in existence is already on the internet. Only allowing people to play a single GB /GBC game, and have to reload it every time is counter productive.

What Square-2 (Cube?) does is treat game files and games read from actual cartridges separately. Games read from cartridge use a system called fscrypt. These games are still stored on the Micro SD card, however they use a Unique ID from the actual SoC so that the file cannot be read on any other system. Files however copied onto the SD Micro roms folder, can be played.

As Metal Jesus points out, the Retron 5 (still) does much more. Cheats are very important for many people, like myself. The systems I grew up with were older than the GBC and GBA, but I don't want to go back and PLAY these games, I want to go back and BEAT them! I cannot stress how important it is to have cheats on these games.
It is difficult to get an in game menu to turn cheats on and off, so I have added the facyility to turn them on and off via a special Joypad button press.

The original square used an older version of mGBA (we used this in Retron 5, so not sure why it looked so bad on the Square?). The new version has many fixes.

One of the things I have added to the mGBA build is the facility to capture Screenshots to PNG files, more importantly I have also added a save game feature. This is the current special Keypress Combo I have created, of course we can change it to whatever we wish. As we can't see anything on the screen, it saves to save file 1, then 2, then 3 until 9 and wraps around. We can have more and they are on a per game basis. So you have 9 slots for each game.

You can see the game I have highlighted here is Popeye. If I press X on the Hyperkin Joypad (I am testing with Scout Premium), it takes you to the Screen captures and saves screen. Looking at them now, I will make them larger. But if you select one of those snapshot saves, then it will load the game from that exact point.

I select the third option, press start and voila, the game is back and running

A Square, as my kids would tell you, is a 2D shape. A 3D square with 90 degree angles is a cube. Not that anyone seems to have noticed.

Recorded captures from the Hyperkin Square hardware (1080p). MP4 format for browser playback.

Notice this runs a little bit slower, as I captured the video directly on the Square 2 hardware because I wanted to try to fix the audio getting out of sync with the video. The quality is a bit better; unfortunately the audio still went out of sync and I don’t have time to fix it at the moment. It is actually surprising how it still runs quite fast even with video capture. We could consider keeping video capture even though I was not planning on keeping it? What do you think?

This was captured using a USB capture card. Unfortunately the audio is a separate device to the video and it ended up getting out of sync.

Notice how the player keeps 3 lives even though I deliberately lost a life a couple of times; this shows the cheats are working.

This was captured using a USB capture card. Unfortunately the audio is a separate device to the video and it ended up getting out of sync.

You can see that I go to a game where I have pressed the snapshot/quicksave “chord” button sequence (Top Right and Select) and I use this screen to reload from that exact point. You can also see that the cheats are active; that is why the ghosts are acting strange.